Bogies, Corridors, Cuttings and Post-Hoc Rationalisations
Summer has well and truly gone but my summer reading list has not quite finished for the moment – still waiting on an unfilled Amazon order for Eleven Minutes Late.
However, I’d like to share my connection with a marvellous work from the 1970s – Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey – Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th Century. An one special chapter from among many worthy chapters on such matters as the shrinking of space/time in the popular consciousness, the impact on urban form, the impact on industrial/occupational medicine and on social customs all in the first century of railway development.
As my readers know, the thing I hate most in modern day political discourse, particularly when it comes to railways, transport and urban planning – is ’spongy’ thinking. Fluffy thinking. The fluffy bunnies. The middle class pleading for welfare. False victimhood. Words losing their meaning. Fallacious thinking, especially post hoc ergo prompter hoc, which was Railpage par excellence. And where Railpage went, Ministerial Media Advisors were sure to follow.
Railpage is thankfully dead – but its memory lives on in my blogs, and the small group of us committed to clear thinking in the aid of efficient rail and transport policy and planning.
The chapter from Schivelbusch I will share is on The Compartment and how the fundamentals of railway economics actually drove the development of rail design and engineering, and how cultural commentators can misconstrue these developments to fit their cultural biases and agenda.
Schivelbusch describes the European experience of mass transport in the 1700s – the coach and horses, and how it impacted on early railway design and thinking. The early wagon builders had only a couple of basic designs – a flat wagon on 2 single axles, and a coal variant with walls. Axles were not pivoting and the train as a whole could only bend at the couplings, or with very limited purchase at the wheel-rail interface, before the wheel profile and flanges might fail and the train derail. Hence the train itself could not bend very much, and civil engineering therefore favoured long straight sections, with mountains and valleys tackled by cuttings, tunnels and viaducts at obviously considerable expense.
With a single flattop wagon body, the passenger market at first assumed a first or second class passenger would bring his own coach onboard.
As rail travel expanded to more, albeit still wealthy, passengers, a fixed coach body mounted or built onto the same wagon chassis was then offered. The first or second class passenger then sat in a confined compartment, as in a road coach, on a stiff upright seat with upholstery, facing his fellow passengers. Doors were locked from the outside as a concession to the safety risk of falling at much higher speeds than had been the case with horses.
All the while, third class passengers road in open sided wagons, though roofs and eventually rough benches appeared.
This development had rested on two pillars. First, Europe was short of land but not short of labour. Hence the economic fundamentals favoured building direct railways wherever possible, cutting through whatever the landscape required. This placed no pressure on passenger carriage design as it was assumed a) the journey would be shortish b) a break would be taken at a sizeable town of which many existed. c) the horse coach was still the design influence of people who worked in the carriage industry in the early days.
Schivelbusch then contrasts the American experience. With the economics reversed – ie labour being expensive but land cheap, it worked out advantageous to railroad builders to avoid expensive cuts and viaducts where possible, but to go for curves and grades. Because of the strain this would place on train flexibility around curves, the bogie quickly came into its own and became standard on firstly passenger then freight rolling stock. Such rollingstock inevitably ended up quite a bit longer than the 4-wheeled European equivalent, which meant that rather than at most 3 compartments per coach on a European passenger carriage – the American might have 3 or 4 times that many.
The US equivalent of mass transport was not the coach (though there are many famous examples of it) but the canal packet and the riverboat. The design influences and market demands of long distance transport had already been determined via marine transport and hence the famous images of card playing smoking lounges, sleeping berths, on-vessel dining and drinking, and even just the open seating area of the ’saloon’ were quickly translated onto the US railroad car. The bogies and the additional length made this possible.
Unlike the European train, there was no guarantee the journey would be ’shortish’ or that there would be regular breaks for calls of nature or for dining, as would be the case in Europe.
By the end of the civil war, according to Schivelbusch, there was enough of an income spread for the most luxurious extents of the riverboat culture to be integrated into the sleeping car – as the Pullman.
So we have two primary influences on the divergence of US and European practices – the economics of building fast versus slow railways – and the design precedents at work in the industry being based on coaching practice in Europe but inland waterway transport in the US.
This seems reasonable enough until Schivelbusch introduces the inevitable cultural commentators – the parliamentary junket taker of the 1800s writing the inevitable report on how the other side of the Atlantic live – or the travel columnist of the weekend paper of the time – and so on.
And how none of them spot these influences, but instead ascribe the differences to the lazy, emotionally loaded usual suspects – the ‘casualness of the American’ versus the ’stiffness and class-consciousness of the European’ – the respect for the old traditions versus the New World pioneer and other silly stereotypes.
And when confronted with the possibility of the alternative type of wagon being transported across the Atlantic – the sheer impossibility of it. The Europeans would never accept it, according to these commentators. Being stuck bolt upright in a small compartment, locked in and trapped was clearly preferable to the insufferable possibility of seeing other passengers in a saloon car. Quasi medical excuses given for how a European could never sleep on a train.
Rather than face the fact that the bogie was a technical innovation whose need was clearly greater in the USA, but was becoming useful in Europe too.
After a series of high profile on-board murders, well before Agatha Christie, raised the danger of being stuck in a locked compartment with someonie who might want to kill you, the Europeans explored the possibility of how one might escape, or at least alert the train staff of the danger whilst in motion. Peep holes and other silly nonsense were suggested in parliamentary enquiries and newspaper editorials – but nothing so logical as a saloon car where the perpetrator might feel much less inclined to kill with witnesses – and where escape might be possible for a potential victim.
Anything but adopt an American innovation!
Eventually the Europeans settled on side corridor compartment bogie car- such as would become standard European car design till well into the C20th – whilst in the USA the saloon car became standard.
Even in Australia we saw a tension between the dog boxes in many cities – Brisbane’s Evans cars for example, and the saloon stock that replaced them, such as Melbourne’s Taits.
This might seem a curious but historic post hoc fallacy from a distant world, and not worthy of further discussion.
But it is typical of so many post hoc rationalisations I have read in the recent media, on railfan blogs and forums and elsewhere.
I am lead to believe Australians won’t stand on trains, they won’t change trains, they won’t pay the full price of tickets, they won’t catch a bus to the station. They won’t do various things that people overseas routinely do given the right information and incentives. Why?
Because they are Australian? Because of their ‘culture’? Their ‘laziness’ characterised in the Asian press, means they can’t stand up? Their mental vacuity means they can’t work out how to change trains?
If I followed these sorts of sentiments to their natural limits I would be either accused of racism or in a position to accuse others of it.
Point being, any country, whether the India of the chaotic Indians, the China of the scheming and cheating Chinese, or the Arabia of the ungovernable Arabs – if you install a modern underground railway system like the ones say in Delhi or Shanghai or Dubai – if you install such a system with clear rules, modern reliable technology and well maintained systems – you get a similar result no matter what the culture.
To look at the problems of Australian transport and rail in particular and to find cute ‘cultural’ defences rather than genuine systemic weaknesses; that is the same laziness that Schivelbusch pointed to in the 19th century and which he wrote about 30 years ago.
If this feebleness and spongy thinking was limited to only railfan forums that would be one thing – but when I hear similar utterances from the mouths of Transport Ministers or academics who should know better – then I can see the problems such spongy thinking will cause for rational planning and policy.
I see it when I read Lynne Kosky saying that Myki’s problems were inevitable because Melbourne people ‘love’ their zone system. I recall Hong Kong people ‘loved’ their last ride bonus (who remembers having 3 or 4 different stored value cards in their wallet, all with small amounts on them, to benefit from this bonus?) but happily sacrificed it for a better system, the Octopus, which had no such bonus but other benefits.
I see this feebleness of mind too when I read how metros ‘don’t work’ according to several newspaper editorials and politicial commentators – when all they are really saying is they would rather the money spent in the underserved extremities of Sydney, as opposed to the congested but served inner areas.
I worry these things become an echo-chamber. If the Office of National Assessments, charged with providing the Prime Minister with clear information on national security, only regurgitates its own and public domain information rather than genuine secret intelligence, as happened in the Iraq war – you have to wonder how low the public service can go in getting genuine new, independent and accurate advice, rather than simply quoting the usual sources, from the same small intellectual pond that is Australia.
Anyway, I recommend Schivelbusch for this topic and several others on how rail transport changed the 19th century world. It is changing the world of many developing countries too. I suspect India and China are right now experiencing the changes Schivelbusch documented – towns becoming cities and villages becoming suburbs. The world shrinking and becoming more interconnected. And we are seeing something Schivelbusch never saw, with the internet further changing interpersonal relations in a way even the 1970s never forsaw.
Riccardo
Looks like an interesting addition to my library. Seems to be readily available on abebooks. Obviously I can’t comment on it until I’ve bought and read it.
One reason that British railways retained the conservative, non-corridor dog-box type of compartment, even after bogie construction had become the norm, was economic. Simply put, it provided the maximum number of seats and the lowest weight and cost per passenger of any alternative design. This was important given the much smaller loading gauge than in the USA and the generally smaller and less powerful locomotives.
Add a side or central corridor and capacity went down by 20-25%. Add further amenities, such as toilets, and the weight/passenger ratio went through the roof.
Another factor would have been that the compartment design (corridor or not) required no shunting or internal re-arrangement (other than a light clean-out) when a train arrived at a terminal station and departed in the opposite direction. This was important with the shorter journeys where a single consist routinely made multiple trips in the course of a day.
By contrast, the American “saloons” required somebody to flip-over the seat backs (or, in later designs, rotate each pair of seats through 180 degrees) every time direction was reversed.
(Many of the grander American trains, incorporating observation cars, required either total reversal around a wye or massive reshunting and turntabling in coach yards outside the station. This drastically increased layover times but, with many journeys extending over one, two or even three days, this was acceptable.)
It is notable that, until quite recently, British and European saloon cars retained facing “bays” of two or four seats rather than the American model of all seats facing the direction of travel. This was important as many trains, particularly in Europe, reversed direction in stations such as Florence in the course of a single journey such as Rome to Milan.
(I well remember the old “Gippslander” with its AZ and BZ saloons where the conductor had to reverse all seats during the eight minute stop at Sale.)
Class and social mores did have something to do with the Britishers’ long love affair with the compartment. The traditional landed gentry and the rising mercantile and professional classes were much more inclined to shun the company of the “lower orders” than their American counterparts. It is interesting that the American railroads did not usually offer different classes on their trains, leaving the provision of luxury accommodation to private contractors such as Mann and Pullman.
One American export to Britain which hardly survived the Atlantic crossing was the open-section Pullman sleeper. The concept of undressing and bedding down for the night separated from total strangers (including those of the opposite sex!) by only a pair of curtains was anathema to better-class Brits and subsequent sleeping car designs focussed on private, fully enclosed single bedrooms, usually only ten per car. Couples were accommodated by communicating doors between adjoining compartments but this merely reflected the domestic arrangements in better households where husbands and wives occupied separate bedrooms except when engaged in procreative activity.
As a result, the use of a sleeper for overnight travel in Britain remained the preserve of the wealthy until September 24 1928 when the GWR, LMS and LNER simultaneously introduced Third Class sleepers – more like European couchettes.
By contrast, in America the Pullman sleeper which, in it’s “Tourist” configuration provided up to 32 “berths”, was affordable to a much wider spectrum of the travelling public.
The Pullman Company has been widely credited as being one of the organisations that enabled a nation stretching three thousand miles between two oceans to develop and to function as a unified entity in pre-aviation days.
Conventional wisdom dates Pullman’s success from the inclusion of his lavish experimental car “Pioneer” in Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train in 1865. What is conveniently overlooked is that the inception of Pullman service coincided almost exactly with the emancipation of millions of slaves who formed a subservient labour force willing to work for wages and under conditions that would not have been acceptable to the white population.
Not sure if these comments are on or off-topic until I acquire and read Schivelbusch’s book.
Thanks PClark. I think the book would be up your street. Particularly interested in your comment about slave emancipation and the link the thousands of sleeping car attendants, porters and so on that had paid work, rather than slavery, but still a long way from white pay and conditions.
He has some other great chapters – on the Hausmannisation of cities, the Crystal Palace phenomenon, the concept of industrial/organisational medicine which preceded OH&S and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, space-time compression, the fear of technology and so on.
My concern about post-hoc is that people see a connection that isn’t there. I agree the English would have preferred the company of their own class – the reality though is that they have adapted to a much less stratified world, as everyone eventually does. If countries like China or Japan with their famously conservative social mores eventually adapt to train or plane travel, as everyone does, then even British, Americans and Australians can change.
And this is my point wrt things like changing trains, or standing rather than sitting on short inner urban journeys. Sure, the situation that built the previous habits can explain those habits – for example, people suspicious of changing trains because of unreliable connections – but if that changes, then the habits can change too.
I don’t mind habits explained that way – but to argue that single seat journeys are in Australian people’s “DNA” is what I find bizarre yet read from wide sources, from the Railpage dribblers to Lynne Kosky’s media advisor.
Its interesting, I was actually chatting with someone at work drinks the other day. This person works in North Sydney but lives in the outer west. Knowing where the individual lives I know they are within easy walking distance to a main station. The complaint was about Sydney traffic. It often takes two hours in peak hour to drive to North Sydney and Petrol price is high since they drive a large 4wd and also has to pay for parking. I said why don’t you catch the train, the trip should be no more then 50 odd minutes? Its pretty much an express train. Plus you are only a few minutes walk at either end? “NO WAY would I catch a train! I am not a train person”. Puzzled by this I quizzed them further. “The trains are too crowded and I would have to stand and I hate non A/C trains. Also can be more productive on the phone while sitting comfortably the whole way”. This is what not being a train person is I guess. No mention of late trains or Cityrail “service”. This person spends a lot of time and money to avoid standing on the train. Not a wealthy person but still wont use the train despite it being a very reasonable and cost effective option. This is without trying to get your average Cherrybrook or Pymble business executive to stand on an all stops Metro train for 45 minutes to the CBD. However I know from catching the train that there are people that will actually stand when there are seats. The difference being that they don’t tend to be travelling out into the burbs. They will be heading to the inner areas and not on the train long enough to worry. Although there are still plenty of people who will fight for a seat when only going two stops…
Riccardo,
The place of the Pullman Company in the story of black/white relationships in post-Civil War America IS an interesting one.
One the one hand it can be argued that Pullman achieved it’s important role in the growth and unification of the nation by continuing the exploitation of blacks.
Pullman put that it was providing a “racial monopoly” in an expanding, nationwide organization. The trade-off was that discipline was strict (as late as 1951 chewing gum on the job was grounds for dismissal), career opportunities limited (most senior jobs on trains were “reserved” for whites) the job was arduous, conditions poor and wages low.
Not only did the “racial monopoly” enable Pullman to get away with poor job conditions but it was, to a large extent, self-perpetuating as most whites of the period, if they had to work with blacks at all, expected to do so from a position of command – not merely doing the same job. Another factor was that blacks were perceived as more appropriate than whites as faceless, asexual domestic servants by the paying passengers.
When, in the 1920s, the black staff started to become restive and to organise as a union or “Brotherhood”, Pullman retaliated by breaking the “racial monopoly”. However, it did this by recruiting about 600 Filipinos, Mexicans and Chinese – not whites.
Despite all this, for most of the period of Pullman ascendency a job with the company was regarded as something of a status symbol in the broader black community. Wages might not have been good but, if you obeyed the rules, there was a degree of permanency and at the end of each trip there were the tips which, on the grander trains like the 20th Century and the Chief, manned by the more senior staff, could be a very substantial bonus.
It reminds me a bit of the situation in white-ruled South Africa where there were significant problems of border-control – not to keep the “persecuted” blacks of South Africa from fleeing to the “liberated” black-ruled states to the north but to stop a tsunami of refugee blacks from those states coming south.
Will probably post again over the holidays on other matters raised on this thread.
Riccardo,
great post! I love the passion with which you attack these ex-post rationalisations. It reminds me of this piece:
http://www.humantransit.org/2010/03/the-most-important-blog-post-youll-read-this-year-.html
which argues ‘culture’ is mainly misused as an explanation for transport economics. Druker calls it the fundamental attribution error. Rails – if your colleague is saying they are not ‘a train person’ then they are probably making the fundamental attribution error even in respect to themself.
Thanks to all. wish I had read that post – Fundamental Attirbution error sounds like what I am talking about.
Not sure I agree with the Marxist “They don’t know what they want” school of thinking though. fundamentally I think people don’t always act rationally, nor in their own long term best interest. I even think uneducated people can unwittingly do the bidding of others against their own interest.
But I stop at the idea that people don’t know what they want.
What the non-train person is probably saying is that they just don’t like the company of strangers, and wrapping this in other language.
I suspect 50% of the pop have this problem – but that still means the other 50 is up for grabs by PT, and we are a long way from it.
Pclark, these ’stepping stone’ jobs will always be controversial. the other thing I think is lost is the idea of being ‘national’ by then the railroads were becoming truly national – less the line of a company linking 2 large cities, but becoming national networks. So the rail jobs were becoming more prominent nationally. This, and the army, were the only route out for poor blacks.
But as we discussed before the US passenger trains were becoming a dead end street and without the sort of investment in track and speed and wiring that Europe was getting, not likely to succeed post war with air and road competing.
Growing and consuming organic foods was the normal way of life for our forefathers. Most people are not aware that synthetically packaged foods (made with synthetic ingredients and chemicals to prolong the preservation process) really only came around in the mid 1900s. Today, many smart consumers have returned to this healthier practice of eating fresh and organically grown foods where the production process is devoid of non-organic pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides.
I don’t think the fundamental attribution thing is so much “they don’t know what they want” as it is “you don’t know what they want, so don’t assume you do”.
Ricc, you’ve made mention of the Minister’s office a number of times before. As annoying as it is to hear our political class say fundamentally stupid things, spin is the name of the game to them. To me the blame lies with the media for swallowing s*!t. There used to be a reporter in Melbourne who was quite adept at breaking through the spin and presenting to a wide audience well. The Minister hired him.
Thanks K. Yes, Stephen Moynihan wasn’t it?
You almost wonder whether writing 1 or 2 cutting, well researched articles is an audition for working in the Minister’s office – gamekeepers turned poachers. Clearly the Minister can outpay the Age.
I tend to view people as having deep conditioning, often at a young age. We place too much emphasis on the cerebral ahead of the animal.
You spend all days walking the streets, sitting at your desk and in your armchair, lying in your bed – trillions and trillions of bits of data flowing into your brain through your 5 or 6 senses – and yet we are supposed to believe people make decisions based on a few abstract facts/data written in a newspaper, or a fact that someone tells them?
I’m sure when the 50% of the population who never use the train are given some futuristic brain scan – we’ll find in the deeper layers years and years of negative information, their impressions and sights and sounds and smells, the opinions of others, recycled information, and so it goes. I doubt you’ll see a rational calculus at the heart of it.
I’m sure Travelsmart type campaigns work on the marginal percentage who just don’t have enough information – and actually improving the transport and changing reality will work on those who’ve got a marginal, rational decision to make ahead of them. But a goodly part, probably 50% have made their minds up, and not on something rational
I think it shows how terrible things have become for journalism when government is the better bet. For what it’s worth it just goes to show how invaluable sources of information like Transport Textbook are.