Category Archives: Trains

Oct 16 2023
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Art, Cinema, Crime, Film, Movie, Movies, Technology, Trains, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized, United States

North by Northwest (1959).

The weird behaviour of the extras and background actors in this is hilarious to watch, as is the entire movie. Cary Grant’s accent makes no sense, nor does the film. The rear projection is so bad that it can only be a Hitchcock joke. As entertainment, I enjoyed every moment of it, because it’s self-aware and self-deprecating, and most unpredictable.

I think the career of Hitch was just a case of him taking the piss out of people whilst brushing up on his film aesthetics. And that’s fine with me.

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Dec 28 2021
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Architecture, Building, Edinburgh, Photography, Scotland, Trains, Transport

Obligatory annual Waverley snap.

Best job I ever had. My duties consisted of putting ramps on trains, turning off my radio and hiding in the ScotRail toilets whenever there was a crisis, and occasionally pointing an annoying member of the general public in the wrong direction or directing them to an incorrect platform if they vexed me.

Brilliant times.

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Nov 27 2021
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Art, Trains, Travel, TV, Uncategorized

The Signalman (1976) is a classic for a reason.

It’s totally gripping and eerie and surely too adult and atmospheric for TV. One would think for that era, anyway. Denholm Elliott is best known for his role as Dr. Marcus Brody in the Indiana Jones movies, but he was more than capable of going proper convincingly nuts in a Gothic horror.

This is Charles Dickens done right.

Here we are:

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Feb 13 2021
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Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Trains, Transport, Travel, TV, United States

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) is timeless chuckles.

Shockingly (for me as I’ve catalogued most of these ’80s classics) I’d never seen this until last week. It could be made today, that’s how ‘undated’ it is. What an experience – genuinely a hoot and wholly relatable. We’ve all been stuck next to some annoying blabbermouth on what seems like a never-ending journey into the abyss. And who can’t relate to a transportation fiasco.

It’s also a subtle portrayal of class, the difficulties of breaking barriers, and ultimately and reluctantly working together to get where you need to be. A life lesson! This should be screened at office training days or something.

One scene came out of nowhere in its profanity, and it’s quite the spectacle seeing Steve Martin finally crack. He wasn’t going to intimate that rental agent, but he did a wonderful job in articulating the pain of dealing these sorts.

First-class movie.

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Feb 13 2020
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Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Trains, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) … in 4K.

The terrified audience bolted from the theatre, so the apocryphal story goes. Why anyone would flee from a black-and-white moving image with no sound didn’t appear to come into the mythmakers’ thinking.

YouTube user Denis Shiryaev has given the Lumières’ slice of early cinema a 2020 makeover (4K and 60 FPS) and it has the effect of amplifying the nostalgia factor and the strange serenity of the ‘narrative’. The frame’s occupants always looked too nonchalant to me, this a time when the presence of the camera was meant to turn folk into a frenzy. A mere few minutes of research reveals the extras in the shot were asked to ignore the filmmakers, the subjects ‘directed’ so to speak.

This is the upgrading of vintage visuals done right, none of this Ted Turned colorization pish.

Further reading:

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/02/lumiere-brothers-arrival-of-a-train-4k-update-1202208955/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-51360644/lumiere-s-train-gets-4k-treatment-and-other-news

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/did-a-silent-film-about-a-train-really-cause-audiences-to-stampede

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Sep 11 2019
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Edinburgh, Photography, Scotland, Tourism, Trains, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized

The Waverley – never forget.

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The Shangri-La.

I try to avoid my former place of work these days because the experiences – which belong to what I refer to as the East Coast Epoch 2010-2012 – were so epic. Not epic like a Wagner-infused helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now (1979), but something a little bit more transcendent – the comedy and the banter. And I’ve never seen so many fruitcakes in all my life. Public spaces involving transport are microcosms of society. People are nuts.

My fondness for The Waverley is probably nostalgia, pretending in retrospect it was more enjoyable than it was. But it’s like that with most memories; time adds gloss to the mundane. I do, however, know more about trains than any topic aside from the drug and dietary habits of Adolf Hitler. So there’s always that.

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Mar 06 2019
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Britain, Technology, Tourism, Trains, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized, United Kingdom

HS2 is coming.

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“HS2 will change things.”

I remember the chat well. This was eight years ago when I was doing soul-destroying manual labour/customer service in Edinburgh Waverley train station. The job was well paid and a laugh – colleagues were cracking banter and all hit the sauce like pros – but the “civilians” who ventured into that station. Fucking hell. Never again. Members of the general public are the dregs of humanity.

Anyway, I heard this HS2 topic daily, a colossal event on the horizon. The railways in Britain are a shambles. No-one knows why and not a soul has a solution. It’s been like this for the past century. No-one knows why. HS2 is meant to be the panacea for the chaos.

HS2 trains, expected to be operating by December 2026, will be 400 metres long, travelling at up to 250 mph – the fastest in Europe, apparently – and able to hold 1,100 seats, the initial line between London and the West Midlands. Following this, ‘Phase 2’ will connect Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds.

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The new lines will connect to existing standard-speed lines, with ‘classic compatible’ trains running on both high-speed and classic lines. The idea is that classic lines will benefit from HS2. The London to Edinburgh journey time, for example, will be 3:38 hours instead of 4:23.

Guaranteed they will still cost a fucking fortune, though.

I can get a flight to Dublin for £6 but a train to London King’s Cross is £194. And this for the privilege of being sat on some rickety rocket chock-full of intoxicated bairns.

Trains are torture.

Further reading:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/02/16/true-cost-hs2-not-known-boss-controversial-rail-scheme-admits/

https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/77763/hs2-route-uk-cities-development/

 

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Mar 01 2018
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Air travel, Austria, Germany, Munich, Tourism, Trains, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized

On the sauce in Salzburg and Munich.

Back to Salzburg and Munich again for a double-headed session. To think the birthplace of Mozart and Doppler was now the temporary milieu of beer-compromised attempts to retrieve a Snickers bar from a dilapidated vending machine at 4:16 a.m.

 

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Salzburg is a place with many bars, sadly few ATMs (seeking a Geldautomat is depressing), and with a most varied supply of charming newsagents, which appears to my primary interest these days. Somewhere down the line vistas ceased to be of fascination. I couldn’t find a Lidl, though. Gutted.

 

The salient memory of Munich was feigning a limp in order to use a disabled toilet, and attempting to escape the city for the airport. There was “something wrong with the tracks,” they kept barking at me in the station. I don’t think I’ve ever been on so many trains to get to one destination, and so drained of vitamins throughout. I thought I was going to die on that plane home from an overdose of fatigue and amaretto. But I didn’t.  Good times.

 

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Oct 21 2017
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Edinburgh, Tourism, Trains, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized

The Waverley.

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Here we enter the circus, a veritable Looney Land. I used to work here in my ‘Wilderness Years’ 2010-2012 and the shit I saw is more than enough material for the basis of a manky neo-gothic crime drama set in the early twenty-tens. Ah, those were the days – before Trump, Brexit, and fidget spinners being habitually revered as the panacea to Autism. My highlight in ‘Stalag EH1 1BB’ was a disgruntled passenger throwing punches at a rail cop because the vexed customer didn’t like the quality of alcoholic beverage he was served in the bar – it didn’t meet his esoteric ‘standards’.

I highly recommend a day trip to The Waverley. Bring a packed lunch and a Polaroid.

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