twenty six degrees centigrade. clear.

Uhh... so... where was I?

Oh yeah, train stations.

To walk into a city terminal station is to be caught up in a whirled of glamour, speed, excitement and opportunity. A journey taken by motor car tends towards boredom, frustration, solitude; resignation. On the one hand you have the imposing legacy of the nineteenth century, with its vanity, and power, and faith, writ large in the enormous vaults. In the other you have the twentieth century, which offers up a pusillanimous counter sign of humility, routine and pragmatism: the car park.

I do not drive, nor do I have any great desire to learn how to. If I ever learn, it will be because it has become necessary. But the necessary is not beautiful, and I submit to it resentfully. Daughters of the impoverished nobility were married off to the boorish scions of monied industrialists in much the same fashion. Duty must be borne with grace.

In the Good Old US of A, the railways were treated most scandalously. They had fulfilled their role admirably; allowing continent-wide settlement and a consequential economic development that laid the foundations for the superpower we have come to know. And then they were gone, pushed out and marginalised to the point where in many cases they simply ceased to exist.

As the death rattle of the oil economy grows louder, however, it becomes apparent that this ungrateful neglect was premature. The combustion-fired car - that little box of private space, that repository for regulations, symbol of a selfish and unsustainable life - is dying. The vaults will be rebuilt, and hopefully a little of the faith will return with them.

Dead Stations (Infrastructuralist, via The Economist)

Comments

[ourmaninthenorth]

Nothing but flowers.

[joe]

2. MEMPHIS - Union Station.....it may have helped if just one person in the planning meeting had said 'er, what the fuck are we doing?'.