Timekeepers Page 4
When two Observatory staff ran from their office at the sound of the explosion, they found Bourdin still alive. But he survived only half an hour, and when his body was examined by the police they found he was carrying a large amount of cash; it was fleeing money, they suggested, quite enough to get him swiftly back to France once his mission had been accomplished. But what precisely was his mission? Speculation gripped London for weeks, and a decade later it inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Bourdin’s motive remains unclear. He may have been carrying a bomb for an accomplice. He may have simply been trying to cause panic and chaos, the way terrorists aim to do today. But the most romantic theory, and the most French, is that he may have been trying to stop time.
The people at Fonacon do not hold up Bourdin as a hero, not in these straitened times. But they do possibly share an ambition. On New Year’s Eve 2008, Fonacon tried to stop time once more, and they had a new slogan: ‘It was better right now!’ As a man named Marie-Gabriel explained, ‘We’re saying no to the tyranny of time, no to the merciless onslaught of the calendar, and yes to staying put in 2008!’ The protest in Paris saw the largest turnout yet, with about a thousand people gathering to boo the arrival of the new year on the Champs-Élyseés. The clocks struck midnight, and the protestors struck the clocks, and then, merde, it was 2009.
The idea that time may be stopped in its tracks we happily recognise as a fanciful one, or the stuff of movies. If, in revolutionary France, such a thing once seemed plausible, it is a desire we should credit to optimism and enthusiasm, and to the fact that another revolution, a revolution in travel, was yet to occur. A train was coming down the track, and it was a solid and earnest thing: in terms of time, the train would change everything.
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1 The French had another shot at time transformation in 1897, albeit on a modified scale. The Commission de décimalisation du temps suggested maintaining the 24-hour day, but changing to 100-minute hours with 100-second minutes. The proposal lay on the table for three years but was brought into effect for nought minutes.
2 Rather than face the guillotine, the principal architect of the calendar, Gilbert Romme, fell on his own sword almost a year later on 17 June 1795 (or, as he would have preferred, 29 Prairial).
3 See Sanja Perovic, ‘The French Republican Calendar’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 1.
4 We are vaguely familiar too with the Julian months: Januarius, Februarius, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Iunius, Julius, Augustus, September, October, November, December. In the first centuries of the modern era, newly appointed Roman emperors made their own egotistical modifications. The most extreme was Commodus, who delighted in changing all the months to variations of his own adopted names: Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, Pius, Lucius, Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus and Exsuperatorius. And then he was assassinated, and subsequent emperors changed the months back.
5 Although, as with the revolution of 1789, time momentarily, and perhaps mythically, did stand still. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin claims (in On the Concept of History, 1940) that ‘during the evening of the first skirmishes . . . it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris’. Two plausible reasons: to show contempt for an old unconstitutional establishment, and to mark the exact time of its overthrow. Then again, bullets may just have been flying everywhere.
6 Quoted in ‘Dying of the Past’ by Michael S. Roth, History and Memory, vol. 3, no. 1 (Indiana University Press).
7 Today’s diseases associated with time? There are many: ADHD, cancer, smartphone addiction.
Mallard: small boy not included.
Chapter Three
The Invention of the Timetable
i) The Fastest Thing You Ever Did See
Do you plan on being alive for the next two-and-a-half years? If the answer is yes, you may begin building Mallard. This magnificent British steam locomotive, streamlined and garter blue, is available for construction each week from your newsagent, and if you keep the faith for 130 weeks, and buy all the bits required and assemble them, you will end up with a 500-millimetre-long engine and tender (almost 20 inches), weighing about 2 kilos.
Mallard was originally built in Doncaster in 1938, but in 2013 the publishers Hachette offered the amateur modeller the chance to build a highly detailed replica as a part-work, a precision-tooled miniature of the ‘O’-gauge variety, designed to run on 32mm track (‘track not included’). The model is made from brass, white metal, etched metal and an intricate metallic casting process called ‘lost wax’, and requires not only considerable patience and skill to assemble, but also tools including round-nose pliers and top-cutter pliers, and a recommendation to wear protective gloves and a face mask. When you have finished making your model, you may then paint it (paint not included).
Issue no. 1, priced at only 50p, consists of the first metal parts and a magazine that tells you a bit about Mallard’s history and great railroad enterprises such as the Trans-Siberian Railway. The magazine is hole-punched for easy storage, and, after a few weeks, the magazines should be put in a binder (first binder and dividers included free with your second magazine; subsequent binders not included).
The first choice you must make is whether to superglue or solder (solder not included and not recommended). Instructions for the first week’s parts, which will make the driver’s cab, come in twelve sections and include using the top-cutter pliers to remove all parts from the fret, smoothing the edges with wet and dry sandpaper, punching three dots in each tab to form raised rivets, and placing the left-front cab window bead in position with the pliers. If you actually like doing this you will be delighted with the free Modeller’s Magnifying Glass to inspect the smaller parts (if you reply within 10 days), and a black-and-white A3 print of the original Mallard in thunderous action down a slope.
Issue 2, priced at only £3.99, contains the next part of your model (nose section and boiler skirts) and a feature on the West Highland Line. If you subscribe, you will also get a magnificent set of Mallard drink coasters in a tin. Not much happens with issue 3, apart from the arrival of the main boiler and a price hike to £7.99 (the standard price for each issue from now on), but with issue 4 you get a free Modeller’s Toolkit, including a stainless steel ruler and two mini-clamps. With issue 5 there are details of how to motorise your Mallard when you have completed it (motor not included).1
The bit-part Mallard is a costly enterprise. If you wish to make the whole thing, and surely there can be little point stopping at issue 10 or 50 or 80, then you need to buy all 130 issues, and all 130 issues will cost a total of £1,027.21. The original locomotive from Doncaster, 70 feet long and 165 tons, taking hundreds of thousands of passengers on an express journey from London to Scotland and back for 25 years – about one and a half million miles of track travel in all – cost £8,500. It would be cheaper to buy the kit direct from DJH Model Loco in Consett, County Durham, where, for just £664, you get it all in one delivery in one big box. DJH Model Loco even offers a service in which someone will speed everything up and build the damn model for you in a couple of weeks, although that would surely be missing the point. For Mallard has always been about time. Time is why she was built.
Perhaps you can imagine Mallard coming down the track on Sunday, 3 July 1938. The engine, tender and cars are blue, although whether you’ll be able to see this as it speeds past you is questionable. There is also a rickety brown carriage early in the chain, known as a dynamometer car, and within this are men with stopwatches and machines that resemble primitive lie detectors and heart monitors. The train is travelling so fast that it appears to be ‘hunting’, the phrase engineers use to describe a locomotive hurtling at such a velocity that it is swaying from side to side, as if it was searching for the fastest route to its destination, happy to jump to another track if need be. Its destination is London, but it will overheat long before then.
You are watchi
ng the train from Stoke Bank, not far from Grantham. The threat of war hovers. Twelve-year-old Margaret Roberts is at school up the road. The hurtling train, and its memory, will swiftly become one of those iconic pre-war images, like the last of the country-house shooting parties before Britain went dark. What it is about to do will never be bettered, and the anniversaries – 25th, 50th, 60th and so on – just can’t come soon enough. People who love trains love this train as much as they love anything.
Similar locomotives in this group, known as A4 Pacifics, were designed to look and perform like Mallard, and their engineer Nigel Gresley gave them all similar names: Wild Swan, Herring Gull, Guillemot, Bittern and Seagull.2 But to Gresley – 62, in failing health, his designs internationally recognised and copied, his trains, including the Flying Scotsman, lauded for both safety and comfort, an engineer comparable in achievement to the Stephensons and Brunel – none of them appeared to be chosen like Mallard, with her dynamic lines and increased cylinder pressure, and her new brake valves, double chimney and blast-pipe maximising steam production.
At Stoke Bank it has its chance. The ride through Grantham has been slow due to track maintenance, but it has reached Stoke Summit at 75 mph and accelerates now over a long downhill stretch. The speeds at the end of each mile from the summit were recorded as: 87½, 96½, 104, 107, 111½, 116 and 119 mph. The subsequent half-mile readings then gave 120¾, 122½, 123, 124¼.3 And so Joe Duddington, aged 61, an Englishman based in Doncaster, employed by the London and North Eastern Railway since its formation in 1921, and Mallard’s driver that day, pushed her on a little as she thundered past the Lincolnshire village of Little Bytham. ‘She just jumped to life like a live thing!’ he would recall a few years later. ‘Folks in the [dynamometer] car held their breath.’ The train achieved a top speed of 125.88 miles per hour, a steam record that stands to this day.
Time passed. Seventy-five years later, a great gathering of 90 old-timers assembled at the National Railway Museum in York to talk of crewing Mallard and manning the sheds, and to tour another great gathering in the main hall, all six of the surviving A4 streamliners (of 35 built), huge and gleaming, a product of England: Mallard, Dominion of Canada, Bittern, Union of South Africa, Sir Nigel Gresley and Dwight D. Eisenhower. They were all wonderful engines, but Mallard had the celebrity status – the fastest, the only one purchasable in 130 parts, its creator’s favourite – and it did seem to glow more than others, the way Marilyn Monroe or Cary Grant used to. And, as with movie stars, adults who should know better sighed in the train’s presence, as if they weren’t worthy, as if the train was of a different and higher species. Iron and man-made as it was, it was also a deity, shining huge above us. I queued up to step on its boiler plate, and I would have put on overalls and cap and begun shovelling coal if they had let me.
Trains, and steam trains in particular, serve as the holding pen for deep male longing. For a person over 70, the notion of ‘times past’ usually invokes foggy stations and whistles and the presence of grime. A great hall with men dragging tired wives around, lots of plastic bags with lots of souvenirs – it could only be childhood revisited at a railway museum; the French would have locked you away for such nostalgia.
I specifically went to hear one of the old-timers, a man named Alf Smith. Smith was 92, funny and direct, the fireman (coal-shoveller and oiler) on the boiler plate of Mallard for almost four years, and ‘I never had a bad day, never had a bad day’. He spoke of his driver and his train with deep respect, telling a story of how, when the pair were lodging overnight and came down for their cooked breakfast, his driver would scrape three-quarters of his meal from his plate and give it to him. ‘Not once, not twice, but every day that we was there, that’s what he done. I said to him, “Joe, what are you doing?” He said, “I can get home on a bloody egg, you’ve got the work to do – eat it!” Mallard was part of our story. Well, it was our story. That was my engine.’ His engine was being mobbed downstairs as he spoke. In the shop, the train was basking in the glory of an anniversary, which meant posters and magnets on sale, and small tins of garter-blue paint suitable for modelling.
Speed records on trains tend to be maintained for a long time: you push the absolute limit for a few miles, and then safety concerns or a basic lack of ambition seals the record shut for decades. The London to Aberdeen run, for example, took 8 hours 40 minutes in 1895 and didn’t get any faster for 80 years. In the mid-1930s it took about 2 hours 20 minutes from London to Liverpool, and we have shaved barely 15 minutes from this. But in the twenty-first century the train is once more beholden to records and speed. The birthplace of the railways has come relatively late to this party; HS2, the first phase of which is due to open in 2026, will cut the journey between London and Birmingham from 1 hour 24 minutes to just 49 minutes.
Elsewhere in the world, progress has been faster. In Spain in 2010, the 205 mph AVE S-112, a train shaped like and nicknamed ‘The Duck’, cut the time it takes to get from Madrid to Valencia by more than two hours, to 1 hour 50 minutes. In the same year, travellers between St Petersburg and Helsinki managed the cross-border trip in 3 hours 30 minutes, two hours faster than before the Sm6 Allegro arrived from its works in Italy. In China, the CRH380, new in 2011, travelled at 186 mph to cut the journey from Beijing to Shanghai to less than half the journey time in 2010: from 10 hours to 4 hours 45 minutes. And, with a certain inevitability, Japan has gone a little faster than everyone: in April 2015, on a test track near Mount Fuji, its Maglev (‘magnetic levitation’) train, hovering 10cm above the track, carried 49 passengers at a speed of 374 mph, smoothly outgunning the French TGV. It is expected to begin service in 2027 between Tokyo and Nagoya, a journey of 165 miles that it should manage in 40 minutes, half the time of the current Shinkansen bullet train.
But for the most extraordinary advance of all we need to go back to the birth of the idea of the train, and a sooty dawn in pre-Victorian north-west England.
ii) Was Ever Tyranny More Monstrous?
On the day it opened in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway revolutionised the way we thought about our lives. The fact that it linked the thriving cotton mills to a major shipping port about 30 miles away is almost incidental. The steam engine both shrunk and expanded the world; it enhanced trade; it hastened the spread of ideas; it fired global industry. And more than any other invention – save the clock itself and possibly the space rocket – the railways changed our appreciation of time.
The train wasn’t like the computer: its early champions knew fairly well what they were unleashing on the world. Proposing the idea of the Liverpool and Manchester line to prospective backers and nervous crowds in the late 1820s (people thought their lungs would collapse, that cows would fail to milk, that the countryside would be set alight), the line’s secretary and treasurer Henry Booth spoke of how the passenger journey time between the cities, previously only possible by horse-drawn coach over turnpike roads, would be cut in half.4 ‘The man of business in Manchester will breakfast at home,’ Booth predicted, ‘proceed to Liverpool by the railway, transact his business, and return to Manchester before dinner.’ (In 1830, dinner was at lunchtime.) Booth, a man who should be more remembered than he is, foretold the impact of the railway far more eloquently than the Stephensons or Brunel. The railway, he correctly suggested, would change ‘our value of time’. ‘Our amended estimate of the occupation of an hour, or a day’ would affect ‘the duration of life itself’. Or, as Victor Hugo would later claim, ‘All the armies in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.’5
The Liverpool and Manchester railway was the biggest mechanised engineering project the world had seen. It was, of course, at that time also the fastest railway in the world, covering the 31 miles in around 2 hours and 25 minutes.6 Within a few years of its opening, there were accidents all over the country, but also a huge sense of industrial adventure and release: the destiny of the world’s economies was now hurtling on iron wheels, and the minute hand had found its vital and i
ndispensible purpose.
British steam engines were being shipped throughout the world. In February 1832 a new publication called the American Rail-Road Journal carried news of a rail alongside the Erie and Hudson canal, and plans for imminent openings in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Passenger railways opened in France in 1832, Ireland in 1834, Germany and Belgium in 1835, and Cuba in 1837. In 1846 the whole of Britain was being dug up or drilled through or laid upon: there were 272 railway acts that year.
With the openings came another innovation – the passenger timetable. In January 1831, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway dared list only its departure times, although its journey time was shortening. The company now hoped that the trip between the cities ‘is usually accomplished by the First Class carriages [in] under two hours’. The first-class coaches did indeed seem to travel faster – more coal, perhaps a more efficient engine – and there were two distinct schedules: first class, costing 5 shillings each way, ran at 7 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4.30 p.m., with late departures for Manchester tradesmen at 5.30 on Tuesdays and Saturdays; second class, costing 3 shillings and sixpence, left at 8 a.m. and 2.30 p.m.
But what happened if you wished to travel further afield, perhaps from Lancashire to Birmingham or London? This was already possible by the late 1830s, although the competing rail companies – the Grand Junction Railway running north-west from the Midlands, the London and Birmingham Railway, the Leeds and Selby Railway, the York and North Midland Railway – failed to coordinate their schedules to oblige a passenger keen to use more than one line in a day.