J. F. BELL, secretary.
Ten pounds was a lot: the upper limit on most lines was forty shillings.
The basic truth that railway lines were unsafe for public sauntering was manifest as early as 1830, when Huskisson was cut down and killed. Yet the temptation remained irresistible. Country people who had been walking the same unofficial ways across fields and through hedges for generations were reluctant to take the long way round because of some remote and bossy railway by-law, forty-shilling fine or no forty-shilling fine. More than this, the new railway routes often provided a tempting alternative to established public thoroughfares. Their average gradients were usually gentler than on the roads, and their courses straighter and shorter too. Trouble-free crossings of rivers and streams were thrown in for good measure and there were no bogs, quagmires or thick undergrowth to besmirch or hinder the feet.
This pedestrian invasion started early. The Stockton & Darlington Railway began running third-class carriages in 1835 with the specific intention of picking up fares from the many walkers who had forsaken the roads to use its line instead. The habit was shared by those who should have known better, like the workers, no doubt somewhat gone in drink, who were cut down by an express on the main line at Low Gill in Westmorland in 1859, on their way back from the feast to celebrate breaking ground for a new branch line towards Sedbergh. Once completed, this line was habitually invaded as a footpath too, as were other routes through rough fell country. Bridges that spanned obstacles where no road went, and the tracks leading to such bridges, might be especially trespass-prone. The mile-long iron viaduct that opened across the Solway Firth in 1869 proved irresistible to incomers from the Scottish side for an additional reason: the licensing laws there prohibited Sunday drinking. Until the viaduct was dismantled in the 1930s, pubs on the English side received useful extra trade from intrepid Scots travellers.
Anyone who has ever tried to walk along a railway line, licitly or otherwise, sober or otherwise, must decide how to use the sleepers. The standard spacing for these is rather too close for the average stride, but too far apart to tackle two in one step. The Scottish writer Moray McLaren discovered as much, on an unauthorised 1920s crossing of Rannoch Moor – ‘a limitless waste of peat and water’ – via the track of the West Highland Railway. The complaint came with its own remedy: ‘After about a mile or so one gradually begins to alter the natural length [of step] so that it fits the sleepers, and, if the line has been well laid out and the sleepers do not vary, one swings along with a very easy and regular motion.’ The trespasser learns to walk like a railwayman.
Smaller strides encounter less difficulty. The young characters of The Railway Children (1906), jumping the fence at the bottom of their field to walk the rails for the first time, find the sleepers ‘a delightful path to travel by – just far enough apart to serve as … stepping stones’. That looks like an inducement to trespass – but, like all good children’s authors, E. Nesbit watches the moral economy of her story with care. The mother of the family tries to forbid walking on the tracks, but has to admit that she too used to stray across railway fences when she was younger. So she settles for a promise from the children that they will always walk on the right, in order to see any approaching trains directly ahead. Here the reader may pick up a useful fact: then as now, like road traffic, British trains usually travel on the left.* Walking near tunnels remains forbidden, however; and when the Railway Children do break this solemn vow, it is for an emergency sortie to rescue an injured boy who has foolishly run through their local tunnel while following a paper-chase.
All of this may be familiar from the fondly remembered film version of 1970, starring Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbins and shot on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway (actually a single-tracked line whose tunnels are too short to supply the fearful ‘black-velvety darkness’ of the book). Not included in the film is the sequence following, in which the children go to report the casualty to the signal box, only to find its occupant asleep in the summer heat, ‘sitting on a chair leaning back against the wall’. By waking him, they save the man from losing his job. So their triple trespass – on to the line, then through the tunnel and finally into the box (which the children know to be prohibited too) – is justified by circumstance or by outcome.
Edith Nesbit understood very well that railways were dangerous places. One of her friends was killed in 1896 when walking on the line, having apparently failed to hear the guard’s shouted warning. There was some suggestion of suicide: the man was a Russian revolutionary, whose life in exile had not been easy. The friendship is a reminder that Nesbit was politically radical, a utopian socialist in the mould of William Morris and a co-founder of the Fabian Society. She also knew how to write in a breezy, up-to-date way (‘snarky’; ‘like a pig being killed a quarter of a mile off’), as if to show up the fusty moralism of existing books for children. To widen the appeal further, the Railway Children’s country is a carefully unspecific amalgam: the hills around are studded with furze (the southerner’s word for gorse or whin) and pictures of ‘The Beauties of Devon’ adorn the station waiting room; but there are canals nearby too, and the family’s house has a distant view of moorland, hinting at the north or the Midlands. The fictional railway company’s name is itself nicely ecumenical: the Great Northern & Southern.
By later standards, however, Nesbit’s most famous book is also desperately class-ridden. The children come from a genteel family forced to ‘play at being Poor for a bit’, before a fairy-tale restoration to their rightful state when father returns from wrongful imprisonment. If sometimes gruff, the railwaymen are always deferential (unlike the ungovernable, semi-criminal barge folk); when the youngsters are caught pinching pram-loads of coal from the station yard, they are let off with a caution (‘“Well, you are a brick,” said Peter, with enthusiasm. “You’re a dear,” said Bobbie. “You’re a darling,” said Phyllis. “That’s all right,” said the Station Master.’) After which, like good Fabians, the three end up more than once rescuing the working men of the railway: not just the dozing signalman, but also in the famous episode in which they save a train from hitting a landslide by waving the girls’ torn-up red petticoats as a danger signal. Nesbit’s biographer Julia Briggs noted with puzzlement that the Edwardians had long since given up red flannel petticoats, a fashion that peaked in the 1860s–70s; but is it too much to suggest that waving a red flag for the attention of working men by a fine young woman of the upper middle class may have had other connotations in 1906?**
Incursions by children and young people were not always so well-meaning. Pilfering was only part of it. Objects might be placed on the line: not the traditional copper coins left on the rails to be flattened into bright thin circles, but things heavy enough to be lethal. A driver was killed when his engine derailed on a lump of wood left on the Stockton & Darlington’s line in 1834, and a sleeper placed on the track near Lewes in 1851 caused a derailment that killed five people. Instances of stone-throwing started on the Great Western almost as soon as the trains began to run. Dickens observed a prohibitory notice against the habit at a bleak Black Country station in 1853. Penalties on detection might be severe: four lads aged between nine and thirteen who were caught in the act at Leeds in 1875 were each sentenced to a dozen strokes of the birch.
The landslide episode from The Railway Children, 1906
The menace seems to have returned with new force in the 1960s, when the areas worst affected were Manchester and Liverpool, the twin birthplaces of modern passenger railways. Internal documents show that even David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), with its spectacular train-wrecking sequence, caused disquiet among the railway management at the possibility of evil-minded imitation. Such concerns were not misplaced: in 1965 an evening train to Southend was derailed at Elm Park in Essex by pieces of metal placed maliciously across the tracks, killing the driver and one of the passengers.
The persuasive powers of film were used as a deterrent, culminating in 1977 with
the British Transport Film The Finishing Line. A sort of nightmare inversion of The Railway Children, this twenty-minute short takes us into the imaginings of a T-shirted urchin sitting on a road-bridge parapet, above a cutting on the Hertford loop line. His thoughts come to life in the form of a surreal school sports day held by the trackside, complete with adult supervision, a marquee, brass band and impassive commentary through unseen loudspeakers as the increasingly hideous contests begin. Fence-breaking, stoning of carriages as they pass and races across the double tracks in front of approaching trains all take their toll. Most of the survivors are finally wiped out in the ‘great tunnel walk’, in which long defiles of youngsters are shown marching off into the mouth of Ponsbourne Tunnel. A speeding train then disappears into the same opening. Cut to the finish, as three bloodied and disorientated children limp out into the daylight, stammering out their names to a complacent race marshal. They are followed by an interminable procession of adults, carrying broken young bodies and laying them silently down between the rails one by one, like a Hertfordshire version of the Battle of Atlanta sequence in David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind.
The British Film Institute now describes The Finishing Line as ‘among the most audacious public safety films ever made’; but children and parents alike found it too traumatic, and the film was quietly withdrawn from television schedules. Its replacement was the more conventionally preachy Robbie, presented by the avuncular Peter Purves from Blue Peter, in which a football-loving lad is struck by a train and is lucky to lose no more than his feet.
Absent from the list of trackside sports in The Finishing Line is the spraying of graffiti. As late as 1983, London Underground had no dedicated budget for the removal of illicit writing. Shortly afterwards, London began to copy New York, where much of the Subway – trains and stations, but especially the trains – was already covered in bold spray-painted tags. Traditionally the British vandal had been content to mark the insides of carriages only, but the new graffiti culture encouraged large-scale painting, with the highest premium on works that used the carriage sides as a canvas. Coverage of this kind takes time, requiring stealthy entry to depots and sidings where trains can be found unattended and at rest. The hooded trespasser rather than the rogue passenger now became the representative defacer of trains. This helps to explain where the trend took off: not in the gritty urban heartlands, but along the leafy outer reaches of the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines. The canonical sites for the first UK graffiti artists (‘writers’, to use the insider term) were Neasden, Uxbridge and Wembley Park, with their spacious depots, easily walked tracksides and none-too-secure fences. Far from the arson-scorched wastes of the Bronx that were the crucible for New York, it was Metro-land – of all places – that nurtured the infant British graffiti scene.
Only a very prim person would be immune to the dynamism and animation of graffiti at its best, or would deny that it can sometimes enliven a drab urban setting. It is the spray can that has changed the game. In 1973, in the first book-length study of vandalism published in Britain, the anarchist writer Colin Ward (1924–2010) hailed aerosol paint as an aesthetic advance ‘simply because it imposes a bold, free-flowing line on the user, by comparison with the effect of dripping painting or hesitant chalk … I would not like the reader to think I am being flippant.’
Ward’s indulgence reflected his profound opposition to authoritarianism, and an essentially optimistic view of human nature in which graffiti can be equated with legitimate protest and self-expression. He might have sympathised with one London graffiti writer (‘one of da decorators’) whose eccentrically spelled manifesto (posted 2004) aspires to the immortality of high art:
we have produced master piece burners that rolled through the concrete jungle to be destroyed at the hands of the overseer’s of order and conformity. Such demonstrations of hate and conformity will ultimatly weave us into myth and legend. This is important for future generations who need a history, stories and masterpieces to strengthen their spirits in the comming darkness …
A lot of care and attention certainly goes into some of these pieces, especially ‘wholecars’, in which the entire side of a carriage, windows and all, is painted from end to end with a single design. Thanks to the web, vanished paint schemes that may have lasted only a few hours before the afflicted carriages were sent back to the depot for cleaning have been memorialised for all to see, on sites such as the Digital Jungle UK graffiti archive. Here are a thousand large-scale pieces by practitioners from Agony to Zonk, sprayed on main-line trains as well as those of London Underground, and all dating from the second half of the 1990s, when the scene was especially lively.
The defence that graffiti adds vibrancy to the environment falters when spray paint has blanked out the carriage windows through which that environment must be seen. These collections of graffiti images also show that they are amazingly repetitive in terms of style, and instantly forgettable as a result, for all the defiant hopes of ‘da decorator’. And if anyone of an anarchist persuasion still nurses the dream that graffiti might be a harbinger of collective purpose, online forums suggest that rivalry and rancour are the dominant modes of graffiti culture. The creators of ambitious ‘pieces’ despise taggers, endlessly replicating their drab little marks. Local gangs disparage and detest their neighbours and rivals. Collectively, Londoners hate ‘bumpkins’ (exponents of graffiti from outside the capital), reserving special venom for upstarts from Brighton. And so on.
Even so, as nobody needs telling, bumpkin versions of London’s versions of New York’s graffiti are now pervasive up and down the country, along the railways and beyond. Confronted with the derivative sprayings of the track bandits of Droitwich or Spalding, no less than those of west London, the eye slides away and the brain fails to engage. There are phases of visual respite whenever the railway approaches to London are smartened up and the palimpsest of tagging along cuttings and retaining walls disappears under big blocks of dun-coloured paint – after which the taggers creep back as surely as the sea-tide, reclaiming the freshened surfaces to make their scrawls show up all the more clearly. Especially boring are the hurried tags scribbled doggedly on every surface, as if to insinuate the idea that the catenary masts and trackside equipment cabins owe their continuing existence to an adolescent with a knack for fence-climbing and a pocketful of Pentels.
The omnipresence of graffiti culture has another odd effect, in that the elderly survivals from the time when lineside graffiti still communicated in a shared language are now much more likely to hold the attention. There is a certain pathos in the flaking initials of a long-relegated football team, or the declarations of provincial fandom, such as the pot-and-brush-painted slogan BOWIE ’77 that lingers beneath a bridge at Maryport station on the Cumberland Coast line, or the marks of extinct tribes at Loughborough on the preserved section of the Great Central Railway:
PUNKS RULE
TED’S ARE BUMERS
Paddington’s celebrated graffiti
Nor has any modern blurt of spray-painted colour come close to the enduring impact of
FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE
as painted neatly on a wall on the approaches to Paddington station in 1974. This haunting declaration piqued the curiosity of thousands of travellers. The Daily Telegraph’s columnist Peter Simple attributed the words to the shadowy ‘Master of Paddington’, the subject of squabbles among imaginary scholars; the poet and commuter Roger Green puzzled over them in his entertaining compendium of railway musings Notes from Overground (1984), published under the pseudonym ‘Tiresias’ (epigraph: ‘Man is born free, and is everywhere in trains’). In 2005 the text was revealed to have been the creation of two brothers named Dave and Geoff, working over Christmas when no trains ran. They had taken the first six words from a poem by Robert Graves and adapted the rest from the title of an academic paper by another poet, Ruth Padel. Demolition of the original wall in 1981 failed to suppress this hybrid text, which was promptly recreat
ed further along the line, only to disappear finally around the turn of the century.
‘Far Away …’ cost the public nothing. Not so the efforts of the bombers, burners and taggers of the modern graffiti scene. The annual bill for cleaning trains, buildings and lineside structures on the national network now stands at over £3.5 million, while London Underground was reportedly devoting 70,000 man-hours a year to the same task by 2007. The job is made harder by writerly ruses such as mixing brake fluid with the ink of marker pens, so that tags burn their way indelibly into plastic or painted surfaces. Countermeasures that have reduced lasting damage to trains include the adoption of transparent self-adhesive films for carriage bodysides, which can be peeled off and discarded along with any unwanted sprayings, like surgical gloves. Bridge parapets and other perilous locations that enhance the thrill of creating graffiti also inflate the bill for removing it, when safety harnesses and other special precautions may come into play. Then there are the costs of prevention and deterrence, which overlap with the precautions taken against cable thieves: spike-topped palisade fencing of galvanised steel, infra-red security lights, alarms and closed-circuit TV at depots, enhanced lineside patrols and the operation of special ‘Q-trains’ to spot trespassers and vandals, which work jointly with police teams on the roads along the tracks. Surveillance flights by remote-controlled drones may yet join this list. Prosecution and punishment of offenders, and the maintenance of the National Graffiti Database (part-funded by the British Transport Police), nudge up the bill still further. As surveys of the impact of vandalism have also demonstrated, the final reckoning should include the loss of revenue from those intimidated by edgy, vandalised environments – women and the elderly in particular – who may therefore avoid using the railways at all, especially at night. And that is to speak in terms of money only, without trying to put a price on fear.
The Railways Page 40