Between The Ears - Vapourtrain (2009)

Broadcast BBC Radio 3, 23.5.2009

‘The train is like a ship, a land-ship into which people go to be transported somewhere. And whenever the container is filled and shut and the travel begins, then it's given “into the hands of God”, as they said in the old world. The passengers move out of our world for a time into a no man's land of time and travel - and there is a potential doom in that.

‘The railway was the first shock spearhead experience, which, like oil on water, spread and spreaded until today we have no spatial experience. We live in the dust of it, in terms of the explosion of the thing - the explosion of the locomotive in an Arcadian idyllic world. And what we are left with is dust, either settled or a hazy dusty landscape...’

-Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Vapourtrain

Produced by Neil McCarthy

Presented by Harry Willis Fleming

With the voices of fellow travellers:

Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Cultural historian and author of 'The Railway Journey'

and

Michael Freeman
Author of 'Railways & the Victorian Imagination'

Paul Farley
Poet

John McGoldrick
Curator of Railways at the National Railway Museum

Bill Mitchell
Writer, and President of the Yorkshire Dales Society

Gerald Tyler
Writer

Colin Wilson
Writer and philosopher.

With thanks to Gregory Whitehead.

With sounds recorded on the Isle of Wight Steam Railway (with thanks to the Isle of Wight Railway Co. Ltd.); and on the Yorkshire Coronation to Scarborough (4/4/09) with 46233 Duchess of Sutherland (with thanks to the Princess Royal Class Locomotive Trust).

BBC Radio 3 Programmes - Between the Ears, Vapourtrain

For more information email Harry Willis Fleming

Producer Neil McCarthy with Gerald Tyler at the Ribblehead Viaduct in North Yorkshire.