![]() The great sheds of iron and glass discharged the traveller into smooth, industrial space, while the adorned facades mediated – via the extreme complication of their ornament – the relationship between this frightening new expanse and the traditional space of the urban street. The spectactular domes of glass and steel for Bucharest’s central station were unfortunately never realisedĬredit:The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman In Schivelbusch’s reading, the station itself was the interface of two paradigms. Competing railway companies often kept different times, so that stations from which several different lines operated would need a different clock for each: six, in the case of Pittsburgh). (This process was not without its complications. ![]() This is represented by the station clock, which rises over the town proclaiming that railway time has conquered natural time. This is the classic argument of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, whose 1977 book The Railway Journey describes the way the new technology warped space and time: space is collapsed, so that Normandy is entered via Saint-Lazare, and time, which was once local, becomes everywhere the same. In the process of integration into the human psyche, however, rail travel changed the way we see the world. This disguise was so successful that the station would eventually be equated with the possibility of happiness, as in Larbaud’s poem, and romance, as in Brief Encounter. ![]() The alien new was thereby made to look reassuringly familiar, except that, after entering via the seemingly domestic door, you were shot out across a transfigured landscape as if from a cannon (as contemporaries frequently remarked). Their locations speak of the intimate connection of the station with industrial modernity, yet the stations themselves resembled classicising townhouses. The first purpose-built stations opened in 1830 at either end of the Liverpool to Manchester line, the world’s first intercity service. Opened in 1830, the Manchester–Liverpool line was the world’s first intercity service For many others, however, the station was a portal to hell: among them the indentured Chinese labourers who built railways across the US and Canada, the Indigenous peoples whose lands they occupied, and the Jews who were sent from them to their deaths. Larbaud was heir to a fortune, and could afford to muse with pleasurable melancholy on that terminal named happiness, which must exist somewhere, albeit in some now-inaccessible other place. In 1913, Valery Larbaud published a poem titled ‘The Old Station at Cahors’, which included the lines: ‘Station, a great door open to the lovely immensity / Of the Earth, somewhere on which divine happiness, / Like an unexpected, dazzling thing, must be.’ The obsolescence of the building he describes, which once connected here to everywhere but is now marooned, anticipates the war, when inveterate travellers such as Larbaud would have to shelve their Baedekers. While railway infrastructure enables new connections across countries and continents, the stations keep their face turned to the city
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