Great Railway Stations No. 22, York

Many years ago Michael Palin pointed out the association between railway towns and footballing mediocrity. There are exceptions - Derby and more recently Brighton have played in the Premier League, but for York, Darlington, Crewe, Gateshead, Doncaster, Swindon, Eastleigh, Ashford and Horwich, success on the pitch has been hard to come by. Not to mention Newton Abbot, Melton Constable and Woodford Halse.  The railway arrived in York long before football was organised into leagues and the North Eastern Railway built a station of epic proportions, in the process demolishing significant portions of the old city walls in the casual manner that Victorians displayed toward ancient relics that got in the way of progress and profits.  York was well connected with both East Anglia, the Midlands and the industrial North West from its position on the main route linking London with Edinburgh and developed into a major railway town.

The station we see today dates mostly from 1877 and a modest exterior of no great merit is no guide to what lies within.  A curving track dictated 13 curving platforms and a triple span curving roof built to awesome proportions. Polychromed Corinthian capitals support the roof and tapering iron ribs, elegantly perforated to save weight.  Spandrels are decorated with the letters NER (for the North Eastern Railway) and the white rose of Yorkshire. The roof trusses make a glorious sight soaring overhead in repetition, especially when viewed from the station footbridge. On platform 4, to the right of the entrance is a repurposed signal box that contains a WHS shop and a café above. Bracketed to the roof structure over the steps to the footbridge is a massive clock with three faces.

The other great station built by the North Eastern Railway with a broad curving roof is Newcastle Central, completed in 1850 at which date it had 6 platforms. Following a series of expansions, by 1877 when York opened, Newcastle had 12 platforms (by 1892 there were 15). Interestingly though Newcastle is listed at Grade I by Historic England, York is listed at Grade II*. Newcastle has by far the best entrance (designed by John Dobson) and there is nothing at York to equal the extended sweep of the curving portico with its catering and retail services at Newcastle.  Despite the York Tap’s interior of restrained elegance, it’s easily upstaged by the scale and ceramic splendour of the Centurion Bar at Newcastle.  But having recently visited both stations on the same day, my impression is that a comparison of the train sheds alone favours York in terms of magnitude where the slender iron ribs almost deceive the eye into anticipating its imminent launch into the stratosphere. For a better written and more detailed comparison, I recommend this from the great Beauty of Transport blog.

 

A Passing Train

There was a time in the mid-20th. century when all British trains (with a few exceptions) were painted either green or black according to status. A shortage of labour to work as cleaners invariably led to them all looking alike as the layers of untouched grime accumulated. In the 1970s the favoured colour was British Rail blue. This was an early example of a corporate branding decision and as such was rigidly imposed. But those days have long passed.  Rail franchising encouraged every operator to brand their trains with distinctive colour schemes.  Some chose relatively sober colour combinations to project a reputation for safety and reliability, while others went for high intensity palettes as if to suggest the excitement of travel would be equal to the visual drama on the exterior of the train. The latter strategy rapidly predominated and increasingly bizarre colour choices were to be seen across the network. In recent times a proliferation of graphic devices and computer processed photographic imagery, applied in the form of vinyl wraps, have led to an explosion of discordant visual confusion on the side panels of the nation’s passenger trains.  Britain’s privatised rail operators (there are some exceptions) have led the way in this trend even though the extent to which they compete for patronage is more notional than real.  

European railways have retained their state owned national networks, each with their individual identity and colour. Netherland’s yellow, Germany’s red and France’s blue were once ubiquitous but now are in retreat as privately owned operators take advantage of the EU’s insistence that state owned monopolies are opened up to the private sector.  The images below have been extracted from just 8 seconds of video of a passing train in Lichtenberg, Berlin and by chance they form a series of mostly abstract compositions in which is embedded a dark vision of a mobile phone call. And it’s the mobile phone that enables these visual experiments at the same time as it removes the possibility of direct perception of the visible world - a concern that much exercises the minds of those who believe that technology is undermining active participation in our own existence in favour of a lifetime of curating.

 

Railroads on Parade 1939-40

This card covered publication was published to accompany Railroads on Parade, a musical pageant celebrating the early days of American railroads at the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40. The Railroad Building was the largest in area at the entire Fair. On the wraparound cover illustration we are shown how the power of steam left the ponies and oxen far behind - at the top an exotic streamliner represents the peak of contemporary technology. Famous mural painter, William A Mackay was the cover artist - it was his misfortune to die of a heart attack on a New York subway train in July 1939, less than 3 months after the Fair opened its doors on April 30th. It sets the tone for the anachronistic folksiness of the theatrical presentation. Kurt Weill was commissioned to compose the music. Since arriving in America in 1933, Weill had immersed himself in the American Songbook and mastered the idioms of the Broadway musical and popular song - this was his first opportunity to compose for a mass audience. Tickets were sold for only 25 cents and the auditorium could seat 4,000 spectators at up to 4 shows a day. The fair was a massive corporate jamboree designed to dazzle the American consumer with visions of future plenty. Major firms competed to offer the most architecturally extravagant pavilions in which to present the technology of the future. The railroad industry looked to the past and devised a historical pageant that catered to the public appetite for nostalgia as well as displaying the latest in locomotive development to build the market for future travellers. Please follow the links below for past posts on the World’s Fair.

World of Tomorrow
Meet the Middletons

Postcard of the Day No. 92 – Interior of Elevated Car, Philadelphia

An air of deepest gloom and melancholy hangs over this sombre group of passengers. Mostly seated and facing the viewer, they appear resigned to their fate – trapped on the infamous Long Black Train, bound for extinction. The dark mood is intensified by the way the passengers huddle in the back of what could easily be taken for convict transport. It makes a stark contrast with Coffee & Cigars and Afternoon Tea in the Salon-de-Luxe. In the former we see a trio of captains of industry browsing the news while in the latter, three ladies of leisure sip tea in plush upholstered surroundings. Both groups have the air of late Victorian narrative painting and scrupulously avoid making eye contact. Prosperity and privilege in locomotion.

London Stations in Postcards – Victoria

When this postcard was published, Victoria Station comprised two separate termini operated by different companies. The modest, low-rise building pictured here was built by the London Brighton & South Coast Railway (LB&SCR) in 1860. To the left, out of the picture, was the station for the London, Chatham & Dover Railway (LC&DR). Looming over the station is the Grosvenor Hotel (1861) – a view that would be lost a few years later when a six-storey red brick and Portland stone building was planted on top. Designed by Charles Morgan, Chief Engineer to the LB&SCR, in typically bombastic Edwardian Baroque styling, it was completed in 1908. It survives to the present under the protection of a Grade II listing from Historic England.

The second postcard shows the singular glory of Victoria Station – the slender, lofty and elegant wrought iron train shed built in 1862. It flooded the platforms with much needed daylight at a time when locomotive smoke and steam would have filled the atmosphere. The extra height allowed for dispersion of some of the worst effects. Sir John Fowler, former chief engineer of the Metropolitan Railway was responsible for the design. Fowler was a remarkable and prolific engineer who would go on to design the Forth Railway Bridge (together with Benjamin Baker). The train is a Brighton express from 1908 behind an H1 Atlantic locomotive, one of 5 constructed in 1905-6.

In the third postcard we see the departure of the Brighton Pullman, storming under the signal gantry outside Victoria Station. This time the locomotive is an LB&SCR H2 Atlantic built in 1911 that later carried the name, North Foreland. The train most famously associated with Victoria Station was the London to Paris service, marketed as the Golden Arrow and the subject of the final card as seen in the era of British Railways.

Futile Activities – the incomplete jigsaw

Assembling these incomplete jigsaws called for some exhaustive mental effort. The individual pieces were found scattered through a box of miscellaneous clutter – there were no pictures. Each piece was double-sided and progress was very slow until it dawned on me that there were two different double-sided jigsaws that were not easily separated. In the knowledge that the rewards of this task would never measure up to the effort involved I pressed on and these fragmentary assemblages are the results. Not every jigsaw in my possession is incomplete as the latter images show although even here a sharp eye will detect the occasional lacuna. And for every one of these I must have acquired at least four that were nowhere near complete.

Postcard of the Night No. 10 – On the Night Mail

In the flickering light we see Prince Peter Kropotkin at the controls while Lenin stokes the fire. The mighty locomotive steams headlong into the darkness. Next stop – the triumph of the proletariat. Always a stirring spectacle, the image of the train by night is a powerful emblem of the romance of travel. This is the work of a postcard artist in the employ of Raphael Tuck, London-based and one of the great postcard multi-nationals of the boom years of the industry. Tuck specialised in hand-painted imagery and this example comes from the Oilette series Firelight and Lamplight published in 1909. The other cards are either hand-painted or much enhanced by over-painting and take full advantage of the pictorial possibilities of the subject.