Train Tracks

Work, Play and Politics on the Railways

Gayle Letherby, Gillian Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323610
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

This book provides an in-depth exploration of trains and train travel. Letherby and Reynolds have conducted extensive research with all those concerned with trains, from leisure travelers and enthusiasts to railway workers and commuters. Overturning conventional wisdom, they show that the train has a social life in and of itself and is not simply a way to get from A to B.The book also looks at the depiction of train travel through cultural media, such as music, films, books and art. The authors consider the personal politics of train travel and political discussion surrounding the railways, as well as the relationship trains have to leisure and work. The media often paints a gloomy picture of the railways and there is a general view that the romance of train travel ended with the steam locomotive. Letherby and Reynolds show that this is far from the case.

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Points and Branch Lines

Locating the Train in Time, Place and Space

Introduction

In this chapter we explore the tram and train travel in the context of social theory. We draw on a range of disciplines to inform our analysis. The discipline of sociology provides the more abstract theoretical concepts of modernity, post- (or late) modernity and urbanization, as well as the more interpersonal themes of identity (especially those emerging from feminist thinking). The discipline of history enables us to explore trains and train travel from the perspective of industrialization and colonialism. Philosophy helps us to contextualize the concept of time, whilst social geography offers the crucial concepts of place and space.

Throughout the chapter, embedded in the overarching concept of 'Grand Historical Time', there is occasional conceptual movement from the 'outside' of trains to the 'inside' and back again. This is symbolic and characteristic of the management of the subject-matter in relation to 'space'. We are concerned with social interaction within trains, and trains carry this interaction on railways through time, and between a multitude of other spaces and places. In the same time/space of 'Grand Historical Time', railways and trains themselves have evolved into spaces and places with different forms. All these different aspects of trains and train travel are not separate; they are interwoven in subtle and complex ways.

Changing Forms through Grand Historical Time

In the context of Grand Historical Time, the story of railways begins at the end of a long era in which the main material used for energy and technology had been wood. During the eighteenth century wood had lost its universal function: 'Iron became the new industrial building material, coal the new combustible. In the steam engine, the prime mover of industry, these two combined to produce energy in theoretically unlimited amounts' (Schivelbusch 1986: 2).

From the beginning, therefore, the evolution of the railways in Britain has reflected the evolution of capitalism in Britain. Beginning with the first railway company to carry passengers - the Liverpool and Manchester - networks of railways grew rapidly, even from the early nineteenth century. We can perceive the development as a battleground in historical time in which the nouveaux riches entrepreneurs were seeking, with the help of Parliament, to wrest land - places and spaces - from the traditional propertied classes (Wolmar 2001: 20). The development took place in a haphazard way; neither government nor anybody else sought to coordinate it (Hamilton and Potter 1985: 8). This Victorian culture of laissez-faire was a matter of political dogma. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the virtual end of 'iron road' construction; the competition for lines on limited territorial space had reached almost saturation point, and the smaller lines had not yet proved profitable.

During the First World War, experience of cooperation between railway companies led people to believe that a return to the pre-war attitude of cut-and-thrust competition would be disastrous. The 1921 Railways Act sought to increase the national efficiency of the railway. As the motor car emerged as a major competitor, the government - helped by the national standardization of track width - rationalized the network of railways into four administrative groups: Southern; London Midland, Scottish; London North-Eastern; and Great Western. This more cooperative 'Big Four' would remain until and beyond nationalization.

The interwar years were - and are - seen by many as the 'golden age' of railway. Public relations departments of the Big Four created an image of prestige streamlined 'romantic' trains that remains even today (see Chapter 3). The Labour government elected in 1945 was committed to bringing all the principal utilities under national ownership. Like the Victorian laissez-faire and the privatization to come more than forty years later, nationalization was an act of political dogma (see Chapter 2). At the beginning of 1948, British Railways was charged with providing "'an efficient, adequate, economical and properly integrated system of public inland transport" with the aim of breaking even ... The nationalised sector, therefore, was never set the task of profit maximisation, but rather a far more ambiguous target of serving the public good. At nationalisation the railways were in a mess' (Strangleman 2002b: 2.15). Jessica, a rail user and one of our older respondents, remembers that:

After the war Europe was such a shambles, they had to completely rebuild it, which meant that all its big industries were rebuilt to modern standards. Ours weren't - we just rebuilt the ones that had been bombed. It was the same with the railways. They didn't spend money on our railways, we still kept going with the old Victorian system ... So all the European ones were built new, you see, so they had an advantage there. (Jessica - UK)

As with the economy as a whole, the economic health of British Railways did not improve significantly, and the next proposal for change came in the Modernization Plan of 1955. This was designed to renew the infrastructure and equipment of the industry; one of its key features was the complete eradication of steam locomotives (Strangleman 1999: 743). If the coming of the railway had signalled the end of the Middle Ages almost overnight, then the passing of the steam era in the 1960s signalled the end of the Industrial Age in Britain:

Without steam engines to keep fuelled, the coal industry lost its best customer and much of its strength. The railwaymen and the miners had always stood shoulder to shoulder, a vast army of men who understood the vital chemistry of fire and water. But the bond of mutual dependence had been broken and the hum and clatter of industry would never be quite as cheerful. (Whittaker 1995: 89)

Shortly after publishing the Modernization Plan, government announced a multi-million pound scheme to 'modernize' the road network as well. The Modernization Plan had overlooked a problem: 'Since entering the car ownership club was the ultimate ambition, and becoming feasible for the average family, there was little incentive to walk a mile to a scruffy BR station to wait an hour for the slow train that bore no resemblance to what the government was promising in its modernization manifesto' (Wolmar 2001: 41). As Christian Wolmar further notes, it is very difficult in hindsight to understand just how strong the faith was that the car represented the future. There was simply no conception that high-speed trains could possibly be the preferred mode of travel for longer journeys. And the car and road lobby was a growing political force both inside and outside the place and spaces of Parliament:

In 1959 the rise ol the road lobby was crowned by the appointment of Ernest Marples as Minister of Transport. Marples was the greatest self-publicist ever to hold this post and his background was entirely in the road industry ... Being the Minister of Transport ... [he] was not permitted to retain the ownership of his road construction company ... He passed his shareholdings to his wife, which apparently he viewed as eliminating any personal interest or gain in his being responsible for Britain's roadbuilding programme! (Hamilton and Potter 1985: 50-52)

Determined to have a rail industry that was subordinate to the roads and with the Modernization Plan only half implemented (Murray 2002: 7) - Marples used a highly critical report to influence the Transport Act of 1962, which effectively fragmented the rail industry, while keeping it still under government control. He appointed Dr Richard Beeching whose presence on the team working on the report was almost his only experience of the rail industry - as the first chairman of the British Railway's Board. With the passage of time, the report was perceived as deeply flawed and the result of 'powerful vested interests manipulating government and railway management such that the only option they would consider was cuts' (Hamilton and Potter 1985: 62). 'Beeching's cuts were never going to save much money ... It was that faith in road transport which underpinned Beeching's thinking and led to the massive closures, even of lines that carried large numbers of people' (Wolmar 2001:48).

As the railway journalist Patrick Whitehouse observed as early as 1962, 'the English are curiously sentimental about their railways. Let the most unprofitable branch line close or even be threatened with closure and protest will follow as a matter of course' (Payton 1997: 17). Whitehouse, argues Payton, saw the postwar enthusiasm for rural railways as the 'urge of the city dweller to escape the roar of the traffic, the smoke haze and the rat-race to find the relative peace and quiet of the countryside'. In the succeeding half-century, the reasons for enthusiasm have largely reversed. As people moved out of the towns to cheaper housing, but employment remained within the spaces of cities and towns, this apparent 'sentimentality' has since become more concerned with economy and ecology than with escape.

Under consecutive governments, investment in the railways dropped to less than 10 per cent of costs, comparing badly with France and West Germany. Despite this, some parts of the industry actually began to show a profit and the travelling public were eventually covering nearly three-quarters of the costs (Murray 2002: 8). But, with vastly changing political cultures during the 1970s and 1980s in Britain, this improved efficiency was simply seen as making the industry ripe for profit-making privatization: 'Selling off the railways was an idea first hatched in the hard right circles of the Conservative think-tanks ... [T]he scheme for privatization finally laid before parliament in 1992 was extraordinary around 100 different pieces [to be sold] to somebody different... It was a scheme only a lawyer could love' (Murray 2002: 12-15).

The Railways Act of 1993 broke up British Rail and privatized the entire industry in the name of competition and market forces: a further act of political dogma. As has been well documented in other arenas, however, privatization actually unleashed not competition; but a new 'stampede' towards monopolies, particularly those of existing bus monopolies. Based largely on the discredited pattern of bus deregulation in the 1980s, the picture of the railways in 2001 revealed 'four bus companies dominating train operation, one track monopoly showering its shareholders with taxpayers' cash, a few construction firms bringing the practices of the building site to railway maintenance, and three banks owning all our trains' (Murray 2002: 22). Two of our respondents - both of them railway workers and rail enthusiasts - were particularly keen to comment on this:

I just fail to see how splitting something up can give you a better joined-up transport service. But p'raps I'm naïve. (Jim - UK)

There's four different railway companies based at Crewe ... now [name of train operator] are on about opening up a depot there for the Holyhead line, but I don't know if they will or not. You've got three different companies at Manchester as well... I do sincerely believe that it was the fragmentation of the railways that has caused a lot of the problems. (Ben - UK)

Radical privatization of railway and train space, however, is not the end of the story. In October 2001, one government announcement will be remembered as a landmark in British railway industry. Stephen Byers, the Transport Secretary, announced that he was appointing administrators to take over the affairs of Railtrack (the company with responsibility for track maintenance); the government had decided the company at the heart of Britain's privatized railway system was effectively bankrupt. In retrospect, Railtrack's fate had been sealed a year before, when a train was derailed near Hatfield in Hertfordshire. It was a relatively minor accident but it brought Britain's railways to a near halt, and exposed deep flaws in the way in which they had been privatized (Wolmar 2001).

I think the main failure of privatization has been on costs of doing things and a lack of control over the costs, ironically. Particularly with infrastructure work, Railtrack as was, were taken to the cleaners by contractors. (Tony —UK)

In tune, suggests Wolmar (2001), the privatization of British Rail will be seen as a crazy experiment led by ideological politicians and supported by equally messianic civil servants. Some public services, he argues, simply cannot be commodified and bundled up in such a way as to make them suitable for the private sector.

In Britain of 2004 the structural form of railways has come almost full circle to the original haphazard system of the nineteenth century. The main difference is that, following a series of major crises in perceived dependability, safety standards, track maintenance and extreme weather conditions - and (therefore) public and market confidence - most investment in railways 'continues to come from the taxpayer, including nearly all the money for major new projects' (Murray 2002: 19). This is despite an eleven per cent increase in profits for bus companies such as National Express, which owns Midland Mainline and Central Trains (Derby Evening Telegraph 2003).

Up to this point we have considered the changing forms of railways through Grand Historical Time. Now we begin to explore the more abstract themes of time, place and space as they can be applied to railways and trains.

Other 'Times'

Time, as Barbara Adam (1990: 1) points out, is a fact of life. All too often it is perceived as natural, fixed and unproblematic. Helga Nowotny (1994: 113-14) notes that any discussion of the subject of time actually never deals with time alone, but also with the ways in which we allocate time. We do this in various political arenas:

So much time for ourselves: so much time for others; so much tune for work (paid): so much time for work (unpaid); so much time for buying: so much time for making; so much time for fundamental needs: so much time for luxury; so much time for waiting: so much time for getting things done ... Every categorization says something about the content and its quality at the same time, since the assessment results from the relation with the remaining pattern of allocation.

In this book - and in the empirical research that preceded it - time itself is constructed in a number of different ways. We have already explored the railways through Grand Historical Time. Other constructions of time in this context include:

• 'clock' time, which is especially relevant to work practices, work to be done and journey times (including departure and arrival times);
• 'leisure' time, as it relates to spaces both within and outside the train;
• 'everyday' time the time of desired quality to carry out life activities;
• 'train' time within the train, during which places are constructed and different spaces used;
• 'embodied' time - the relationship between bio-time, train time and the reason for the journey and
• 'empirical' time - the 'moment' in which the research took place, which had a strong bearing on the emergent issues.

We can immediately perceive the logic that time measured by the clock is incomplete because it is divided arbitrarily from the outside. Although we cannot reject the significance of clock measurement as simply false, we can see that it differs from subjective experience: 'Our experience of time rarely, if ever, coincides with what the clock tells us' (Melucci 1996: 11).

As we have noted, the invention of railways and trains occurred at a specific point in Grand Historical Time. But railways also have a deep meaning for our individual sense of time and memory. 'Railways are leys; lines of connection. They connect places, and they connect us with time, and the ghosts of time. The railway is a road of memory' (Marchant 2003: 304). Just as Hogwarts Express, leaving from Platform Nine and Three Quarters at King's Cross station, carries the fictional character Harry Potter from the place of the Muggle to the place of magic (e.g. Rowling 1997), so railways and railway archaeology carry our temporal and spatial consciousness all the way from our postindustrial present back to the Roman occupation of Britain:

The Newcastle roads were built in the seventeenth and eighteenth century to accommodate a wide range of wagons which were already in use. It was natural that the rails were so far apart as to accommodate the average axlewidth of a seventeenth-century farm cart. The average width was about four feet eight and a half inches. The wheels on carts were this far apart, so that they could fit in the ruts of the ordinary late medieval and early modem roads. These roads had not been improved since they were built by the Romans. The wagons were running in very old grooves, grooves that had been cut by the Romans' chariots. The average size of Roman military horses' arses meant that the average distance between the chariot wheels was about four feet, eight and a half inches. (Merchant 2003: 180)

In a very real and material sense the coming of the railways meant that 'clock' time - previously based on the place of the 'loc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Train Now Standing
• 1 Points and Branch Lines: Locating the Train in Time, Place and Space
• 2 Leaves on the Line: Current Discourses of the Train
• 3 Signs and Signals: Finding the Train in Western Culture
• 4 All Aboard the 'Play Station': Leisure and the Train
• 5 Working on the Line: Working Patterns and the Train
• 6 Standing Room Only: Personal Politics and the Train
• Final Reflections: Light at the End of the Tunnel?
• Bibliography
• Index