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 Snap Time


Unconcerned by the spectacle in front of them, a group of line side photographers sit talking, the footplateman on the Jinty appears to be watching them. Meanwhile, through a gap in the fence, another photographer stands, camera to eye, ready to shoot. I liked the way the red of the signals and buffer beam all linked up, the way the figures in hi-viz on the left and in the background were picked up in the collar of the coat being worn by the figure standing next to the railings and all this in a very ‘railway  running into town’ setting.

Railways never enter town through the nice bits, either side of the line is, usually, the wrong side of the tracks. There are exceptions, the entry to Dundee station from the south, for instance, is across the estuary of the river Tay over the famous Tay Bridge.  The line out of Dundee to the north is much more typical of the railway’s entry into town, you leave the station in a tunnel, enter a deep cutting which, upon leaving, you then pass industrial estates and a chemical plant.

Vat loads of ink have been spent on romantic and idealised versions of the railway, though, as with the example above, there are exceptions, Terry Coleman’s book The Railway Navvies is one and this description of the coming of the railway is another; ‘In Manchester, the pauper burial ground is opposite to the Old Town, along the Irk; this, too, is a rough, desolate place. About two years ago [1842] a railroad was carried through it. If it had been a respectable cemetery, how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the desecration! But it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting place of the outcast and the superfluous, so no one concerned himself with the matter.

It was not even thought worthwhile to convey the partially decayed bodies to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it happened, and piles were driven into newly made graves, so that the water oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases. The disgusting brutality which accompanied this work I cannot describe in further detail.’  Engels, F., The Condition of the Dead in 1844

By way of a contrast – it was No.47406’s gala debut and she was certainly putting on a show, generating copious quantities of clag and shining like a new pin. 

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