Eleven Minutes Late

by Matthew Engel

  Contrast British railway art. The Night Train by David Cox (1849) is terrifying the horses. Frank Holl’s 1867 depiction of the aftermath of an emigrant’s farewell is entitled simply Gone. And a pair by Abraham Solomon (1855) had the titles First Class: The Meeting and Second Class: The Parting. Just in case anyone missed the point, they also had heavy-handed subtitles: ‘and at First Meeting loved’ and ‘Thus part we rich in sorrow, Parting poor.’ Fortunately, perhaps, he never got round to third-class. His original version of the first-class picture showed a young man flirting outrageously with a girl while the father dozed but, after it was attacked in the Art-Journal as ‘vulgar’, Solomon bowdlerized it so he was talking instead to a very wide-awake father while the girl looked on demurely.

  There are exceptions, of course. But it is important to draw a distinction between art that might have appealed to the Art-Journal and representational art, aimed squarely at popular taste – as purveyed by the Victorian art-as-narrative merchant W. P. Frith or the twentieth-century droolers-over-steam Terence Cuneo and David Shepherd.

  American artists, even in their post-triumphalist phase, have always been fascinated with the tracks themselves, particularly as they stretched ever further west: linear elements in a regular landscape. Note the work of Edward Hopper or the drawings of Bob Dylan. But even in pictures not shown in Liverpool, the overriding theme in British railway art is the train as threat: an agent of unwelcome change, misery and social division. That reached its apotheosis in John Martin’s huge apocalyptic vision, The Last Judgement showing a train crashing into the abyss of hellfire.7 And Martin was at least as popular as Frith in his day.

  Even the best-loved of all British railway pictures, Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – a Great Western train as ethereal as a will-o’-the-wisp battling its way across Maidenhead Bridge – had to overcome the artist’s belief that trains were ugly. That’s what Ruskin said, anyway, if we trust him. Certainly, there is something very strange here, a paradox that seems to lie deep in the British subconscious.

  A Note on Sex

  When I began researching this book, I asked an analyst friend whether there was any published work on the psycho-sexual implications of railway travel. She said that they were too obvious to be worth discussing.

  But then she is a Jungian. Sigmund Freud had no problem discussing them.

  It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways, and, at the age at which the production of phantasies is most active (shortly before puberty) use those things as a nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway-travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

  Freud noted that ‘every boy’ had at some time wanted to be an engine driver or a coachman. Had he been writing later than the very start of the twentieth century, he would doubtless have added motor cars or even planes. But there are two features that are particularly germane to trains. One is the jolting that was characteristic of the early days. Another is the thrusting produced by the faster and more obviously phallic modern locomotive. Even in the nineteenth century, the train was regularly described as a projectile.

  The sexual arousal produced by trains, Freud said, also had its counterpart:

  In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey . . .

  Freud’s disciple Karl Abraham did a great deal of research into the behaviour of neurotics.

  Many neurotics experience a pronounced bodily pleasure in travelling. As a particularly characteristic example I may mention one patient of mine who used to make long railway journeys and to keep awake all through even the longest of them in order not to lose his pleasure in travelling; and who used to travel chiefly for the sake of that pleasure. It may be mentioned that in many persons a long railway journey always brings on a pollution during the following night.

  ‘A pollution’ is what we would less pejoratively call an emission. The Freudian psychohistorian Peter Gay found sexual overtones throughout Victorian railway writing: ‘the railroad became, for the nineteenth-century bourgeois imagination, a favourite actor in the theatre of libido’. Gay finds it even in Dombey and Son, which seems to be a stretch, but elsewhere it is not a stretch at all. Consider Walt Whitman. To a Locomotive in Winter:

  Thee in the driving storm, even as now—the snow—the winter-day declining;

  Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive;

  Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel;

  Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides;

  Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar—now tapering in the distance;

  Steady on, old chap, one might say. But then Whitman was an American, and assumed to be homosexual. For anything similar in the British context it is necessary to turn, quite startlingly, to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the deep unread recesses of her verse-novel Aurora Leigh is this astonishing passage:

  So we passed

  The liberal open country and the close,

  And shot through tunnels, like a lightning-wedge

  By great Thor-hammers driven through the rock,

  Which, quivering through the intestine blackness, splits,

  And lets it in at once: the train swept in

  Athrob with effort, trembling with resolve,

  The fierce denouncing whistle wailing on

  And dying off smothered in the shuddering dark,

  While we, self-awed, drew troubled breath, oppressed

  As other Titans, underneath the pile ......

  Contrast that with the repressed writing of all the male British Victorians. Indeed, contrast that with the contents of any of the 13,000-plus works listed in Ottley’s Bibliography of British Railway History, nearly all of them written by men.

  We might perhaps disregard as irrelevant the exchange in the Commons in July 2008 between the MP for Lichfield, Michael Fabricant, angry because fast trains pass through his constituency without stopping, and the transport secretary, Ruth Kelly:

  Fabricant: Does the right honourable Lady understand that it is not much fun standing on a platform and a high-speed train sucks you off. . . .

  Kelly: The honourable Gentleman is of course right; it would not be much fun.

  But then these trains are run by a company called Virgin. Deep within the artistic and literary contempt, and the unanimous unwillingness to confront the erotic significance of railways, there must be something that leads on to the catastrophic failure of British transport policy, which would be a more fitting subject for parliamentary question time.

  Let’s go back to Alma Cogan. The original (American) title of The Railroad Runs through the Middle of the House, I now discover, was The Railroad COMES through the Middle of the House. As Cary Grant said in North by Northwest, when he momentarily removed his mouth from that of Eva Marie Saint; ‘Beats flying, doesn’t it?’ Perhaps we should move on swiftly.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE BRIDGES

  The Pasty’n’Haggis train from Cornwall to Dundee or Aberdeen crosses what might be called the three major structures of the British railway network: Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar, the Forth Bridge from Edinburgh into Fife and the Tay Bridge between Fife and Dundee.

  You could also add a fourth: the comparatively unpretentious Royal Border Bridge at Berwick, for its (growing) political significance. But the Forth Bridge, the last to be built, is pre-eminent, both as a symbol of Victorian endeavour and ingenuity, and as part of the language, even to people who would struggle to place it on the map.

  ‘It’s like painting the Forth Bridge,’ we say of any task that has to
be repeated endlessly. The idea that it is necessary to start repainting the bridge the moment the job is finished is said to be a myth. But 200 workers are still required to provide constant maintenance of various kinds, at least until 2012 when engineers are due complete the application of a special coating supposed to last twenty or thirty years.

  It won’t affect the language. And it won’t change the bridge’s appeal, unless someone tries to alter the trademark red. It is the colour, however often it is applied, that (as with the Golden Gate) makes it stand out from the grey crowd. Its stature is that, even in these car-dominated days, the upstart road bridge has to be known as “the Forth Road Bridge” to distinguish it from the real thing.

  Railway writers have long been reduced to gibbering wrecks by the sight of the bridge. It is as ‘full of moods as a mountain’, drooled C. Hamilton Ellis. ‘It should be seen at sunrise; it should be seen in the evening; it should be seen in a storm; it should be seen when a white sea mist drifts up the firth, hiding all but the tops of the towers; it should be seen at night, when the fireman of a crossing engine opens his firedoor and floods the girders momentarily with an orange glare up to the topmost booms.’

  Actually, you don’t see much of it from the train. And when once, while driving, I found a vantage point to stare at it on a clear Scottish afternoon, I was struck by the lack of symmetry between the hulking great superstructure and the pathetic little three-car diesels that now constitute the bulk of its traffic. No more do firemen flood the girders with an orange glare.

  Its status is also partly by way of contrast. Work began on the Forth Bridge in January 1883, barely three years after its counterpart across the Tay was destroyed in a gale of such ferocity that it has blown down the years to make it Britain’s most infamous railway disaster: the Titanic of the tracks. In the long and melancholy history of train crashes, this was something of a one-off. Unlike so many other accidents, it did not reveal some terrible defect in the railway system that could have produced a similar tragedy anytime, anywhere. But like the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic, this disaster spoke of the ever-popular conjunction of hubris and nemesis.

  The Tay Bridge – the longest in the world – was opened in 1878; it had eighty-five spans, combining cast and wrought iron, with thirteen high girders to allow extra clearance for shipping. The following summer Queen Victoria went across, and graciously conferred on the designer Thomas Bouch the order of knighthood. On 26 December 1879 The Times published a gushing account of Bouch’s plans to complete the rail network north of Edinburgh by bridging the Forth:

  Vast as the undertaking seems, there is every reason to have confidence in its practicability. The engineer is Sir Thomas Bouch, whose greatest achievement hitherto – the Tay Bridge – has turned out a splendid success.

  That was Friday’s paper. Monday’s paper told a different story.

  Seventy-five passengers were thought to have been on the mail train making the return journey from Burntisland to Dundee through a fierce westerly gale in the early evening of 28 December. Modern accounts of the catastrophe retain an extraordinary poetic power.

  When the train passed the signal box at Wormit, south of the bridge, Signalman Barclay entered the time in the train book – 7.14 – and let it pass. He and his colleague Watt saw it reach the high girders . . . ‘A sudden violent gust of wind shook the cabin,’ wrote L. T. C. Rolt.

  At the same moment both men saw a sudden brilliant flash of light followed by total darkness; tail-lights, sparks and flash all instantly vanishing. Barclay tested his block instruments and found that they were dead. He and Watt then attempted to go out along the bridge but were driven back by the force of the wind. They next went down to the shore of the Firth. As they stood there the moon momentarily broke through the flying cloud wrack and by its fitful light they saw to their horror that all the high girders had gone.

  And the train too. The official report was less graphic but totally damning: inadequate bracing of the ironwork of the tall piers, probably combined with defects in casting the columns. You could say there was a seventy-sixth victim of the disaster: Bouch, broken, was dead within the year. Yet the name now most closely associated with the Tay Bridge disaster is not Bouch but the Dundee cod-poet William McGonagall, whose opening verse, somewhat less poetic than Rolt’s description, is as infamous as the event itself:

  Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

  Alas! I am very sorry to say

  That ninety1 lives have been taken away

  On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

  Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

  Less well-known is the fact that it gets worse:

  As soon as the catastrophe came to be known

  The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,

  And the cry rang out all oe’r the town,

  Good Heavens ! The Tay Bridge is blown down . . .

  And almost forgotten, but equally execrable, is the account by A. J. Cronin, creator of Dr Finlay’s Casebook, who originally became famous as a result of his 1931 novel Hatter’s Castle. The heroine’s lover Denis is on a train:

  The wheels clanked with the ceaseless insistence of a passing-bell, still protesting endlessly: ‘God help us! God help us! God help us!’ Then, abruptly, when the whole train lay enwrapped within the iron lamellae of the middle link of the bridge, the wind elevated itself with a culminating, exultant roar to the orgasm of its power and passion. The bridge broke . . .

  Meanwhile, the heroine, having been kicked by her father and then nearly drowned, is giving birth in a barn to a premature and sickly baby, not that we’re talking sudsy and overblown melodrama or anything . . .

  Then the train with incredible speed, curving like a rocket, arched the darkness in a glittering parabola of light, and plunged soundlessly into the black hell of water below, where, like a rocket, it was instantly extinguished – for ever obliterated! For the infinity of a second, as he hurtled through the air, Denis knew what had happened. He knew everything, then instantly he ceased to know.

  There really is no accounting for public taste.

  As you cross the Tay even now, it is possible to see, alongside the innocuous new bridge, the foundations of the old one still sitting in the water. A memento mori in perpetuity. It is impossible to look at them without a shudder.

  It’s Safer with Jesse James

  And yet train crashes of all kinds do exert an extraordinary hold on public attention. The complaint that every death on the railways attracts disproportionate media attention is not new. ‘“Dreadful loss of life on railways” was a stereotyped line,’ complained John Francis in 1851, ‘the casualties were always exaggerated, and for a long time it was the custom to treat railway travelling as very dangerous compared with that by coaches . . . railway accidents were treated as special judgments on the sins of the people.’ Two days after the

  crash outside Paddington in 1999 the Daily Mail reported that the death toll could reach 170. The correct figure was thirty-one.

  There is an obvious partial explanation for the exaggeration. It is easier to verify who might have been on a crashed car or plane than on a train or, more relevantly, a particular part of a train. And the media are not in the business of underplaying possible casualties.

  In terms of news value, plane crashes, even small ones, also get more attention than car accidents. There is a logic here, I think. People are used either to driving themselves or being driven by someone they know. Even on a bus, the driver and the road ahead are both visible presences. On a train or plane the passengers entrust themselves to an unseen pilot facing perils we also can’t see. It is amazing that we ever travel on either.

  The Freudians have their own version of events. Freud found that the underlying sexual pleasure of riding trains had its counterpart whenever it was repressed, which he termed ‘fear of trains’, while his apostle Karl Abraham interpreted ‘the fear experienced by neurotics in the face of accelerating or uncontrollable motion as the fe
ar of their own sexuality going out of control’. It could, of course, just be their fear of being killed.

  After the gung-ho early days, train travel was not outrageously dangerous, but it was nowhere near as safe as it could and should have been. Through the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s the lapses in safety were frequent but never quite egregious enough to shock the Victorians’ rather blunted sensibilities sufficiently to make the government do anything.

  The three most significant possibilities for improvement were points and signals that interlocked to prevent any conflicting movement of trains; block-working to ensure that each train had its own inviolable space on a stretch of line; and continuous brakes to provide instant control over every wheel of every carriage.

  These all came in, but more or less at random. According to Rolt: ‘successive Railway Inspecting Officers urged the adoption of these safety precautions upon the railway companies (not all very willing to listen) with such tireless and undaunted persistence that “lock, block and brake” became a kind of theme song of the Board of Trade.’

  Victorian train crashes had a certain theatrical quality, and perhaps that is in the nature of railways. (Staging crashes was one of the main delights of playing with my train set, and I don’t care what Karl Abraham would make of that.) There was, for instance, the incident at Aynho in 1852 on the opening day of the Great Western’s broad-gauge route to Birmingham. The special train, pulled by the Lord of the Isles, and driven by Daniel Gooch, Brunel’s right-hand man, ran into a mixed goods and passenger train of the Oxford & Rugby Railway, whose driver was evidently unaware that the pace of life in the vicinity had just been stepped up: ‘The guard of the mixed was unloading cheeses,’ recorded Rolt, ‘when upon this pleasant and leisurely rural scene there burst in swift and awful majesty the Lord of the Isles running at over fifty miles per hour.’ No one was even seriously hurt on this occasion, which was held by some to demonstrate the stability of the broad gauge.