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Rural Rustic


On a branch line, far, far, away there’s a hole in the fabric of space and time. Engines from the 1890s, coaches from the 1930s, technologies of a different age, rub shoulders with digital SLRs Sat Nav and the ‘social media network’. The alchemical magic of 19th & 20th century, film, developer, fixative, and the dark arts of the dark room, dodging and shading have vanished into pixel counts and photoshoppery – digital manipulation.

That’s the thing today there’s a great deal too much manipulation, of all kinds, public perceptions, the price of milk, banking interest rates, and let’s not leave out those dreaded statistics, which all sides claim to be manipulated. When the engine in this photograph was built, the company that owned it was, to all intents and purpose, the largest in the World – the London & North Western Railway. The Chairman of Directors was Lord Stalbridge, other Board members have included, the II Earl of Iveagh, Rupert Guinness, yes that Guinness, the IV Duke of Sutherland, and Lord Lambourne, a motely, if not a scurvy crew.

By the time the coaches were being built the L&NWR had become the London Midland & Scottish Railway – a conglomerate with tentacles which spread from Swansea in the west to the Highlands of Scotland and even into Great Yarmouth, in East Anglia, via its interests in the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway the Midland share of which was retained by the LM&SR after the Grouping. Much of the former territory of the L&NWR / LM&SR is, today, the domain of Virgin Trains, a company which began in life by selling psychedelic clothing and music to hippies. No wonder the railways went to pot!!

A link to my footplate memoir: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1688929746

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