FALLACIES IN WONDERLAND
Ah, the good old days… but who really remembers them, and are they merely a collection of misinformed, distorted personal narratives?
YOU HEAR some interesting stuff pootling around the railway workshop. As I blend into the background, I hear people expressing views that really make me chuckle. This week it was someone complaining that heritage railways are becoming ‘Disney‑fied’. I couldn’t help but think how well Disney has done in entertaining folk and that it would be quite good if we were half as good as Disney at putting on a show. The rant I was eavesdropping on went on for quite a while, and included stuff such as ‘things not being proper’ and ‘how things used to be, back in the day’, etc. ‘A typical boomer generation‑type conversation’, I can hear you thinking, but no, actually these folk were considerably younger.
So what does ‘proper’ look like then? And how did things ‘used to be’? Are we preserving it properly and what exactly should we aim to preserve? Have you ever watched one of those programs on the TV, set in a time gone by but one that you can remember? Has it ever occurred to you that’s not how others remember it? Of course, everyone’s perspective is different so it really is very difficult to claim that anything we are preserving is truly accurate.
Then there is the golden glow effect. This golden glow often surrounds one of two things, one is a period just beyond your living memory when things seemed to be so much better than they are now. The other is how things were when you first found them. This affects preserved railways a lot. It is something to cling on to. It is how things were before you knew what the problems were and started to do something to make them better. Having been around the block a few times, I can remember the projects and campaigns of times gone by. At one meeting a few years back, a few of the railway founders where present. They were my heroes back in the day, doing amazing things to make the railway better. It was interesting to hear them all reminiscing about how great things were back then and how the railway just wasn’t the same now. It was ‘change for the better’ back then, but now they wanted the old railway back. I pointed out to them at the time that it was their projects and efforts that had changed the railway. Indeed, it was those people who inspired the next generation to do more of the same. They became rather quiet.
At one point, not too long back, we made some changes to a station track layout. A bit of a campaign started about how we were ‘losing our heritage’. It had to be done, but there was some grumbling. Not long after, I got chatting to the old permanent way guy and it turned out this layout dated back to the 1970s when he had lashed something up with a mixed bag of spare track materials he had. He could not believe it had lasted so long, or that anyone liked it. It turned out that the new layout was pretty much back to how it looked originally before he made the changes. It seems there can be multiple versions of heritage, and who is to say one is more important than the other?
What matters, and what is accurate, is a fascinating subject. If we have a perfectly restored train, does that bring us closer to the past? This magazine is called Steam Railway, not Steam Engine or Steam Train. This would tend to suggest that it is the whole railway that matters. I know it does to me but does it matter to you? Railways change so much over time and very few, save for those in remote bits of national parks, can escape from the enormous change in the setting as landscape and skyline change out of all recognition in just a few short decades. Even if we look within the fence, we find very different fences for a start and sleepers made of different materials. Oh well, no matter, we can overlook that. At least we can half‑close our eyes and listen to the clickety‑clack of rails on joints and imagine we are way back when. Hold on though – we can’t do that because someone got some nice, continuously welded rail sections to install on our traditional branch line.
WE CANNOT AVOID CHANGE. ALMOST EVERYTHING WE HAVE PRESERVED ON OUR HERITAGE RAILWAYS IS A COMPROMISE
Back to the workshop though, and we are busy keeping those traditional skills alive. Walk through the door of any heritage railway workshop and you will find those historic synchronised electronically‑controlled pillar jacks, overhead cranes, JCB site loaders, the trusty Victorian MIG welder and 110V angle grinder. It’s all just how it used to be. I think we even still have a set of Great Western Railway pressed steel drawers with every imaginable size of metric bolt within. Yes, here in the workshop things haven’t changed a bit.
What does this all tell us? We cannot avoid change. Almost everything we have preserved on our heritage railways is a compromise. Rolling stock from everywhere and stations becoming almost unrecognisable are things we have come to rationalise. We accept that the enjoyment of the steam engine that still operates comes at the cost of sacrificing worn‑out original components to the new. We discuss the changes and cherish the original but have learnt to accept change. Is it so wrong, then, for our commercial activities to change, perhaps not to Disney levels, but at least to contemporary standards? Perhaps, actually, it is nothing new. From the moment they started, preserved railways have not and could not offer the exact experience of times gone by. Is it any different now, or are we just holding our railways back by trying to keep them in a golden state that never existed? Or just how they were when we first saw them, and we had yet to look behind the curtain and see the problems backstage that we fell in love with in the first place?