Train Stations

In Howard's End there is an interesting comment about train stations

Forster takes us beyond the physical into our perceptions of the world: The great train stations are repositories of latent placeness!

Paddington has Cornwall within it; Euston Scotland. The World has become smaller: The world has become multi-dimensional.

And that strikes a very big chord with me. Much of my life has been spent on Continental Europe - and there the stations maintain this feeling. Most of my travelling is still, Victorian style, done on trains.

Moscow's Kiev station has a Ukrainian feel - and it is not just the wall mosaics and superficial decorations (although they do capture something) it is the people who swarm around it, the beggars, the business men. The early communist enthusiasm for celebrating regional cultural differences has stamped the whole rail transport network of Moscow with an individuality hard to find anywhere else in the world.

Pick your station in Budapest carefully - will it take you back West ? Or South into the Germanic, Austo- (semi-) Hungarian world? Or East into Balkan and Carpathian, once (and culturally, still) Turkish-dominated parts?

I think it is hard now to visualise in multi-ethnic England just how distinctive some of the regions of Eastern Europe are - how a combination of skin colour, nose shape, hair colour, neck length, choice of clothing, swagger of the hips, intangible but there features, mix to say where a person is from even before they open their mouth and pour out one of the many languages of the area. Which beer are they drinking - from a can or a bottle? Or is it wine? Or plum brandy? Maybe you will be wrong with an individual - but not often; get a group together, even if they are not with each other, and that subconscious placeness surrounds you: You might not know the place: You know there is a place though.

An airport doesn't have it. Nor does a motorway service station. Local bus stations are too local and international bus stations too international.

My most frequently used station, 'Timisoara North' in Romania, built at the hight of the Austro-Hungarian Industrial Expansion maintains this placeness.

Once the Orient Express stopped here on its way from Belgrade to Bucharest and further on into Bulgaria and ultimately Istanbul - and you still, sitting waiting for one of the few international trains that now pass though to move off, get the excitement of dangerous journeys.

Or is it the slower train taking the southern route - over the mountains the Romans fought the Dacians in and along the Danube - just in time for lunch in the resteraunt car as you pass the place Trajan bridged this mightiest of European rivers?

Maybe it is a local train - you'll catch it at a different platform, and so the character of the journey changes with the people. Don't be suprissed to find tired workmen sleeping off a night of drinking lying across the wooden benches of the second class carriages - for many of these subsidised trains are essential to people who can't afford petrol, let alone the car - and many trains don't bother with first class compartments.

Even in England something is left of this great cosmopolitanism.

Despite the 'upgrade' to Manchester Picadilly, I still feel when I enter it I am off to the hills of Derbyshire - to 'Buxton' the great Spa Town: or Blackpool, both from the Oxford Road side line. You have to cross the bridge and choose your side of the platform.

The central platforms drive an arrow of conciousness South.

How wonderful of E.M.Forster to grasp this and capture it is words.

Why did he do it though?