Railway Lithography (posters)

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about the railways and lithography. It’s also about the relationship between between industry and printing and communication. Specifically, it’s a post about railway posters.
Some of you will know that I am interested in the history of posters and the development of graphic design. The industrial development of the railway, and its social impact, played important roles in supporting the graphic development of the poster. There’s quite a lot about all this in my book, Modern British Posters (2010).
The poster emerged, during the 1860s and subsequently, because of a number of pre-conditions. These were mostly technological, environmental and sociological.
Untangling the cultural convergence that allowed the poster to flourish is complicated…
The invention of the modern poster is usually associated with Baron Haussmann’s modernisation of Paris. Haussmannisation was a process by which the city was remodelled so as to provide wide vistas, avenues and secure buildings. The new environment was conceptualised to facilitate the safe movement of people and goods. The continuous dynamism of the metropolis was understood as an expression of democratic energy, enterprise and freedom. It was no co-incidence that Haussmann’s plans for Paris were made at precisely the time that the railways arrived in the city.
In London, the railway boom of the 1840s had provided for a new kind of architecture that combined engineering, materials and machine to create an environment of dynamism on an unprecedented scale.
The new spectacular reality, facilitated by the new architecture of the railway, in London, and by Baron Haussmann, in Paris, was increasingly defined through space formed by the spans and apertures of megastructures.  The railway terminus, for example, was predicated on movement and more-or-less demanded a new form of visual communication. Accordingly, the poster was distinguished by the characteristics that allowed it to be seen from a distance and at speed!
In addition to the obvious economic motives, the poster also needed a new kind of printing process. This post explains the development of lithography as crucial in facilitating the poster and in helping the railway.
Poster Printing
Lithography is a kind of magic – it’s a process that allows a print to be taken form a flat surface…
Let me explain
The modern poster was immediately recognisable: it was big, brightly coloured, and made a virtue of being visible.
The poster’s characteristics of colour and scale are important because they were made possible by the development of  lithography. The traditional forms of printmaking – intaglio and relief – require special carved or engraved plates. These are expensive and precious. In both traditional forms of printmaking, the engraved plate is literally pressed into the paper. If you examine the old kinds of printing press you can see the great levers that turn force into pressure, and pressure into image.
If you think about the physics of the traditional printing press, you will realise that the pressure needs to be applied evenly across the plate to achieve a pleasingly uniform impression. The engineering of the traditional letterpress machine (an elaboration of Guttenberg’s original press) applies pressure to the centre of the plate rather than distributing it across the whole plate.
In these circumstances it’s obvious that, when printing beyond a certain size, the forces required will tend to destroy the plates! The more pressure is applied at the centre, the more the edges will have a tendency to lift. Accordingly and for entirely practical reasons, there were clearly defined limits to the scale of printing possible by traditional methods.  In the end, you just couldn’t print economically in the very large sizes required for posters.
So, a first pre-requisite of poster printing was that the process should require less pressure. A light contact between plate and paper ought to be sufficient, without force, for the transfer of image to paper. The reduction in the mechanical forces of the printing process allowed for the elaboration of a much larger printing surface.
Traditional printing has used wood and metal as surfaces from which prints could be taken. The workshop environments of printing required materials that were both refined and hard-wearing – especially if they were to survive printing large editions.
In 1796, Aloys Senefelder discovered that a print could be taken from a flat stone surface. Stone had a the great advantage of being hard-wearing and robust. Furthermore, it could be prepared so that very large prints could be made. In the end, the size of the print became limited by the lifting machinery needed to shift large lumps of stone.
Senefelder hadn’t been thinking, at the end of the 18C, of printing posters. He had developed his lithographic process to facilitate the publishing of sheet music and orchestral parts and of dramatic texts. The process works by exploiting the fact that oil and water do not mix. Because drawing is always less expensive than engraving, and because drawn plates can be wiped clean and reused; lithography was immediately attractive as a commercial process.
The process dramatically reduced the cost of printing non-standard visual elements.
The basic elements of the process are described below,
• the print is prepared so that a design is drawn (transfered) by litho artists onto the stone using a grease crayon
• coloured ink is then applied with a roller to the surface of the stone
• the grease holds the ink whilst it is washed away, with water, from the rest of the surface
• when paper is brought into contact with the surface of the stone, the image is transfered onto the paper
• by combining printings of separate colours a full-effect “chromo” lithograph can be made
You can demonstrate the idea of lithography simply with card, candle, water and ink. The demonstration also shows the problem – there’s so much water involved that the card disintegrates quite quickly…
The conceptual simplicity of lithography masked a number of technical difficulties. These were resolved so that the process became quicker and so that a large variety of effects became possible through the understanding of colour and over-printing.
Power was applied to the press and to the management of ink and paper. Eventually, the flat-bed horizontal action of the early presses was turned into a fast-spinning rotary action, with offset rollers keeping stone and paper apart.
By the end of the 19C, complex colour prints could be produced quickly in large editions.
During the 1920s, poster design became more economical. This was achieved by the brutal simplification of the image into a reduced number of colours. Each colour could be rendered as a flat 2D shape.
A number of poster designers were associated with this flat-colour style – Tom Purvis, Frank Newbould, Fred Taylor, Frank Mason and Austin Cooper. All these artists worked for the London and North Eastern Railway.
Railway Printing
The 19C railway companies were enthusiastic supporters of print culture. Beyond the traditional letterpress printing of rules and conditions of travel, they produced a multitude of printed ephemera. This included timetables, tickets, labels, books, pamphlets and posters. The bigger railway companies supported a local print economy so that the growth of the railway and it’s associated printers were combined.
The economic exploitation of the railway demanded that the capacity of the system be used efficiently and to the maximum. It was natural, in these circumstances, for railways to begin advertising their services for passengers and freight.
The railway companies quickly realised that they had a convenient estate of display sites across their station platforms and began to seek advertising clients for the poster display sites on their stations.
Seaside Excursions
In addition to the usual commercial advertisers promoting their sausages, biscuits, tea and other comestibles, the railway companies identified the new seaside resorts as potential advertisers. Coincidentally, advertising the resorts would also advertise the railway excursions provided to serve them.
The history of the seaside is beyond the scope of this post. We need only note that, before about 1750, the seaside was a kind of wilderness. The first resorts, Brighton, Blackpool, Margate and Scarborough, were established primarily as an alternative to the overcrowded inland spa towns. The recreations offered by the resorts were both social and therapeutic.
The increasing popularity of the seaside resorts prompted the romantic exploration of more isolated areas.
The railway building boom of the 1840s supplied transport links to all the major resorts and to more isolated stretches of coast. By the 1860s and 1870s a tourist economy was developing all along the coast. Later, high-class international destinations became the sophisticated choice for travellers.
The poster display space, a substantial element in the usual costs associated with advertising, could be deferred between the railway company and the resort. In practice, the railway company offered the advertising space to the resort and deferred the cost of design and printing to the resort managers. The printing companies were kept supplied with top-end work that, co-incidentally, advertised their own expertise in the specialist work of large scale advertisement printing.
The result was a virtuous triangulation between railway, resort and printer, expressed though the lithographic integration of word and image.
The entirely positive feelings of holiday and nostalgia associated with these images has ensured the popularity over the years.
You can find out more about railway and seaside posters through the National Railway Museum, York. Check out the poster blog from the NRM, here
http://nationalrailwaymuseum.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/3/
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Safety and Control (posters)

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about safety and railways. You might be wondering why it’s beginning with a picture of Doris Day as Calamity Jane? Well, at a crucial moment in her career Doris was involved in a a car accident. The car she was riding in was hit by a train at a level crossing… (It’s amazing the stuff you can learn watching TV).

In case you’re wondering, Doris suffered a severe fracture in her legs and it seemed as if her career would end before it had begun. She picked herself up, dusted herself down, and learnt to sing. She did get to Hollywood in the end.

The point about the story is that railway accidents are much more widespread than is imagined. Of course, the big train collisions and de-railments are part of national folklore. In fact, the systemic failure of the usual control mechanism associated with train travel are remarkably rare. The recent tragedy in China is a reminder of how newsworthy these big accidents remain.

In fact, the railways are plagued by a pretty constant stream of accidents in which individuals are injured or killed. Generally, these accidents are caused by human error.

The opening ceremonies of the world’s first commercial railway service, the Liverpool and Manchester in 1839, was marred by the death of William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool. Huskisson had got off the train to inspect the track and was surprised by the arrival of the train. The speed of the machine caught him by surprise and he was knocked down. He died of his injuries later. So, the history of the railways is linked to fatality from the first.

Mostly, these accidents involve people doing things that they shouldn’t. For members of the public, walking on the track and jumping form trains are especially to be avoided. The railway has a more-or-less continuous campaign aimed at public safety.

Equally, the safety guidelines for railway employees are pretty straightforward. Nowadays, we take the idea that employers have a statutory duty of care to their employees for granted. It wasn’t always like that.

Until relatively recently, the railways were such a dangerous working environment that the big railway companies were obliged to provide their own orphanages! I can remember the Southern Railway Children’s Home in Woking. We passed it on our own journey to London when I was small.

These institutions reflected the absence, elsewhere, of any alternative. Before WW2, say, the loss of a breadwinner was catastrophic. A woman with small children would be destitute. It seems inconceivable by today’s standards, but the best solution was to take the children into care! We now understand how often that ends in abuse, cruelty and misery…

The creation, in 1923, of the Big Four railway groups consolidated staff and machinery, across Britain, into fewer larger organisations. This consolidation was initiated for the purposes of economy, efficiency and profit. To achieve these objectives required that uniform standards of performance – both mechanical and personal – be imposed. Part of this standardisation began to address itself to issues of health and safety.

It was natural, in these circumstances, for the railway companies to embrace the potential of graphic design to propagandise in favour of accident prevention. Since these messages only work through constant repetition, the railway was obliged to re-issue these posters at intervals. The result is that we can easily compare graphic styles across the decades.

Here are the kinds of thing I’ve been taking about. The posters are by Frank Newbould, Leonard Cusden and others. There’s also a chapter on safety posters in my book, Modern British Posters. 

If you want to get a sense of the thrill, excitement and danger that still attaches to the railway, especially for small children, watch this TV advertisement from Norway…

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Steam, Steel, and Stars (the night-time railway photographs of O Winston Link)

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about trains and photography; black and white photography; night-time, black and white photography from the USA during the 1950s. This is a post about O Winston Link.

Link was born in New York during 1914. His early training was as an commercial photographer for big US industrial clients. His photographs were used in promoting American industrial power in magazines such as Fortune.

Link was on working in Virginia, during 1955, when he contacted the Norfolk and Western Railway. The N&W was, by virtue of their enthusiasm, the last of the railways in the US to use steam power. Link conceived of a plan to photograph these trains at night, using thousands of flash bulbs.

The technical problems of the set-up should not be underestimated. Back in the 1950s, camera equipment was big and heavy. Working in low light conditions or darkness required the use of big lights. Working with industrially scaled objects, in motion, required short exposure times and massive blasts of light across whole landscapes. Link conceived of his pictures as a conjunction of machine, civic detail and human interest.

The trains are travelling at 60mph. So, you need a shutter speed of 1/250 of a second. To get that at night you need 100000 x 100 watt lights, or 60 flash bulbs. The flashbulbs were wired up into reflectors in series. If one bulb failed, the whole picture was lost!

The conjunction of elements, conceptualised by Link, could be orchestrated with precision, according to the train timetable, but not controlled. So, each shot required careful planning and a some luck too.

Link’s project was obviously about railway engines and steam power; but it was also about the idea of the railway as an industry and a lifeline for the community. Indeed, Link’s images of 1950s small-town America are testimony to the discipline, responsibilities, excitements and pleasures of the railway passing through…

The Norfolk and Western ran from Norfolk, on the eastern seaboard at Chesapeake Bay, inland to Cincinnati with several branches of. The engine works were at Roanoak, Virginia. It’s entirely appropriate that the O Winston Link Museum is at Roanoak. You can link to it, here

http://www.linkmuseum.org/

There’s information about O Winston Link, here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Winston_Link

There are a number of books, exhibitions and film documentaries about Link too.


 

 

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Once Upon a Train Track in the West…(cinema)

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about cinema, the wild west, and trains. There are lots of films about the history of the wild west and many of those films include railway trains. Usually, the train is high-jacked or robbed, or chased by Indians. It’s unusual for the railway system to be structurally embedded in the plot; so as to draw out issues of land-grab, profiteering and social progress. This is post about Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

The western genre has been a staple of the film industry from the very beginning. Of course, it took a view from outside Hollywood to see what “the Western” could be…

The European Western

During the 1960s, the Italian film industry re-invented the American western film. The genre was attractive for a variety of reasons. The first was that, for many Europeans and because of familiarity, the western was widely acknowledged as a quintessentially American form of film storytelling. Secondly, the pared-down circumstances of the American west allowed for a heightened, or operatic, intensity of drama. Finally, the films were attractive to producers in terms of costs because of their relative economy. These films became identified, because of their Italian origins, as spaghetti westerns.

Italian film-makers drew on their familiarity with the western genre to re-cast the western in a more cynical light than their American contemporaries. Film-makers in America had generally mythologised the west in terms of the harsh, but fair, moral certainties of biblical teaching.

The ironic re-invention of the genre became a global phenomenon through the success of Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. Clint Eastwood was cast as the man-with-no-name bounty hunter, Blondie, and was launched toward global superstardom.

The success of these films encouraged the producers to give the director, Sergio Leone, carte blanche for his next project. That project became Once Upon a Time in the West. In the beginning, the film was elaborated by Leone, Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci. The collaboration between these three produced a story with a conceptual and philosophical sophistication that is unusual for cinema. Argento and Bertolucci both went on to have important careers as film directors.

Marx in the West

The story of Once Upon a Time is set against the land-grab associated with the building of the trans-continental railway. So the drama is played out, against the background of money (capital) and technology (the railway and guns) that provides the determining forces for their actions. The foregrounding of these powerful determinants informs the film with a historical, sociological and psychological realism.

In the 1960s, the critical understanding of human behaviour was advanced through the development of social-science methodologies. The revelation, in detail, of the complex workings of modern society was generally understood as informed by Marxist theory and the pop culture sensibility of the Frankfurt School intellectuals. So, the film provides a watershed by acknowledging and foregrounding, in part at least, the complexity of the systems that determine our behaviour.

Every child is familiar with the railway as a system of interconnected mechanical parts. The model railway layout provides for a perfect representation, in miniature and in simplified terms, of the complex original. It was entirely appropriate that the scriptwriters of Once Upon a Time in the West should focus on the railway as signifier of a specific form of social, political and economic organisation.

The Opening (The Train Arrives)

The title sequence of the film is almost half an hour long. Three men, wearing trademark dusters, await the train and form an intimidating welcoming committee. After a long wait, the train arrives. The men are surprised when no one appears. It is only as the train departs that they become aware of the visitor. After some discussion, a gunfight takes place and the newcomer rides away.

The duster coats are recognised as belonging to a local gang. In fact the agents of railway speculator, Morton, wear the coats as a form of disguise. The ruthlessness of Morton is based on a number of personalities associated with the American railway boom and its associated frauds, scandals and mayhem.

The underhand and double-dealing of the railway speculator provides the framework for a film about violence, duplicity, and revenge. You can find out about the real-life dramas of the trans-co railway, here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroad

A summary of the film is available, here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_the_West

The duster is a long, loose work coat made of canvas or linen. It was designed to be worn by horsemen and to fit over their normal clothing and to protect it from trail dust. For practical purposes the coat had an exaggerated vent that allowed the coat to be worn comfortably whilst riding. On foot, the coats had a particular flapping gait. In addition the long, loose, coats allowed a variety of guns and weapons to be concealed. Just like the poncho, the coats allowed for the ready and speedy use of firearms. So the flapping duster was associated in the popular imagination, and from its very beginning, with violent and itinerant groups of horsemen.

These specific associations help explain why the duster was rarely seen in the traditional western. The hero, individually isolated, could ride long distances without requiring special clothing except in the most difficult circumstances. Furthermore, the moral integrity of the hero would be fatally compromised by the use of a coat to hide a gun. Lastly, the action of most westerns is played out against the civilised backdrop of town and community. Even the saloon bar setting of many westerns required the protagonists to fight it out in their Sunday best.

At the same time as the first train, and the visitor, is arriving a terrible massacre is occurring. Over at the Sweetwater Ranch, Morton’s gangsters have murdered an entire family, including the children; the McBains. They are gunned down as they prepare to welcome their new stepmother to the home. The arrival of this woman into the family is a sign of better things. After years of struggle and isolation, the railway is coming and the water, at the eponymous Sweetwater, will bring people, wealth and excitement. Sweetwater will become a whole town and community. McBain’s prescience will have been vindicated.

The Ending (The Railway Arrives)

At the end of the film, the railway is shown arriving at Sweetwater. The new Mrs McBain is shown welcoming workers to a feast and with great pitchers of refreshment. So, notwithstanding all the violence and mayhem, the railway is acknowledged to be an instrument of social progress…

The film starred Charles Bronson, Jason Robards and, cast against type, Henry Fonda. The female lead was Claudia Cardinale. The film has a remarkable musical score by Ennio Morricone.

This is my all time favourite film. I’ve watched it many times and I’m still amazed by it. It’s big, and clever, and beautiful. If you watch the film and like it, give Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) a go.

Supplemental Sunday 21st August 2011

The film is routinely described as “epic.” It’s certainly got big themes played out against the big spaces of the mid-west. Amongst the cruel brutality there are passages of amazing beauty. One of these, my favourite, is the scene when Mrs McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arrives at Flagstone Station. The train pulls up, she gets off, and is a bit surprised that there is no one to meet her (she doesn’t know that the entire McBain family have been murdered). She moves along the platform and arrives at the ticket office. The camera moves vertically over the building to reveal the town beyond.

The whole scene is touched by the terrible pathos of what we know to have happened. The amazing music by Ennio Morricone adds the finishing touch.

I’ve watched the film loads of times and have payed the opening sequence over and over. Even after all these years, and notwithstanding this familiarity, the sequence of Mrs McBain arriving still amazes me. The combination of pathos, sadness, and beauty; all combined in image, movement and music, is heartbreakingly moving.

Here’s another view, from my colleague, Steve Radmell, in moving image

Once Upon a Time in the West (Cera una Volta il West)

The partnership here is of course between Leone and the great Ennio Morricone. The sequence shows mail-order bride Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arriving by train in the Western frontier town of Flagstone. As the camera cranes up and the music swells, oh man, that’s cinema.

You can check out Steve’s cinema blog, at

http://parallaxview.myblog.arts.ac.uk/

Supplemental, Saturday 27th August 2011

The BBC Prom 39 was broadcast yesterday evening. It featured music by Morricone performed by The Spaghetti Western orchestra. You can watch it on iplayer, here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on/2011/august-12/44

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b013rl84/BBC_Proms_2011_Spaghetti_Western_Orchestra/

Morricone is best known for his film music; he’s composed hundred of scores. But, in the 1960s, he was part of a jazz inflected avant-garde. Morricone also performs with an orchestra…

Check it all out on Wiki, YouTube, and Spotify…

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Food Train (Three Courses)

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about food, catering, fine dining, and trains. For those of you old enough to remember, the “British Rail sandwich” was a thing of legend – not good. It wasn’t always like that.

This is the dining room of Le Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon, Paris. It’s one of the greatestBelle Epoque interiors that survives. Maybe only the Paris Opera is better…

I’ve posted about French restaurants and railway stations before, here

http://areopagitica.blog.co.uk/2011/04/18/steak-frites-11021581/

One of the great pleasure of trains in France is the high quality of the restaurants and hotels that you find around railway stations. At Gare du Nord, for example, there is the amazing Terminus Nord. This is a classic brasserie style restaurant. That means you can eat at any time during the day. The menu usually comprises  the classic selections of shell fish, grilled meats and sauerkraut and desserts.

This is a brochure produced by SNCF (French Railways) in 1954. It advertised all their main-line station buffets. Great store is placed on the regional specialities and a handy map is provided which shows the kinds of produce which can be anticipated.

Anone who has travelled around France will be familiar with this. The good news is that the redevelopment of St Pancras in london now includes a number of excellent restaurants. The new King’s Cross station will also have an improved food offer. That’s certainly an improvement on the usual fast-food outlets and fried chicken shops that you get around UK stations.

Here’s a picture of me about to tuck in to lunch in Paris. This is roast bone marrow at the Europeen, opposite the Gare de Lyon. You can check out the menu, here

http://www.brasserie-leuropeen.fr/bewax/fr/home.html

You can check out Terminus Nord, here

http://www.terminusnord.com/carte/

Both of the excellent restaurants are part of larger groups…Bon appetit.

 

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Locomotive (Raymond Loewy)

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is  a post about the American industrial designer, Raymond Loewy. It’s also about locomotives and streamlining, and about book design and art-direction.

The pictures in this post are taken from Loewy’s book on locomotive design, published in 1937. Not surprisingly, Loewy uses the book to promote his own idea of what successful design would be when applied to railway engines. It’s called “streamlining.” Guess what, he does it best!

The centre-fold image is this fantastic shot of Loewy’s design for the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1936. There’s another photograph of him posing on the front of the engine…

The book was published by The Studio and was part of a series of books, collected under the title, The New Vision. The other titles in the series were by the famous architect Le Corbusier and also by W Watson Baker. Le Corbusier wrote about Aircraft design and Watson Baker about the World beneath the Microscope. 

Ostensibly, these books are about science and technology and the idea of progress through design. They are also books about photography and about how the new camera technology and film stock would allow us to see the world in new and exciting ways.

You can think of the themes of these books as exploring the visual language of speed, height and scale…That’s all very 1930s. So, the books are about the visual language of progress.

Because it’s the 1930s, the implicit message is of a new type of mechanical image making and mass-production. This is what Walter Benjamin was trying to promote in his essays on image production and politics.

You can see that, even at the end of the 1930s, art-direction was though of in terms of black and white photography. Using images to tell a story was quite new in book publishing. Loewy’s book is like a slide presentation by Alexey Brodovitch. Nowadays, this is what we do on powerpoint; except not as well.

Here are some more pages from the book…

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Different Trains (Steve Reich)

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about Steve Reich, trains and the music of slaughter. The post carries on from my recent post about American trains (Sheeler) and about my previous post about music and trains (Pacific 231). We begin with Steve Reich.

The engineering of steam railways gave the experience of train travel a distinctive and musical rhythm. This was based on the sound of the engine, the clickity-clack of the wheels on the rails and the visual punctuation of the telegraph wires along the track.

Nowadays, nearly all this has disappeared. The trains power along in an undifferentiated roar; the tracks are welded and the train slides along them; the telegraph has gone. Anyway, back in the 20c, it was natural for composers to respond to the industrial beat of machinery and rhythm of speed.

The sounds of trains were especially attractive to the East Coast minimalist composer, Steve Reich. In 1988, Reich created a three section piece called Different Trains. You can find out about the piece here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Different_Trains

Reich used sampled loops of spoken voices and superimposed those onto his distinctive, and percussive, repetitions. Some of the voices recorded by Reich are station announcers. Other voices speak about their recollections of the journeys and announce different trains and their destinations. The music also includes whistle sounds and mechanical noises.

The three sections of the piece contrast the luxury rail service, between NYC and Chicago, of pre-war America with the European rail services that provided the machinery of despotic deportation towards the Nazi death camps.

A number of writers and film makers have explored the connection between railways and brutality. Nowhere was this more evident that in Europe during the 1940s when millions were transported towards their death. The Nazi administration of the Holocaust was a simple recasting of the railway and stock systems designed, at the end of the 19C, to supply the Chicago slaughterhouses.

Lars von Trier made a film, Europa (1991) that deals with this theme of industrialised slaughter. You can find out about the film, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_von_Trier

The working conditions of the Chicago slaughterhouses were notoriously harsh. At the end of the 19C, American intellectuals and the political elite began to express an anxiety that these conditions would provide ideal conditions for the emergence of a radicalised American working class. Upton Sinclair described the exploitation, degradation and misery associated with these material conditions in The Jungle (1906). You can find out more about this book, here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#The_Jungle

One of the great mysteries of American politics is the stubborn refusal of the American working class to become radicalised and to demand a different politics from Washington. The story of the American Labour movement was told in Warren Beatty’s film, Reds (1981).

If you’re interested in the historical development of this integrated industrial system of transportation, administration and slaughter, you should read Daniel Pick’s book, War Machine (1993).

The development of the refrigerated freight car in the 19C was at least as important as that of the luxury Pullman car. You can find out a bit more about this technical exploit, here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_car

If you think that we have advanced beyond all this. Think again. It’s just that this system has moved beyond the usual experience of supermarket shopping and so on. In fact, the concentrations of resources required by the scale of supermarkets has made the system even more brutal. You can read about how the contemporary iteration of this system has been developed in Canada inIan MacLachlan’s Kill and Chill (2001).

You can listen to the music and watch a film, here http://vimeo.com/4226079

Supplemental, Tuesday 9th August 2011

The Guardian has included an editorial in today’s paper about Reich’s Train’s. It’s ahead of tomorrow’s Prom at the Albert Hall.

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Rolling Power (art)

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about art and trains and about an American artist called Charles Sheeler.

Charles Sheeler was an artist and photographer who worked in the 1930s. He embraced the industrial landscape of North America as a legitimate and, in its own way, beautiful expression of the machine age modernism of industrial capitalism. Not surprisingly, trains and tracks feature in Sheeler’s work.

Sheeler is usually associated with the “precisionist” school of painting. This was a form of painting that combined the formal conceits of cubism with observational realism.

Sheeler was also part of a wider American cultural project. This was to position North America as the end-point of the global cultural phenomenon of Modernism. This project, conceptualised by Alfred Barr, of NYCs MoMa, was an attempt to connect Moscow, Berlin, Paris and New York in a single coherent trajectory of progress and innovation. That’s quite a train ride.

Barr’s project established the terms by which America was able to leverage the scale and critical mass of its productive energy to project soft “cultural” power across the globe. The choice of explicitly “American” themes was, accordingly, an expression of cultural maturity and independence from the old world (Europe).

A note about the train… The 1930s marked the apogee of steam locomotion in the USA. The engines were distinguished by a combination of size, engineering, performance and styling. The engineering development of the engines allowed them to haul great loads at speed and over the great distances of the American continent.

The engine was a 4-6-4 Hudson (or Baltic) type locomotive made for the New York Central Railway. The numbers refer to the wheel arrangements of the engine. These engines were superseded, after WW2, by diesel traction.

The “streamlined” styling of Modernist America applied itself to everything from architecture and engineering to consumer products. The main figures associated with form of industrial design were Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes.

You can infer all of this (scale, styling and performance) in Sheeler’s painting from the details of the picture. The driving wheels, for example, are of a new design that replaces the traditional spokes with a disc.

As it happens, the wheel details are taken from the engine styling by Henry Dreyfuss for The 20th Century Limited . This service provided the rail passenger service between New York and Chicago. The streamlined styling provided for this train was an expression of the speed and comfort of the service.

The train service to Chicago was crucial in connecting the two most important business centres in the USA. Furthermore, Chicago marked the beginning of the rail network into the mid-west and beyond.

The train service was used in Alfred Hitchcock’s film, North by Northwest. I’ve posted before about Hitchcock and trains…

Here are some great poster images of the engine and train.

 

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Big Wheels Keep on Turning

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about a small book about big engines. There are thousands of books about railways; but most of them aren’t as nicely designed as this.

Patrick Stirling’s Locomotives, by LTC Holt, was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1964 and designed by Higginbottom and Oubridge (Who they? If you know, let me know please). I know a bit about the history of illustrated books in britain and the developemnt of art-direction in magazines and books. I know the illustrated books of Hugh Evelyn from the early 1960s, but these books by Hamish Hamilton are new to me.

The square format of the book is a big clue. As is the use of a photographic image enlarged so as to become slightly degraded. This book looks like it comes form the early 1970s. In fact, it’s from the first pre-commercial period of pop art in England.

You can see bits of Peter Blake, The Sunday Times Magazine and Sargent Pepper in all this.

The Stirling locos were designed, built and developed for the Great Northern Railway towards the end of the 19C. They were distinguished by the large diameter driving wheel. In their time, they were the biggest and quickest machines known to man.

There are a number of other titles in this series of books. Well worth looking out for.

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London Midland and Scottish (LMS)

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Paul Rennie

This is a post about the LMS Royal Scot class of steam locomotive. These are the engines that pulled the trains up the west coast route to Scotland.

The print is from the 1930s. Here’s a scale model of this type of engine. A classic.


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