Here’s the cover of the Southern Railway staff magazine from 1935. The design is signed with the initials VR. That’s Victor Reinganum. You can find out about him, here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Reinganum
I bought this in a second-hand bookshop. It was really inexpensive, but I liked the integration of image and typography in the design. The gothic tracery of the rails is terrific.
This is post about trains and time.
We’re all familiar with the idea of time as an expression of position, movement and speed. In fact, the whole universe is defined by its expansion over time. The big bang theorises the connection between time and space. This is one of the reasons that Einstein’s Special Theory is so important. It’s no coincidence that Einstein’s ideas are always presented by analogy to train, or tram, travel.
The railways were the mechanical and engineering expression of the increasingly regimented and relentlessly time-driven society that is characteristic of industrial economies. Nowadays, we can theorise this kind of timekeeping as one of the formal constructs of Modernity.
The sociological and philosophical consequences of this technological system of thinking have been described by Walter Banjamin, Paul Virilio and Giles Deleuze amongst others. They’re not good, and I’ll post about it all later. You can probably guess where this ends!
Adam Curtis has made a series of films about this too. You can get to them here
http://areopagitica.blog.co.uk/2011/05/07/adam-curtis-11115722/
In the context of railways, time is defined through punctuality. This is understood as an expression of consistency and reliability. We find this a useful measure of railway service. In addition, we comprehend the smooth running of the railway system as a meaningful expression of the general reliability and discipline of society. Accordingly, the consequence of railway systems is greater than the sum of their parts.
Clocks
Railway stations always have clocks prominently displayed. You can’t really separate the idea of time from that of the railway system. In fact, the railway system can be said to have extended the concept of time, expressed consistently and precisely through hours and minutes, across the whole of the country and society. Because of the extension of the railway, its mechanical and systemic organisation can provide a very accurate measure of people and resources in movement.
This doesn’t mean that, before the railways, time didn’t exist. It just means that most peoples’ concept of time was defined by daybreak and dusk. In this context, public clocks were quite rare – usually attached to the church tower. The railway station added another visible clock into each community.
Nowadays and because we have conceived of the railway as an integrated system of machine, environment and service, we see the modernist clockface everywhere. It’s become the standardised expression of the concept. The default image for this signifier is the Mondaine clock for the Swiss Railways. You may know that Switzerland has one of the most reliable train services in the world. That can’t be a coincidence. Switzerland and clocks; it’s uncanny!
Italy has had a reputation for the opposite. It’s often said the dictator, Mussolini’s, great achievement was to get the Italian trains running on time. Maybe, but at what cost!
In the old days, each railway terminus displayed a massive clock that said something about the ethos of the company (that’s semiotics again). Here’s the clock at St Pancras
And here’s the clock at the old Gare D’Orsay in Paris
Train Time
The standardisation of railway time is quite an interesting story. Wolmar (2007.104) describes it briefly.
The proliferation of railway companies during the 1820s and 1830s produced a series of practical complications where routes crossed. It was difficult, in the first instance, to convince different companies of their mutual dependency above their individual self-interest. Accordingly, there were problems relating to the sharing of information, accounting and reporting standards and in allocation of revenues. The Railway Clearing House was established in 1842 as an attempt to coordinate and standardise the work of all these different companies. The standardisation of time, based on Greenwich Mean Time, was finally agreed in 1851 and enshrined in law in 1880.
The standardisation of railway time, so as to facilitate the integration of services between the different services, was a significant step forward in the provision of a consistent and convenient service. The standardisation of time tended to promote a coordination of service so that travellers could jump from one service to another. Indeed, the benefits of standards, consistency and co-ordination were so evident, that they were extended internationally in 1884.
Timetables
George Bradshaw (1801-1853), cartographer and publisher, conceived the idea of a fully ingrated timetable of railways for the whole of Britain. Bradshaw was a Quaker and follower of Swedenborg. His association with Nonconformist thinking probably made him aware of the Utilitarian school of philosophy. Bradshaw’s idea of increasing the general utility of the railway service beyond the provision of a specific service was a completely utilitarian improvement. The same may be said of several standardisations of the 1840s.
The speed of railway evolution in the 1840s made the frequent publication of his guide a necessity. The guide was conceptualised as a monthly publication to ensure that the published information was as up-to-date and accurate as possible. Bradshaw began publication of his guide in 1842. The project was fraught with difficulty.
Quite apart from the political and business issues of sharing information, the printing of timetable information provided for a number of technical challenges. The neat tabulation of numbers, in small format, required very careful typesetting in letterpress. Also, the repetition of numbers required a disproportionate volume of particular symbols. The advent of commercial lithography, where letters and numbers could be drawn on to stone, eventually resolved some of these practical problems.
Design
The close-setting of many small numbers also proved difficult to read. This difficulty tended to compromise the stated purpose of the timetable. Accordingly, the printing of timetables also raised a number of issues relating to aesthetics, legibility, form and function.
The University of Reading has a big collection of bits of paper. In the academy, bits of paper are called ephemera. Railway ephemera is a a big sub-group of this category. Some of this material, along with its historical and technical evolution, has been presented in their Designing Information before Designers (2010) research project.
Tufte (1990.46) has described some of the ways in which the display of this kind of numerical information can be improved. Implicit in the visual presentation of this numerical data are a number of assumptions about resources and demand. Tufte wants the form and function of these charts to be integrated.
Robin Kinross, who is an expert on typography, has written about timetables as a kind of exemplar of Modernist thinking in information design. Paradoxically, the minute you begin to think about timetables as an integrated expression of form and function through rational design (like Tufte) you understand that this is an impossible ideal. The design can never be neutral, it’s always charged with meaning. So, the intellectual neutrality of Modernity (presented through the appeal to scientific methodology and to the purity of numbers) is a a kind of fantasy.
There’s a book about the the idea of objectivity as a methodological construct in science. It’s listed below. I’ve also added a book about observation; because observation and objectivity are conceptually associated.
In the 1960s, the British Railways identity was turned into a consistent system of expression by the Design Research Unit (DRU). You can read about this stage in standardisation on my friend, David Preston’s, blog
http://designcoordination.wordpress.com/
Actually, David has just posted about the standardisation of LNER type in the 1930s.
That’s Eric Gill, sculptor and type designer, in the beret.
Bibliography
Crary J (2001) Suspensions of Perception Cambridge MA, MITP
Daston L & Galison P (2010) Objectivity Cambridge MA, MITP
Kinross R (1985) The Rhetoric of Neutrality Design Issues No 2
Stiff P, Dobraszczyk & Esbester M (2010)
Designing Information before Designers – Print in Everyday Life Reading and London, St Bride’s Library
Tufte E (1990) Envisioning Information Cheshire CT, Graphics Press
Verilio P (1986) Speed and Politics Cambridge MA, MITP
Wolmar C (2007) Fire and Steam London, Atlantic
There was a charming TV film last night about the Tanzania and Zambia Railroad Authority. You can watch it here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00s6bgw/African_Railway/
The systemic dysfunction revealed in this good-natured film is testimony to the difficulties of railway planning. It’s not just people, it’s the culture that is required.
The TZRA is a freight line that ships copper from its land-locked origin to the ocean. It is now an entirely owned subsidiary of the Chinese government. They buy all the copper.
This is a post about Hitchcock and trains. It is also a post about Hitchcock and psychoanalysis, and also about psychoanalysis, cinema and trains. The link between cinema and psychoanalysis has been described by Christian Metz and others.
Cinema was born on the station platform. The Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat (1896), by the Lumiere brothers, caused a sensation. Audiences jumped from their seats as the train entered the station. Later, the railway tracks became associated with the villainy of damsels in distress. It was natural, in the darkened cinema, to associate the flickering images on screen with the recall of dreams and the associated feelings of pleasure, anxiety and guilt.
Alfred Hitchcock was one of the great film directors of the 20C. He was born in England and enjoyed success at home and in America. Hitchcock’s career began in the silent era and continued until the 1970s. His professional career also included a stay in Berlin working at the UFA studios. This short, but important, period introduced Hitchcock to the potential of expressionistic feeling in film.
Hitchcock’s arrival in the USA, during 1939, gave him access to greater resources and to a global cinema audience. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Hitchcock observed America as an economic system and social organisation that promoted freedom but was, at the same time, deeply conservative and anxious. In addition, he observed that American mass-media provided a back-drop of justification for the American-way-of-life by constant appeal to Cold-War paranoia and psychoanalytical ideas derived from Freud. Hitchcock described these cultural polarities through the production of exaggerated feelings of fear and desire.
The concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis were incorporated into the world of US consumerism by Edward Bernays. Co-incidentally, Bernays was a member of Freud’s extended family.
During the 1950s, the idea of reality was re-conceptualised as a social and psychological construct. Academic research, Freudian psychoanalysis and the developing mass media combined, in America, to create a powerful force of normative formation.
The nascent US advertising industry used its influence, characterised as hidden persuasion, to fuel the development of consumer culture through emotional appeal. This association was promoted by the normative connection between products and feelings. The advertising industry became increasingly skillful in its manipulation of consumers by appeal to feelings of pleasure, desire, anxiety and guilt.
Hitchcock exploited the voyeuristic potential of film. The erotic potential associated with Hitchcock’s exploration of suspense was heightened by the director’s use of cool, elegant and blond-tinted actresses. Laura Mulvey has described the profound consequences of this alignment between psychoanalysis and the formal qualities of film.
As Freud’s ideas gained popular currency, the film experience became increasingly understood as psychologically contiguous to voyeurism. The voyeuristic observer, hidden or otherwise, and marked with the obsessive-compulsive personality associated with sexual dysfunction, became a staple, not just for Hitchcock, but for the whole of cinema.
A number of constants emerge from Hitchcock’s career. This is a post about trains and Hitchcock. The Thirty Nine Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Strangers on a Train (1951) and North by Northwest (1959), each make significant use of trains.
The idea of the train was useful to Hitchcock as a visual symbol for a number of reasons. It was, first of all, widely familiar to all of his audience. Not so the car in 1935! It then had the great advantage of containing the action of the film. This constraint provided a creative challenge to Hitchcock at the same time as providing reassurance to the financial administrators of the production. Not only did the train contain the action of the film, it provided a scenic and cinematic backdrop through the train window. The slightly detached observation of the world, facilitated through the train window, was understood as analogous to the sensation of dreaming. The expression train of thought, gives credence to the associations between train travel, movement and feeling.
The established punctuality of railway services provided a readily understandable timeframe against which the action of the film could be played out. The time-pressure implicit in this sense of an unalterable timetable was a most effective device in creating a feeling of excitement, suspense and anxiety as good and bad play out along the tracks. Lastly, the speeding train gives the protagonists, and the audience, a powerful sense of unstoppable destiny. Obviously and because the train is roaring along the tracks, there is no escape from this destiny.
In addition to these possible meanings and associations, there are all of those usually associated with speed and large machines. The opulent luxury of the train, evident in the appointment of carriages, and the quality of service is implicit to the idea to international express travel. All this positions the protagonists within a narrative of money, power and politics. That’s sexy; which brings us back to Freud again.
The sleeping car, implicit in the experience of overnight travel, also provides a context of exciting pyjama-clad proximity for the personalities of the action. This is certainly the sub-text to the end of North by Northwest when Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint retire to their sleeping compartment. The train enters a tunnel, as the end titles begin, to make the Freudian connection to sexual desire explicit.
Indeed, the subconscious associations between train travel and desire is always being emphasised by Hitchcock. The close-proximity of passengers and overheard conversation seem to allow for unusually relaxed behaviour amongst the passengers. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, for example, there is a sequence where two traveling salesmen begin to discus the ladies’ underwear samples. In The Lady Vanishes and Strangers on a Train the relaxed informality of the train provides a disturbing counterpoint to the narratives of abduction and murder.
Our own feelings towards trains are equivocal. We appreciate the convenience of this form of transport. But we recall, through the long history of accident and fatality that these machines are brutal. Suicide victims acknowledge this practicality and symbolism in their widespread use of railway platforms and bridges. The rich Freudian potential of all of these meanings was expertly used by Hitchcock, the master of suspense.
If you’re interested in any of this, you should begin by watching the films. You can buy an enormous boxed-set of Hitchcock very cheaply.
Then, you can move on to the books. There are hundreds about Hitchcock. The place to start is the book of interviews between Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut. You can then move on to the theoretical association between between psychoanalysis and cinema. Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey are the names to look-out for there. For Hitchcock and psychoanalysis, look at Slajov Zizek.
If you want to find out about advertising and desire (Madmen) look at Vance Packard and JK Galbraith.
I have decided to focus this blog so that its theme is the cultural history of railways. We’ll begin in Europe and see how we go. Hopefully, it will become a kind of “Rail-Rover” excursion.
Most people will know that I’m mad about vintage posters. This one’s by Cassandre from 1927. It’s for an international service between Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Copenhagen. The idea of international travel was pretty special in the 1920s. The word “Pullman” comes from George Pullman who made the most luxurious and comfortable trains. So, the idea of travel and sophistication is implicit in this image, even though nothing is shown.
The low point-of-view exaggerates the perspective of the tracks disappearing to the horizon. That gives the poster a sense of scale and speed. Brilliant.
There are other names associated with international train travel: La Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, Mitropa and Trans Europe Express. Now, you can travel to Paris from London, St Pancras, on Eurostar.
The TEE trains were streamlined services. I remember using a TEE to get from paris to Toulouse at the end of the 1970s. The corridor express had compartments separated by glass walls and the train had double-glazed windows with internal blinds. It was all very Catherine Deneuve. That’s cockney rhyming-slang for sophisticated.
The German electronic music combo, Kraftwerk, did an LP called “Trans-Europe-Express” (1977).
There we are – railways, posters, film and music. That was quite a trip.
Hello and welcome.
I co-ordinate the contextual studies elements across the graphic design and communication subject area at CSM. I also work with colleagues from the School of Graphic and Industrial Design. So, I’m involved in thinking about communication design, spaces and structures, objects and materials.
None of these things can really be thought of in isolation; it’s all connected. It’s the connection between things that defines the system we’re in.
My approach to context is that it’s part of a conversational strand of learning that complements the work in the studio. Most of our work can begin by watching films and reading magazines. When we need to, we can direct people to the books and ideas that are important.
The blog format is an ideal way to facilitate the conversational format of learning. Now, we can add the University social network and e-portfolio.
I’ve decided to focus this blog around a theme of railways. This is because I’m interested in the graphic ephemera and posters of railway travel, but I’m also interested in railway stations, restaurants and all the stuff associated with the co-ordination of transport systems. In addition and because CSM is moving to KX, it makes sense to begin a conversation about railways, regeneration and internationalism.
I noticed that many of my favourite films have trains in them too. Indeed, the history of cinema begins at a railway station – La Ciotat – filmed by the Lumiere brothers in 1896.
Penguin Books began as an effort to offer good quality reading, inexpensively, for railway travellers. It ended up by changing the world!
The worlds of war and politics has been changed by railways too: Lenin’s sealed carriage to Moscow, Hitler’s revenge at Compiegne and the railway administration of the Holocaust are all parts of this story.
