Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Romance of the railways revealed

Romance of the railways revealed

By Amit Roy

JONATHAN GLANCEY now lives in north Suffolk by the River Waveney, sometimes getting up at 6am to dig a trench to plant hedges.


The setting could not be more English, but Glancey is just the right man to com­pare and contrast the railways in America and in India.

A specialist publisher called Sheldrake Press has just brought out a lavishly illus­trated book, Logomotive: Railroad Graph­ics and the American Dream, co-authored by designer Ian Logan and Glancey, who used to write about design and architecture for the Independent and Guardian dailies.

Glancey says it is possible to tell a great deal about a country from its architec­ture. The same, he adds, is true of rail­ways, especially in the US and in India.

Logomotive is full of evocative pictures, many of them taken over several decades by Logan himself.

There is, for example, a Union Pacific X-18 gas turbine electric locomotive in Armour yellow and vermilion livery; the logo of the Burlington Zephyrus, the West Wind; the Southern Belle’s viewing car on the Kansas City Southern; the vast art deco waiting room of the Los Angeles Union Station; and passengers gathering beneath the zodiac vaults of New York’s Grand Central Terminal.

There is an illustration of the Orange Bloom Special going through the orange groves in Florida – “there is nothing like it anywhere in the world”.

There is also John Gast’s 1872 painting, American Progress, with three classic lo­comotives following the wagon trains of white settlers, “bringing with them the infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution”.

In a foreword, the architect Norman Foster admits: “In the 1940s as a pre-teenager, I would stand for hours at the end of the cul-de-sac next to my home in a Manchester suburb waiting for a glimpse of an express locomotive.”

He adds: “The ultimate marriage of machinery, branding, graphics, colour and lifestyle found its apex in American railroad systems.”

Glancey writes: “Even today the US railroad network is the world’s largest in terms of operating length. What has gone for the most part, and notably in the great land mass between east and west coasts, is the passenger train, its role usurped from the mid-1950s by the automobile and airplane, both supported by govern­ment subsidised interstate freeways and airports. This, though, was American pro­gress. Mile-long run freight trains, mean­while, continue to thunder on by, and profitably so, from the Atlantic to the Pa­cific coasts.”

Room The art deco waiting room of Union Station in Los Angeles (© Sheldrake Press and Ian Logan).

Glancey tells Eastern Eye these trains can take several minutes to pass a given point: “If you stand by a railroad crossing in El Paso in Texas or something like that, and the bells ring and you hear the horns of the trains coming, the trains can be a mile long. And they can be longer than that – five huge, modern diesels [engines] on the front, pulling the train.”

The romance of American trains is cap­tured in many films, among them High Noon and North by North-West. “Clint Eastwood loves them – here comes the train and the sheriff,” says Glancey.

That compares with such Indian films as the 1972 Hindi classic, Pakeezah, which has a famous train scene; and Train to Pakistan in 1988, based on Khushwant Singh’s partition novel.

Today, there are very few passenger trains crossing America. And the journeys can take between three and seven days, compared with a few hours by plane.

When it comes to passenger miles, China and India are far ahead, Glancey says. When he was 21, he went to India, travelled around the country by train and worked for a year in and around Calcutta (now Kolkata), where his father, Clifford George Alexander Glancey, who came from an Indian army family, was born.

The other day, the author Sathnam Sanghera, taking a dig no doubt at Mi­chael Portillo’s TV travel documentaries, made fun of “white men getting off trains in India”. The Indian MP Shashi Tharoor has also argued the British built the rail­ways in India so that they could get their loot out of the country.

But Glancey is grateful that he was en­couraged to write about Indian railways by his editor at the Independent on Sun­day, Ian Jack, who knows the country as well as any journalist in Britain.

Glancey points out that his father “spent most of his childhood in India, which was quite rare. In those days, the British tended to send their children back to England to be educated.

“But my very old grandfather – and my father had some of this in him – loved In­dia the way it was. They just loved the place, the landscape, the culture.

“He came to England eventually when he was about 21. Then he became in­volved in helping to do geographical sur­veys of India. And during the Second World War, he signed up to the RAF.

“So then, life changed. He was as­signed to Burma and was very much in­volved in the world of the ‘Forgotten ar­my’ in that fight against the Japanese in north Burma and into the Naga Hills.”

The West Wind The logo of the Burlington Zephyrus, the West Wind (© Sheldrake Press and Ian Logan).

Glancey went to India knowing some­thing of its history. “Being English I had a romance slightly, a Raj romance. It’s gen­erational and inevitable.

“And then you start to learn about In­dia as you travel by train. English was a common language that could get me through any part of India.”

Glancey, who was fascinated by steam trains, travelled to Dimapur junction in Nagaland. In 2011, he wrote a book, Nagaland: A Journey to India’s Forgotten Fron­tier. On a trip in 1992, he rode the footplate of an Indian Railways WP-class Pacific steam locomotive from Delhi to Chandi­garh. He also sat in the driver’s seat.

He assures Eastern Eye: “The drivers are big characters.”

These journeys are apparently musts for English steam enthusiasts. The BBC broadcaster Mark Tully had once said that “if I don’t get covered in soot, I would want my money back”.

Comparing India and the US, Glancey gives his considered opinion: “I think it’s the differences rather than the similari­ties between the railway systems of India and the US that stand out.”

Logomotive: Railroad Graphics and the American Dream, by Ian Logan and Jona­than Glancey with a foreword by Norman Foster, is published by Sheldrake Press. Illustrated hardback, £35.

More For You

Piyush Goyal

Piyush Goyal recalled that in February, Narendra Modi and Donald Trump had instructed their trade ministers to conclude the first phase of the bilateral trade agreement (BTA) by November 2025. (Photo: Getty Images)

Getty Images

Trade talks with US moving forward positively, says Indian minister Goyal

INDIA’s commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday said that negotiations on the proposed trade agreement between India and the United States, which began in March, are progressing in a positive atmosphere and both sides are satisfied with the discussions.

He recalled that in February, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and US president Donald Trump had instructed their trade ministers to conclude the first phase of the bilateral trade agreement (BTA) by November 2025.

Keep ReadingShow less
West Midlands Police

West Midlands Police said they were called just before 08:30 BST on Tuesday, September 9, after the woman reported being attacked by two men near Tame Road. (Representational image: iStock)

Woman raped in racially aggravated attack in Oldbury

A WOMAN in her 20s was raped in Oldbury in what police are treating as a racially aggravated attack.

West Midlands Police said they were called just before 08:30 BST on Tuesday, September 9, after the woman reported being attacked by two men near Tame Road. Officers said the men made a racist remark during the incident.

Keep ReadingShow less
Tommy Robinson

The event, which Robinson has promoted for months, is being billed by him as the 'UK's biggest free speech festival.' (Photo: Getty Images)

London prepares for rival demonstrations, police deploy 1,600 officers

Highlights

  • More than 1,600 officers deployed across London on Saturday
  • Far-right activist Tommy Robinson to lead "Unite the Kingdom" march
  • Anti-racism groups to stage counter-protests in Whitehall
  • Police impose conditions on routes and timings of demonstrations

LONDON police will deploy more than 1,600 officers across the city on Saturday as rival demonstrations take place, including a rally organised by far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as Tommy Robinson, and a counter-protest by anti-racism campaigners.

Keep ReadingShow less
Baiju Bhatt

At 40, Bhatt is the only person of Indian origin in this group, which includes figures such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. (Photo: Getty Images)

Baiju Bhatt named among youngest billionaires in US by Forbes

INDIAN-AMERICAN entrepreneur Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of the commission-free trading platform Robinhood, has been named among the 10 youngest billionaires in the United States in the 2025 Forbes 400 list.

At 40, Bhatt is the only person of Indian origin in this group, which includes figures such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Forbes estimates his net worth at around USD 6–7 billion (£4.4–5.1 billion), primarily from his roughly 6 per cent ownership in Robinhood.

Keep ReadingShow less
Mandelson-Getty

Starmer dismissed Mandelson on Thursday after reading emails published by Bloomberg in which Mandelson defended Jeffrey Epstein following his 2008 conviction. (Photo: Getty Images)

Getty Images

Minister says Mandelson should never have been appointed

A CABINET minister has said Peter Mandelson should not have been made UK ambassador to the US, as criticism mounted over prime minister Keir Starmer’s judgment in appointing him.

Douglas Alexander, the Scotland secretary, told the BBC that Mandelson’s appointment was seen as “high-risk, high-reward” but that newly revealed emails changed the situation.

Keep ReadingShow less