Checks and Balances: The Semiotics of Ticketing on Victorian Railways, During the 1930s and 1940s (original) (raw)
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Trains and Trams: An Archaeology of Modernity
In the history of art and literature, trains and trams were not seldom used in order to represent modernity. Today, they can also work as nostalgic images evoking an early modernity. Yet they are public vehicles too. In an imaginary way, some painters and poets even adopted them to travel into a collective unconscious. And a contemporary “tram painter”, the Australian Graham Lees, well expresses a residual sociality they are able to preserve: usually, our towns go “by at a different pace, while in the tram people go into their own worlds, forming a microcosm of the city for the short while they are in there”.
Changing track: repositioning the Irish and Australian railways in the national consciousness
This paper explores the development of rail systems in Ireland and Australia. The paper highlights the different trajectories of both systems and charts the experiences and influences of Empire and Commonwealth on both. In Australia the rail system was developed as a way to promote nation building and overcome isolation while in Ireland both prior to and after partition the system enabled access to ports thereby not only fuelling migration but improving levels of accessibility between different parts of rural Ireland and town and country.
Misusing the Rail: Theft, Obstruction and Modernity in the Colonial Railways
The railways are a form of industrial technology that cannot be entirely either private or public. The state or private companies may own the train and the station but the extent of control they have over the machine and space is limited by its very nature. It is not like an assembly line in a factory and neither is it like the small-scale tools used by artisans. One may call it "public transport" but really even public authorities such as the state cannot really claim to have control over the meanings and usages of the railway space and technology. Thus, the railways were obviously agents of order and power, a technology of discipline, but they were also widely open to indiscipline. The relationship between modernity and the railways has been analyzed in all its complexity-new forms of perception, new relations to time and space, the alienation and trauma of being in a machine ensemble, the panopticonal gaze of the railway guard, the architectural order of the railway carriage, the proletarianization of travel and the resultant upper-middle class discontent, the loss of aura from localities and objects. Much of this, however, is an attempt to look at how the railways inscribed modernity, through trauma and joy, onto the railway passenger. In essence it looks at how the railway disciplined the passenger into industrial modernity. However, little work has gone into the multiple ways in which the railways were 'misused' by different people. This essay is an attempt to rescue narratives and tales of the 'misuse of the rail' in colonial India. However, the understanding of 'misuse' will be bound by the categories of social history. We will look, not so much at individual misuses and appropriations, but at more collective forms of the same. We will look at how different sections of people used the novel technology that the rail was and is.
The Art and Craft of Train Travel
Journal of Social and Cultural Geography, 2008
Current theories concerning the social and material construction of time and space have little to say concerning the specific things and people involved. For example, how do times and spaces get made on a train—with passengers, train seats, tables, and views through the window? Through a travelogue of one train journey across England, this paper explores the art and craft of train travel, and the making of a particular time and space. The paper draws together science studies approaches to socio-material relations, and geographical concerns with socio-spatiality, to discuss passengers as spatially distributed persons and property. Reflecting on ethnographic evidence in the form of quotations and photographs woven through the text, it demonstrates how these heterogeneous passengers craft their travel times as an effect of their travel time use; how socio-material interactions with pens, papers, puzzles and electricity pylons make time. Following Michel Serres, it also suggests how passenger time is not a simple flow but a percolation, and how these passenger times coalesce in train carriages to form communities. The paper is itself a journey, in the form of words and images, which begins and ends with the imaginary, social, and material work of making a destination.On peut douter de la pertinence des théories actuelles relatives à la construction sociale et matérielle du temps et de l'espace concernant les objets et personnes dont il s'agit. Par exemple, comment constitue t'on les temps et espaces sur un train en tenant compte des passagers, des sièges de train, des tables et du panorama ? À partir d'un journal de voyage en train à travers l'Angleterre, cet article explore l'art et le métier de voyager en train ainsi que la constitution d'un temps et d'un espace. L'article met en parallèle les approches en études des sciences avec les relations socio-matérielles et les préoccupations géographiques avec la socio-spatialité, afin d'aborder les passagers comme des personnes et des biens qui sont spatialement distribués. Des citations et photographies insérées dans le corps du texte donnent un aperçu des données ethnographiques qui permet de démontrer comment ces passagers hétérogènes conçoivent le temps du voyage en fonction de l'usage qu'ils font du temps laissé pour voyager; et comment les interactions socio-matérielles avec les stylos, le papier, les puzzles et les pylônes électriques font passer le temps. De plus, à l'instar de Michel Serres, l'article indique comment le temps pour les passagers n'est pas un simple flux mais une percolation et comment ces temps fusionnent dans les wagons de train pour former des communautés de passagers. L'article est en soi un périple sous forme de mots et d'images qui commence et se termine par le travail imaginaire, social et matériel nécessaire pour parvenir à destination.Resumen: la teoría actual sobre la construcción social y material del tiempo y el espacio no tiene mucho que decir sobre las cosas y personas específicas de que se trata. Por ejemplo, ¿cómo se producen los tiempos y espacios en un tren?—¿con pasajeros, asientos, mesas y vistas a través de la ventana? Mediante un documental sobre un viaje en tren por Inglaterra, este papel explora el arte de viajar en tren y la creación de un tiempo y espacio específico. El papel une enfoques de estudios de la ciencia con relaciones sociomateriales, y preocupaciones geográficas con socioespacialidades, para hablar de pasajeros como personas y propiedad espacialmente distribuidas. Reflexionando sobre las pruebas etnográficas en la forma de comentarios citados y fotografías entretejidos por el texto, se pone de manifiesto el modo en que estos pasajeros heterogéneos construyen su tiempo de viaje como un efecto de su uso del tiempo de viaje; el modo en que las interacciones sociomateriales con bolígrafos, papeles, puzzles y torres de alta tensión crean el tiempo. Siguiendo Michael Serres, las pruebas también sugieren que el tiempo del pasajero no es un simple flujo sino una difusión, y que estos tiempos de pasajero se unen en los vagones de los trenes para formar comunidades. El papel mismo es un viaje, en la forma de palabras e imágenes, que comienza y termina con el trabajo imaginario, social y material de crear un destino.
Backjumps: Writing, watching, erasing train graffiti. (2018) Social Semiotics 28(1), 41–59.
This article deals with mobile semiotics. First and foremost, it discusses mobility as a semiotic device. The analysis engages with backjumps, a genre of train graffiti that draws inventively on various forms of movement. The term backjump refers to any fairly elaborate graffiti piece painted on trains in traffic, notably during the trains' extended stops at terminal stations. The examples focus on the Stockholm metro, where a rigorous anti-graffiti policy has been firmly in place: graffiti is quickly cleaned off trains and a range of strategies is implemented to keep graffiti writing under wraps. By slyly inserting graffiti into the metro system, the mobility-driven backjump practice allows graffiti writers to temporarily subvert this semiotic regime. Furthermore, the forms of semiotic mobility at play are not limited to the movement of the trains. As the present study shows, mobile backjumps are entangled in other patterns of mobility, which jointly underwrite a number of interlinked semiotic processes.
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The study of mobility opens up new transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to fields including transport, tourism, migration, communication, media, technology, and environmental studies. The works in this series rethink our common assumptions and ideas about the mobility of people, things, ideas, and cultures from a broadly understood humanities perspective. The series welcomes projects of a historical or contemporary nature and encourages postcolonial, non-Western, and critical perspectives.
The Journal of Transport History, 2018
to conclude that Jim Crow did not reflect well on the United States at a time when air travel had begun to make global mobility more commonplace. Ortlepp draws from a wide variety of primary sources, ranging from oral histories and newspapers to government and private records and legal documents, and secondary sources, which allow her to vividly sketch and effectively contextualize the events, actions, and discourse that frame her story. At the same time, she could have also engaged with mobility studies literature to consider how Jim Crow airports functioned as environments where movement was socially produced and uneven mobility experiences were the norm. To some extent, this is implied in Ortlepp's narrative since Jim Crow was inherently a regime of racial control and marginalization that reconfigured airport space in ways that denied blacks the same freedom of mobility as whites, but a deeper theoretical analysis would have been helpful to better flesh out this idea and connect it to the many structural and individual examples of discrimination that the book highlights. Nevertheless, Jim Crow Terminals: The Desegregation of American Airports is an impressive and compelling account of an understudied aspect of racial discrimination in postwar America. Transportation historians will find much to like about Ortlepp's work, as will historians of the modern United States and scholars of race relations more broadly.
The journal of transport history, 2019
Reviewed by: Friedrich (Rudi) Newman , Independent Scholar, UK Railways have played a major role in global development, but from their earliest days, there have been those disquieted by their expansion. While now an accepted technology, criticisms and the eponymous "Nimby-ism" attitude continue with new proposals just as they have for centuries. This publication offers a new take on the subject of opposition to railways. References to opposition are common in many studies but near-invariably as only a small part of research concentrating elsewhere. Here it occupies the main focus, looking at its form across Britain over two centuries. The authors make no pretence of this being a comprehensive history, rather aiming to create a detailed introduction with the aim of encouraging further study. Subdivided into 14 chapters, it opens with overviews of British industrialisation, pre-railway transport and early rail network development before introducing the challenges of nineteenth century landowners and how early railway ventures were promoted. Aimed for a non-academic public audience, these chapters largely provide background for readers unfamiliar with Britain's railway development. It then commences with the reactions of landowners to the coming of the railways, followed by other types of landowner opposition. As with subsequent chapters, there is extensive use of examples and many close with an amusing, if atypical, example demonstrating the great variety of situations that occurred. Returning to Victorian rail development, it next turns to parliamentary regulation and the "Railway Interest" before considering other forms of opposition such as Sabbatarianism. With the network complete, the focus shifts to operation: varied sources of criticism (safety, stations and suchlike) and depictions in the Arts. To provide balance, examples were given of support for railways, before concluding with a substantial chapter detailing changes and issues from the 1920s onwards to the present.