Railway Cultures - Introduction

The National Railway Museum is home to not only one of the world’s largest and
most prestigious collections of railway-related artefacts, but also one of the most
remarkable. To be sure, its holdings include the hundreds of locomotives and
items of rolling stock that one would expect of such an institution, and that
attract thousands of visitors on an annual basis. But the museum also contains
more than a few surprises, especially for those who unwittingly expect to find
only engines and carriages. 

Amongst the technical drawings, tickets and timetables that line the shelves of
the National Railway Museum archives, for instance, one may also find personal
letters from the very dawn of rail travel; accounts that capture the excitement
and fear, awe and dread with which the world greeted a technology that would
utterly transform it. Swatches of sumptuous fabric, neatly bound into half-
forgotten folders, not only document the moquette once used to upholster the
carriages of now mythical services, but also point to the tastes of the travellers
who used them, and the styles of the time. Uniforms tell a story of changing
fashions and an even more radically changing society: peaked caps and high-
buttoned breeches give way to wide-brimmed hats and long skirts, as women
entered the workforce in response to wartime necessity. And on rack after rack,
in drawer after drawer, paintings, drawings, photographs and posters testify to
the rich cultural production that surrounds the railways to this day.

This collection, borne out of a collaborative project between the Faculty of Arts &
Humanities at the University of Sheffield and the National Railway Museum in
York, is rooted in a simple question: what happens if we approach the railways
first and foremost as a cultural force? Without disregarding the extensive and
excellent research that has studied the advent and development of rail
technology, nor that which has explored its implications for politics, economics
and society throughout two hundred years of history, we have set out to
question how the railways have shaped and continue to shape the way in which
we imagine the world around us and our place within it. To do so, we have drawn
upon the expertise of researchers within the Arts and Humanities, as well as the
skills of artists and creative writers, to engage the themes and collections of the
National Railway Museum in new ways, and to explore the cultures to which the
railways have given rise.

The contributions to this book are defined by their variety, yet nevertheless
coalesce into three loose themes or approaches. The first group of writers and
artists have engaged directly with both the National Railway Museum’s archives
and those of other institutions, and have sought to open them up to novel
avenues of research. A celebrated painter and novelist, Simon Bill was
commissioned by the editors to examine the museum’s artwork holdings, to
select from it a series of six pieces, and to produce a work inspired by this
interaction. What results is a series and commentary that exposes the diversity
and quality to be found in the National Railway Museum’s often
underappreciated collection, as well as a new piece, titled ‘King Edward's
Saloon’, that perfectly marries the artist’s distinctive style with that of one of the
institution's most iconic items of rolling stock. By contrast, what Prof. Sue Vice
exposes is not an unremarked aspect of the National Railway Museum’s
holdings, but instead a noteworthy omission across all such institutions.
Examining the symbolism of the railway carriage within Holocaust memory, the
author points out that there is at present no museum that exhibits an example of
the Kindertransport carriages used to rescue Jewish children from the horrors of
the Nazi regime, and asks whether the establishment of such a display would be
timely.

Joseph Mayhew’s research for the collection is distinctly archival in its approach:
an undergraduate student of the University of Sheffield, Joseph has examined
documents and items pertaining to the representation of the British railway
system at Paris’ 1889 Exposition Universelle. Focussing on a personal account of
the event written by a County Durham station master, he has teased out
narratives of both great power rivalry and a society deeply rooted in the
railways. Prof. Vanessa Toulmin has also worked with the archives at the
National Railway Museum, celebrating the work of Tom Purvis, one of the
twentieth century’s greatest designers and commercial artists. She has also,
however, brought the museum’s extensive collection into dialogue with that of
Blackpool Pleasure Beach, contrasting a stylised and idealised vision of East
Coast resorts such as Skegness and Scarborough produced for LNER, with a
glamorous yet fun depiction of the West Coast in the artist’s groundbreaking
design work in Blackpool. Her essay is followed by a selection of reproductions of
the Tom Purvis’ work, curated by Prof. Toulmin to exhibit underappreciated
examples of his extensive catalogue.

In the second theme of our collection, the contributors have explored life and
work on the railways themselves, and the rich cultures that have resulted from
this quotidian experience. Dr Oli Betts, the Research Lead at the National
Railway Museum, has examined the mythologisation of the Engine Driver:
drawing on a broad range of sources, from radio programmes and folk music to
comic strips and paintings, Dr Betts charts the slow transformation of the Engine
Driver and his Fireman from a figure of anxiety and even ridicule, to a hero of the
working class. From cultural production to cultures of behaviour, Dr Anna Geurts
analyses the place of sharing within contemporary society, and what the history
of the railways has to tell us about this fundamental human interaction.
Beginning her essay by studying contemporary practices and attitudes in the
context of bike-sharing, Dr Geurts argues that inspiration may be drawn from the
birth and growth of the railways, and the cultures of shared carriage use that
were fostered therein. 

Digging deeper still into how the railways have impacted upon human behaviour,
Dr Komarine Romdenh-Romluc studies the embodied experience of using a train
carriage. Drawing on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, the author investigates
the way in which the carriage has been designed to encourage or to enforce
certain ways of using it throughout its still relatively brief history, as well as the
ways in which humans have actually used this space, either conforming to and
rebelling against the cultural norms prescribed therein. The photographic series
by Laura Page that follows Dr Romdenh-Romluc’s essay is in many ways a
response to these ideas: travelling the railways of South Yorkshire and beyond,
Page explores creative misuse of the carriage space by everyday passengers.
The scenes captured by the photographer are universally recognisable, but
seldom recognised as such a transgression, revealing the extent to which the
railways have become habitualised.

The final selection of pieces in this volume respond to the National Railway
Museum’s role as a custodian of heritage: more specifically, they explore how
railways past continue to shape our present-day landscapes and imaginations.
Taking as his inspiration On Either Side, a guidebook produced by LNER in 1939
for the journey along the East Coast Main Line between London and Edinburgh,
and reproduced in 2014 as a nostalgic collectors’ item, Chris Leffler sets out to
explore what actually remains of this original route in a short section between
Doncaster and York. Eschewing the traditional essay format, the author instead
seeks to capture his experience of and reflections on this memory-journey
through a landscape that is utterly transformed from its 1939 form, yet that
nevertheless continues to be defined by the presence of the railway past.

The four pieces that follow all revolve around a single stretch of line, the
Roundwood & Dalton Colliery Railway: a branch route that once connected the
coalfields of South Yorkshire to the wider network, but that has since been
decommissioned. In photography and sculpture, and through theoretical
reflection and historical account, each of these illuminates a different facet of
this remarkable yet largely unremarked line, and together expose it as an
ambiguous space within the landscape around it. At the heart of the series, we
find the photography of Andrew Conroy and the sculptural work of Tom
Lawrence. In the former, and exploring the route of the Railway with Dr Amanda
Crawley Jackson, Conroy juxtaposes the traces and detritus of the abandoned
lines with the lived environments that they skirt, homes and warehouses barely
visible from the half-forgotten track beds that they largely ignore. Lawrence, by
contrast, has taken a number of Conroy’s photographs and reproduced them as
models: the scales, textures and materials used are all those of the traditional
hobbyist’s craft (so associated with railway culture), yet these are not nostalgic
visions of the railways’ heyday, but a rendering in miniature of their reality in the
present. The photographing of these models for this collection only further
complicates this depiction, making it difficult to discern what is original and what
is reproduction.

Accompanying these visual contributions, Dr Amanda Crawley Jackson’s essay

opens up the complex temporalities that define the Roundwood & Dalton line by
contrasting them to the depiction of the railways in the French literature that
represents her disciplinary home. The author begins by examining the
excitement and trepidation felt by Zola and Proust as they witnessed the
meteoric rise of railway technology during the nineteenth century, as well as
Réda’s musings upon their decline during the twentieth, and in both observes
the railways’ transformative impact upon the urban landscapes of France, one
that has been lasting but far from straightforward. Returning then to the colliery
lines of South Yorkshire, and to Conroy and Lawrence’s engagements with them,
Dr Crawley Jackson notes a similar tension, in which the now closed route
represents a space that is simultaneously past and present, one that both
shouldn’t be used and yet is used, and in which may be observed both
prohibition and opportunity. Finally, Dr Thomas Spain’s essay contextualises the
three aforementioned pieces with a history of the Roundwood & Dalton Colliery
Railway. Since its opening in 1989 (and during which period much of which it was
either in decline or closed entirely), the Railway was subject to a a fierce
wrangling between collieries, rail companies and networks, and the author
exposes the complicated politics that could turn a minor branch line into a
microcosm of the dynamic and often conflictual forces that have built, controlled
and administered the railways.

Throughout the book are woven a series of poems by Prof. Adam Piette and Brian
Lewis, all of which examine the themes that have so fascinated our researchers
and artists. Opening the volume, Lewis’ ‘Southern E762’ muses upon the
hobbyist’s model, so synonymous with railway culture and a staple of any
museum dedicated to it; Prof. Piette’s ‘ballad of the tickerman’ explores the
homeless experience of the railway, the mythical figure of the American “hobo”
reimagined within a South Yorkshire context; and Lewis’ ‘Axholme Cuttings’
closes our collection with a depiction of the present state of the former freight
line of that name. These contributions tie Railway Cultures to its sister volume, a
special issue of Route 57 (Sheffield’s creative writing journal) titled Loco-motion,
which similarly responds to the themes and collections of the National Railway
Museum. Together, these emphasise that at the heart of every new research
project or collaborative endeavour is an act of creativity, one that does not
merely uncover what is there, but produces new knowledge, ideas and
meanings.