'The lost idea of a train': Looking for Britain's railway novel

Journal of Transport History, The,  Sep 2000  by Carter, Ian

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In its turn, railway whimsy's world has ended. The eclipse of steam locomotion killed it off. Oh, Dr Beeching!, that vile television sitcom, debases Carry on movies, not The Titfield Thunderbolt. Fictions about steam railway preservation trail dourly after 1960s social realism, not Love on a Branch Line.84 Since 1968 whimsical railway material has been produced only for children: Oliver Postgate's Ivor the Engine books and television programmes, Wilbert and Christopher Awdry's Thomas the Tank Engine books and the egregious Ringo Starr's commentaries to Britt Allcroft's video versions of those (and other) Thomas stories, Ray Pope's novels about `model railway men'.85 Produced for young children, that Plasticine epic The Wrong Trousers gives us the best steam railway chase scene (though, of course, Wallace, Gromit and the Penguin really scream around on tinplate steam-outline toy trains powered by electricity) since Buster Keaton's The General (1927). Whimsy's descent from adult to children's entertainment is instructive. In Tastes of Paradise Wolfgang Schivelbusch shows how chocolate and coffee triggered very different social meanings in eighteenth-century Europe. Coffee was a sober, dark-clothed, Protestant, commercial and democratic drink. Drinking chocolate, genteel folk in absolutist regimes swallowing aristocratic values, gaudy dress, conspicuous material extravagance and unbridled sexual licence. Absolutism's collapse brought down chocolate. Dressed in dark jackets and trousers, sober men of affairs in France or Austria now drank coffee. Chocolate was a drink (then a food) not for influential men but for marginal women and children.86 The cultural injunction that boys should play with trains and girls with dolls constrains a full comparison (though Thomas the Tank Engine's strong appeal across gender lines bids fair to dissolve differences) but railway whimsy's current limitation to children's books and television programmes suggests a parallel career. Whimsical stories for an adult audience - Q's unexpectedly influential invention, shaping British cultural reponses to railway travel for three generations - are no longer a marketable proposition.

The Enlightenment project's blunted spear punctures Q's exhausted legacy. Broad surveys of railway history and operation (that highly conventional literary genre) invariably round out their accounts of pioneer days, of steady technical improvement in locomotives and rolling stock, of changes in permanent way and signalling systems, of organisational change (amalgamation, grouping, nationalisation, denationalisation) with a rousing, future-- oriented peroration. Britain's (and, occasionally, other countries') railways have a great future behind them, these books all tell us; but days ahead still promise some delights.87 Popular culture concurs in that judgement. Arlo Guthrie may have warbled the American long-distance passenger train's valediction in Steve Goodman's exquisite song `The City of New Orleans' but Arthur Hiller's movie The Silver Streak (1976) renewed Hollywood's interest in the train as a trammelled object which could be arranged to collide inexorably and messily with an immovable object. Today a big rail smash seems almost de rigeur at male teen-oriented action movies' climaxes88 as progress crosscuts death in just the manner which Dickens invented in Dombey and Son. Thriller writers find new plot possibilities in technical change, with tailored mayhem engulfing inter-city and international high-speed passenger trains.89 Whimsical comic fiction may have run its full course but, like trains themselves, creative cultural responses to railways still have a little steam left in the boiler.