When the Facts Change: Essays 1995 – 2010

The environmental advantages of the modern train are now very considerable, both technically and politically.

Cinema and railways peaked in tandem—from the 1920s through the 1950s—and they are historically inseparable.

Rail travel, in what were increasingly open-plan trains whose managers had to fill them in order to break even, was decidedly public transport.

But it is worth reflecting on perhaps the best known of them all, David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), a film in which the station and the train and its destinations do more than just furnish the props and the occasion for emotions and opportunities.

Twenty years later, Britain’s railways, in public hands since 1948, were unceremoniously sold off to such private companies as were willing to bid for the most profitable routes and services.

Everywhere, however, railways—the harbingers and emblems of an age of public investment and civic pride—fell victim to a dual loss of faith: in the self-justifying benefits of public services, now displaced by considerations of profitability and competition; and in the physical representation of collective endeavor through urban design, public space, and architectural confidence.

And a symbolically appropriate victim, too: an underperforming, market-insensitive relic of high modern values.

The aesthetic insecurities of the first post–World War II decades—the “New Brutalism” that favored and helped expedite the destruction of many of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century public architecture and town planning—have passed.

Pancras Station (1868) in London.

From Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) through Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare (1877), Edward Hopper’s Station (1908), Campbell Cooper’s Grand Central Station (1909), and on to the classic poster designs of the interwar London Underground (not least Harry Beck’s classic map design of 1932, imitated if not emulated in every subsequent railway and subway map the world over), railway trains and stations formed either theme or backdrop to four generations of modern pictorial art.