Where Worlds Collide

Ed Driscoll writes about the Napa Valley Wine Train

Imagine traveling in an elegant dining car, full of handsomely dressed passengers, sitting down to tables laid out with white linen, beautiful china and silverware, as you enjoy a meal of chicken prosciutto, baked and stuffed with layers of sauteed spinach, wild mushrooms and provolone cheese with sun dried tomatoes and wild mushroom sauce. Lush fields of California grapes slowly roll by at about ten miles an hour. A few cars ahead, a pair of champagne, burgundy and grapeleaf green Alco FPA-4 locomotives are cutting through the air with their classic blunt noses, with the odd belch of black smoke as a reminder of their turbocharged engines.

Sound like something out of the 1950s, long since vanquished by generic Amtrak Amfleet cars that resemble airplane interiors serving “Amfood” of styrofoam hamburgers and Diet Cokes? Actually, it’s a scene that’s recreated everyday on the Napa Valley Wine Train.

I don’t know that much about railway preservation in America, but I believe there are far fewer preserved lines than in Britain. Over on our side of the pond we have several dozen lines, largely operated by steam locomotives. Most of them are short, and almost all aren’t run as commercial enterprises, relying heavily on volunteers supplying their own time and money to restore and operate the vintage steam and diesel locomotives.

Sometimes I think about the time and energy put into operating these lines and compare it with the money spent on subsidising loss-making rural parts of the national rail network. The preserved railways operate on lines closed in the 1960s and 70s because they were hopelessly uneconomic; many of them are short sections of what were once much longer routes and terminate in the middle nowhere.

Perhaps preservationists should be encouraged to take over loss-making bits of the existing national network? Something like the Central Wales line might be too ambitious, but what about lines like Liskeard-Looe? Run steam-hauled tourist trains in the summer, and run a modern railcar for the all-year round local service.

I’m thinking a bit of some of the small private railways in Switzerland. Most of them are actually publically-owned, by local authorities (‘Private’ here means ‘not owned by the federal government’). Although the day-to-day services use modern equipment, almost all of them seem to hang on to some of the vintage trains they replaced. For instance, the Rhätische Bahn still keeps three steam locomotives in working order on the books, which regularly operate enthusiast’s specials, and can even be hired – I saw one hired for a wedding party, with white ribbons and flowers on the loco!

Cold Spring Shops has an interesting article on how the apparently fragmented METRA system in Chicago works, when the privatised mess we have in Britain doesn’t. (Link from UK Transport).

Interesting railway-themed site, with links to the author Steve Karlson’s O-gauge layout. Could do with some more railway-related blog entries, though!

In an earlier post, I described Atlanta as “Bracknell on Steroids”.

Bracknell is a soulless 1960s new town 25 miles west of London, seemingly built around cars rather than people. As a major centre for IT companies it was the subject of a lot of negative comments in the satirical BackBytes column in Computing.

When I first visited Atlanta, it reminded me of a gigantic version of Bracknell, covering an area the size of Greater London. This Atlanta Journal-Constitution article confirms this; it appears that Atlanta is the 4th most sprawling city in the whole of the US.

I hate sprawls! The one big reason I turned down my ex-employer’s offer to relocate to Atlanta was the fact that it’s simply impossible to survive there without a car. The city lacks the sort of comprehensive public transport networks we have in any British city of similar size. Worse still, the physical layout of the city would make any decent mass transit system prohibitively expensive to construct. Yes, they do have the MARTA network, but it covers only a tiny fraction of the city; and it went nowhere near my ex-employer’s offices. I found most of the bus services in the suburbs are less frequent that the services in rural Cornwall!

Of course one reason American cities sprawl the way they do is that they simply have the space. But how much is due to leaving everything to ‘the market’? On the other hand, who built all those roads that encourage the sprawl?

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Minister attacks Turner art

Culture minister Kim Howells has denounced the modern art up for this year’s Turner Prize as “cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit”.

Mr Howells left a note at the Tate Britain gallery, where the nominated work is on display, saying British art was “lost” if that was the best it could produce.

I’m sure I’m not the only person that thinks that if a piece of ‘Art’ can’t connect in some way to Joe Public, and is comprehensible only to a narrow clique of art students, it’s not really art, but pretentious nonsense. Or does that just make me a hopeless philistine?

The Turner Prize’s best moment was when it was sent up by “The K Foundation” with their competition for the worst piece of art of the year, the nominations for which were just coincidentally the same as the four entrants for the Turner Prize.

What is art anyway? Why not take a model railway layout (preferably an accurate fine-scale layout in the Mostyn league), operate it to a strict prototypical timetable, and call it a piece of performance art? I’m sure at least as much effort goes into researching and building a project like Mostyn as goes into some of the Turner entries, such as that light flashing on and off.