Station (eBook)

Introduction

Imagine a world where every step was a trial, where mud and forest and things that eat you got between you and your destination, where horses cantered between inns and everyone smelled. The recent reality of our world was a place where – essentially – you didn’t travel unless you had a good reason. Men off to make money or make love or make war took these bizarre Barry Lyndon journeys involving so much side plot. The only real way you could travel anywhere was on a boat – the land was unconquered.

I met my great-grandmother, a child of the 1800s, incredibly born when Queen Victoria was on the throne in the United Kingdom. Her mother knew this world, right on the point that Yorkshire industrialized and the world exploded, sending ripples down the decades. In the 1830s the world changed completely as the railway and the steam engine came to prominence in a flash of exuberance where pure chance and scientific skill somehow mixed in the white-hot embers of the fires of human imagination, pioneered in England’s North at the Stockton and Darlington Railway, Middleton Railway in Leeds and the Liverpool to Manchester Railway.

When you live in a country whose past seems to offer more than its future, you learn these lessons in school, on TV every night, at preserved heritage railways on the weekend: the technology that shaped the world, Stephenson and Watt et al, were the mad Musks of their day, the nutty professors whose experiments bizarrely worked – even though there were many explosions, crashes and deaths to come.

And for my great-grandmother’s mother, life would never be the same again: a fiery furnace of social changes; enclosure forcing the peasants from their common grazing land into Bradford’s wool factories; the potato famine starving the Irish into the English mills; jobs and routines and clocks set by railway companies rather than the sun and the seasons; back-breaking graft, filth and horror and injury and mistreatment and repetition; but also the chance to make something in the mire – a distant relative (perhaps) mopped up all the building contracts in Bradford to construct the banks and the mills and villas. William Beanland lies immortalized in Undercliffe Cemetery, a member of the merchant class Marx and Engels were studying in Manchester as they watched the wretched poor slip further into drink and prostitution and saw a revolution as the only corollary.

The industrial world needed to move people – the commuters on the trains. The railways brought people to work their dead-end jobs as it does today. The paper pushing is now key pushing, we convince ourselves the pointlessness has a worth – or we just accept it doesn’t and take the money anyway.

But the railway also began to take the people away for pleasure: soon you could visit Scarborough and Whitby and Southport and even London. If time had changed so had distance: the possibilities stretched and required a new mental outlook. How could you live through an age like this? We baulk at the way technology super-speeds the changes today; one wonders if this rapid social change itself is one reason for the anxieties and the attention-deficit disorders you see in everyone if you look hard enough. Imagine how much therapy the Victorians would have needed – and how ill-equipped the workhouses and the asylums were to look after a people who were so shocked, who had gone from such a small life to such a restless one. The trains partly did this, a steam-powered jolt to the system.

For the next 100 years the railways dominated everything like a Bruce Forsyth on metal rails, refusing to go quietly or not be there every day: they were the ways you got around, they were for the military and the vacationers, for transporting people and for transporting the new goods and the coal and the wood needed to power everything. The railways bought everything up and opened more: hotels, factories, shops. The system reshaped the very land that sheep had grazed on for centuries: viaducts crossed valleys and in urban areas everything was pushed aside – the graves at St Pancras Old Churchyard were shifted by a young Thomas Hardy so the Midland Railway could plough through. Rails injected themselves everywhere like parasites. Thousands died building the follies – the graveyards on the moors above the Woodhead Tunnel in the Pennines mark the last resting place of the mainly Irish navvies whose death rates were higher than soldiers at the Battle of Waterloo. As well as the bulk cargos the trains were eventually given royal approval and ferried the elites around – Wolferton Station is preserved as a quaint reminder of when kings and queens would catch the royal train from London to Sandringham for every Christmas holiday.

Wars needed railways – indeed, many railways like those in Paris and Berlin’s loop lines were constructed especially to allow military trains access to the lines out to various parts of the country. The First and Second World Wars were dominated by the vast bulk transports of fuels and ammunition on the rails, people too – lest we forget the horrors, increasing in scale from the troop trains carrying scared young boys to the fronts, to the refugee trains ferrying the displaced, to the outright catastrophe of the Nazi cattle trucks loaded with humans bound for the gas chambers. Trains had proved their worth – even if the intention often disgusted. And what did they get in return? The post-war age was to be the motor age, and then the age of flight.

For half of the 20th century hardly anyone was celebrating trains and stations; we were lost in a drunken fug of exhaust smoke and screeching tyres and motorway plans – the USA and Asia and Eastern Europe still are. Around the world railways were subjugated by the car: Birmingham New Street is essentially demolished to make way for a car park on top of it; Prague Hlavní Nádraží gets a motorway running right outside the front door and narrowly escapes the wrecking ball; Penn Station bulldozed and put underground; the Euston Arch taken down and thrown into the Lea. Grand Central was even nearly axed in the mid-1970s, if you can believe that. Jackie Kennedy’s campaigning saved the station that we all recognize today as one of America’s most beautiful.

East Dereham’s bypass on the A47 road in Norfolk was laid on the course of a former railway, and the Cambridgeshire guided busway was laid on a former railway. LA had all its streetcar lines bought up and ripped up in one of the biggest municipal swindles in human history, which inspired the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The perpetrators? The oil, automobile and tyre corporations. The argument was often that the railway companies of the 19th century were too powerful – dominating everything. Now it was the turn of the auto industry. This was sold as personal emancipation – the idea that you were in control of your own vehicle and your own life, and timetables were no longer your boss.

The suburbanization of the United States was made possible by cars and the federal highway programmes that gave them roads to drive on; enabling white flight and building freeways like the Cross Bronx Expressway right through black neighbourhoods to boot. City planner Robert Moses got everything he wanted – almost. His Lower Manhattan Expressway was stopped by Jane Jacobs and the locals of Soho, Little Italy and Chinatown, as you can discover in my book Unbuilt (apologies for the product placement).

The USA went from around 40,000 stations at the peak of its railroad age to little more than 500 Amtrak halts, and every year the service suffers, despite the recently improved Acela trains on the East Coast. Argentina’s rail map of the 19th century was impressively tentacular. As the 20th century went on, the majority of lines were removed. Ireland removed a vast swathe of lines and Australia did too.

As Zdeněk Tomeŝ points out, this decline – centred as it was more markedly than anywhere else in the Rust Belt of the USA – was also a problem of freight. Railways (and airlines) often joke that passengers are simply ‘living cargo’. The real dosh is in freight. And deindustrialization in Detroit and Baltimore and Buffalo was a hammer blow. The railways made money transporting heavy bulky stuff like wood and steel and coal. Lorries and vans could be more nimble and were more suited to the retail and service economy to come.

Abandoned lines are everywhere, poking out of the grass. At the start of the 21st century we suddenly decided that they would make ideal linear parks: the High Line in New York, Paris’s Promenade Plantée, the Goods Line in Sydney, the Folkestone Harbour Branch, the tracks threading silently through Tempelhof Airport in Berlin’s newest park. It’s odd that a kind of memento mori of the railways and their decline has become a way of making them cool again. And ironic, of course, that the popularity bestowed on these previously ignored and misunderstood arteries is irrelevant – they can never reopen as real railways because they are now popular parks.

In Britain one word was synonymous with the hollowing out of the railways: Beeching. His axe fell on rural branch lines around the country, robbing towns and villages and suburbs of their railways and stations. Portishead lost a striking new station in 1964 that was barely ten years old. The reinstatement of that line and that station will surely happen in the next decade but whether the station will be cheap ‘n’ cheerful? Well, we are deep into an austerity...