A trip through Transporting moments

Trains are extraordinary machines. They leave tracks, of the parallel sort with which we are all familiar and the cultural kind, which run through our lives in myriad ways, in the language we use, in our spatial-temporal frameworks, in music and art, literature and film. More than any other form of transport, the railway was instrumental in laying the foundations of contemporary mobility. It fed into the development of the modern city, enabled millions of its citizens to travel to work each day, provided the means for shipping goods and freight across nations and between nation-states, was the major catalyst in the growth of modern tourism and so on.

Railways, especially of the older kind, have a particular hold over our imaginations, asmanifest in the passion for vintage rail and for steam trains. They have managed to survive, though not without some considerable rationalisation in their services and comprehensiveness, the onslaught from the motorcar and the jet aeroplane, which almost put them out of existence. Arguably, as the environmental costs of the motorcar and the aeroplane have come to be appreciated, not to mention their destructive power in terms of urban and communal development, where cars in particular have led to freeway-dependent cities, there has been something of a railway renaissance. More and more commuters are leaving their cars at home and travelling by train to work, often because it is quicker, they can, ‘armed’ with lap tops and other mobile devices, undertake work on the train, catch up on sleep, or a missed television programme. The train has become a home or office on wheels. Rather than being dead time, travel time is actually useful time.

Transporting Moments: Mobility, Australian Railways And The Trained Society, eBook By Colin Symes

Enlightened governments (Australia’s, as this book argues, are not, as they continue to hold onto the cargo cult of the car) have begun to recognise that investment in railways makes more sense than investment in roads and freeways which are mere recipes for urban sprawl and car crawl. Further, they have led to deeply divided cities (and Sydney is lamentably one of the worst) where the poor have been ‘marginalised’, pushed out to the edge of the city, remote from services that might offset their economic plight. By contrast, the inner cities are the magnet of the professional classes, knowledge and creative workers, and who are surfeited with transport options, and who have therefore no excuse for owning a car!

Cars are a four-wheeled form of individualism. They epitomise a selfish mode ofmobility, one whose days are numbered. In many respects, they are the horse and buggy of the twenty first century.

Hence, some cities have begun to deconstruct their freeways and replace them with parks and pedestrian (and their extension, the bicycle) friendly zones. They have begun to recognise that ‘autocracy’ (an ideology believing in the divine right of the automobile) is a defunct transport paradigm and must be overthrown, in the interests of saving the planet from ‘thermal-cide’. Private transport must at all costs be replaced by public transport. This might have flow on effects, including a demand for other public services, such as broadcasting, education and health, which under the neo-liberalist settlement, have suffered the effects of subvention withdrawal, have been residualised. Public, unfortunately, has become a boo word; it has been stigmatised. A mobility turn back to public transport could inject dignity into the sphere of public goods.

Meanwhile, recognising that railways are a necessary part of the city’s transport infrastructure, Sydney Trains have been giving the rail network a radical makeover. On the basis that there is little difference between running fast trains and fast food restaurants, it exemplifies a mobile translation of McDonald’s philosophy. It has, in the absence of making huge investment in tunnels and bridges and rolling stock and that would really fix the trains, focused in large measure, on impression management, on giving the system the appearance of being efficient, rational, uniform, standard and so on.

Even long distance trains, though they cannot compete for speed with the modern airliner at least in Australia — their counterparts in Europe and north Asia can — are experiencing their own renaissance. In line with the emergence of a slow travel movement, that parallels the development in slow food and education, slow trains — at least for those not in a hurry — have become quite fashionable and offer a distinctly more rewarding encounter with the continental landmass than the head in the cloud in one.

Transporting moments*, which takes as its case study Australia and Sydney in particular, provides an analysis of rail travel, not so much from the point of view of its engineering, as its users, commuters, passengers and travellers, and argues rail, though much maligned in the press and by governments, is the most efficient form of mobility ever invented. It needs our support.

In short, being on the move, on a train, isat least as exciting and interesting as being off a train, and offers rewarding glimpses of the way trains choreograph our lives and make possible economic life in cities. It documents how travel on trains is, using a combination of auditory and visual signage, carefully scripted and choreographed. It shows how the railways are instrumental in timetabling our lives, our powerful force in influencing our spatial priorities. It shows how the ‘predestination’ experience is a regulated, meticulously organised one, how those who go off the rails are brought back into line through soft power, a combination of semiotic direction and discrete policing. It provides glimpses into the soap operas of mobility, as their plots work themselves into the day-to-day operations and incomparable theatre of rail.

Those who travel by trains will find much in this bookthat is illuminating, while those who do not might be ‘illuminated’ into doing so. This book’s celebration of rail-mindedness is not just timely, but also, like so many of the trains it chronicles with affection, long overdue!

Colin Symes
Honorary Associate
Macquarie University,
Australia

*Transporting moments: mobility, Australian railways and the trained society, is to be published by Bentham eBooks, in March 2015.

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