Captain Railway

Railways. Aesthetics. Dreams.

[pogphotoarchives]

Albert Einstein waving from train, Albuquerque, New Mexico Date: March 1, 1931 Negative Number 131333 Group on back platform of the AT&SF Grand Canyon Limited train include (L to R): Mrs. Albert Einstein, Dr. Albert Einstein, Fräulein Dukas, Dr. Walter Mayer 

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Railway as relative motion: Einstein used obeservers on moving trains and station(ary) platforms to unpack the ideas at the heart of Special Relativity.

We all move. Some people move faster than others at some times. They see things differently.

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Railway as Future Past:

Separated at birth - a Martian spaceship (from War of the Worlds, 1956 George Pal, Paramount Pictures), and the current incarnation of Birmingham New Street station.

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Episode 1:  炎炎ノ消防隊   train inside view

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Railway as visual haiku: In Victorian paintings, the frozen swing of a window blind tassel was the fine art equivalent of comic book ‘whoosh lines’. How fitting that the motion (and thus the two inertial frames) in this animation is so beautifully restrained;  only by the wavering lines of the telephone wires outside and their shadows inside betray velocity.  Another Japanese love letter to its railways.

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Cinemagraphs Animated GIF - Giphy

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Railway as illustration of relativity:  An element of Mach’s conjecture is that absolute motion cannot be said to exist without reference to another inertial frame - so which side of the window in this train .gif is moving?

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Railway as ceramic design: As part of a series of patterns for Wedgewood called ‘Travel’, Eric Ravilious produced this charming work.

It must be one of the few designs that conform to the requirements of an industrial scale ceramic manufacturer that also retains the quality of a child’s dream

First seen by the Captain in ‘Eric Ravilious, Artist and Designer’ Alan Powers wonderful book on the artist,

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Japan’s levitating maglev train reaches 500 km/h (311mph)

Video

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Railway as unbelievable spectacle: This is what the Liverpool to Manchester Railway must have looked like to the lineside Victorian public in 1830.

No wonder that even 14 years later, Dr Dionysius Lardner thought Great Western Railway passengers would suffocate on exiting Box Hill Tunnel at such seemingly high speeds.

History may not repeat itself, but it likes to play variations on a theme.

[clair-audients]

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Railway as Universal Time-tabling phenomenon: Update Sherlock Holmes’s mind-boggling mastery of Bradshaw’s Guide for Railway Tourists that so shocked Victorian readers and the result is the timetable that allows the Pan-Galactic franchise that is Galaxy Express 999 to engage in single track running to Andromeda. Railway travel has always been regarded as time out of time in Time.

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Railway as temporal indifference (sponsored by Benrus):

“Great, slant beams of moted light fell ponderously athwart the station’s floor, and the calm voice of time hovered along the walls and ceiling of that mighty room, distilled out of the voices and movements of the people who swarmed beneath. It had the murmur of a distant sea....It was elemental, detached, indifferent to the lives of men” 

Words: Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, on the subject of the mighty concourse of the original Pennsylvania Station, NYC

Picture: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

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Railway as temporal/contextual dilation: This model of the New York State Agricultural and Industrial Exposition circa 1939 contains an interesting visual effect, due to the presence of trees that could easily be mistaken for scale model explosions. The model figures, frozen by Time as well as the photograph, seem unconcerned, as well they might if the objects were trees. Yet in the back of the mind, as with all miniatures, one wonders if the figures are frozen by the photographer or the modeller.

Once seen as shell bursts, the context of the shot slips backwards and forwards like a temporal trompe l’oeil, flickering between the domestic and the surrreal. The time and space of the observer (you/now) is overlaid on the time and space represented (New York State/1939) as well as the time and space of the photograph (Modeller’s basement/1940).

Add the effect of the flickering context to this tiny frozen world and each dimension is mutliplied, despite the additonal clues provided by the magazine cover graphics.

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(1939)

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The quality of Time is not uniform.

Railways have long known this and promoted it as their USP.

We can expect driverless cars to attempt a hijack of the same marketing territory but without surrendering the existing temptations of consumption as status expression.

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Railway as trans-cultural temporal symbol: In Japan, the Cherry Blossom has always been regarded as intertwined with the passing of time inherent in rebirth and renewal. A different commute perhaps, but the combination of pragmatic train and poetic fragility is one readily appreciated by regular travellers.

The symbolic link between space and time translates directly across other national cultures.

[life]

“Johnny Cash sings of trains, prisons and hard times. From the Nov. 21, 1969 cover story: JOHNNY CASH—The Rough-cut King of Country Music.” (Michael Rougier—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) #LIFElegends #1960s #JohnnyCash

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Railway as a bridge across the generations:

“Kids get something wonderful when they get a Lionel train. They get Dad.”

Johnny Cash, taken from a Lionel model trains promotional poster.

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Railway as time shift: One is a representation of state sponsored paranoia and the other is a crassly realised monumentalist structure that looks embarrassingly dated.

You decide which is which.

Only one of them has a railway station buried underneath it, however.

The 1956 film adaptation of George Orwell’s ‘1984′ and the 2017 adaptation of Birmingham New Street Station, which I am reliably informed lies somewhere within the archly named ‘Grand Central’ shopping precinct pictured.

The black and white still from the film comes from the amazing N Z Pete’s Matte Shot blog.

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Buster Keaton 

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Railways as Chronological Model:

A visual analogy for space/time relativity and the ‘river flow’ model of how humans experience time: Buster Keaton demonstrates remaining static in one dynamic (space) while the freight cars (time) flow under him. The apparent stasis is reliant on a similalrly positioned non-moving viewer (the camera and thus audience) sharing the same relative space as Buster.

The flow of time is often considered in the same way; we remain static in one dynamic (the present or ‘Now’) while time flows around us.  Of course, such a model presupposes an endless supply of freight cars that pre-exist our experience of them, but as this loop gif indicates, the effect might be achieved in other ways.

[abandonedandurbex]

Grand Orient Express fading into Belgian oblivion [1100 × 1495] 2009

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AbandonedPorn/comments/5083tn/grand_orient_express_fading_into_belgian_oblivion/

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Railway as bridge to Past Futures; nothing ages faster than an Icon of Modernity, except perhaps an Icon of Post-Modernity. Even Entropy has a history.

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Railway as Contextualized Time Narrative: Hard to believe that these four book covers are visual insights to the same text, a collection of short stories (not all of them by Dickens) bound together by a rail based structure. Accordingly, the covers take their cue from different elements of the stories and range from: Permanent Way as Modernist graphic device Calling at Contemporaneous Internationalist Repositioning By way of Nouvelle Vague Cinematic Whimsy Arriving at Dickens as Visual Haiku

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Railway as clock-stopper: Putting a stamp on Time itself, this clock is stil viewable at London’s Gant’s Hill Underground Station, Divorced from light and space and relative positional benchmarks as Underground passengers are, they are still in no doubt who is in control, even of Time itself. A bespattering of Underground roundel logos makes numbers unnecessary and has done so since the 1940s.

You’ll find out where other claims are staked on Underground Time by visiting the home of this image, namely Transport For London’s excellent Transported By Design Gallery