Trains

I have just returned from a shorter trip which made me ponder about trains. A company specifically aimed towards the very self-conceited form of travelling called "backpacking" describes train travelling as the very essence of travel, a way to emotionally connect with the travelling experience and gives you the opportunity to speak to "the locals". Another company more specialised on luxurious, comfortable train travelling calls it "a holiday in the pace of your soul with elements of culinary pleasures like food and champagne".
Not that I wish to affiliate myself with said companies, but I must admit to being a train romantic. Trains are not only potential meeting grounds but also an urban glue with symbolic value for industrialised society.


Rumour has it that when "The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station" by the Lumiére brothers, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk, showed for the first time in 1895, the audience screamed and ran away at the sight of the motion picture train rushing towards them. Myth, probably, but a myth that reflects not only our prejudice towards historical times but also our awe of trains as a symbol of modern technology.

Present day train culture includes such highlights as graphic novel Bílý Potok - Alois Nebel by Jaroslav Rudis and Jaromir 99. With the author's own words, at least according to an online interview:
"Our story is the story of a railwayman working at a small station near Jesenik, north-eastern Moravia, in the former Sudetenland, a railwayman who 'sees' what other people can't. He has visions in the fog. He's a bit... maybe ill, mentally ill, but perhaps not. [...] Through these 'foggy trains' on his railway he sees the whole century pass by, good and bad sides. There are German soldiers and there are Soviet soldiers, there is everything that destroyed this region in the last century." This gem is a purchase from my trip, and I will greatly enjoy reading it perhaps already tonight.

Reading suggestion

First published in 1937, "The Night Climbers of Cambridge" by pseudonym Whipplesnaith is a useful handbook of and account for roof climbing in said city. Full of good advice on what shoes to wear, different kinds of drain pipes and how to chimney-climb "The Night Climbers..." is a humorous declaration of principles. Do not leave traces, do not harm the exterior of climbed buildings. And do not, by boasting about or showing off your escapades become merely a gymnast:
"Modesty drives the roof-climber to operate by night; the proctorial frown makes him an outlaw. And outlaws keep no histories.[---] It is the few, the handful of men in each college who are caught by the fascination of buildings at night, who become the night climbers."
Read the book in its entirety at: http://www.insectnation.org/projects/nightclimbers/html

Oh, and there are pictures for a lowly coward like myself to behold.

Umeå, summer 2007

Last summer I visited a house, hidden behind trees and high grass.

Two rooms, a kitchen and an outside toilet. Abandoned for more than 20 years, but still containing scraps and memories of its previous owner. Once the house had been someone's pastoral dream, much like a real life Carl Larsson painting. No one had bothered to strip the house of its less valuable contents. An old box of cottage cheese and news papers revealed the date of abandonement to 1986; the headline refers to the protection of Ingvar Carlsson, the Prime minister succeeding Olof Palme who was shot in 1986. But what happened to the owner is, for me, unknown.