Transporting Moments: Mobility, Australian Railways and the Trained Society

The various roles railways played in laying the foundations and ground rules of contemporary mobility are analysed. Rail in leading the shift away from animated mobility, transformed the relationship, as expressed in mobility, between space and time. It led to the re-urbanisation of cities and to new forms of quotidian documentation such as railway timetables and tickets. These impacts were exported across the globe to such European outposts as Australia, where rail assisted national development and the growth of cities and regional centres. As elsewhere in the world, in the second half of the twentieth century rail experienced intense competition from the automobile and from the aeroplane, and almost became obsolete as a mode of transport. In the face of the need to ‘brand’ Sydney and attract global capital, NSW Transport’s programme of renovating rail, especially intra-urban rail, is examined.

Among the most important yet least analysed elements of transport culture, is the ticket. It confers on its holder the right to travel, access to a station and train space, generally a seat. Through its enormous range of types and forms, which proliferated during the nineteenth century, the ticket facilitated the division of mobile communities, not just in terms of class of mobility but also the function of travel, whether it was for the purposes of study, recreation, work and so on. During the late twentieth century, many of these ticket classifications were abandoned in favour of more omnibus forms of ticketing, especially in relation to intra-urban travel. It coincided with changes to ticket procurement, provision and collection and that underwent progressive automation. The development of travel analogues of credit cards such as Sydney’s Opal Card, which are rendering the cardboard ticket and the processes associated with it obsolete, has furthered these automating tendencies.

Programmes to revive Sydney’s ailing rail network in the face of competition from road transport, which began in the 1990s, were not confined to modernising its rolling stock and infrastructure. They also embraced the organisational structures, micro-practices and documentation in which rail transport were embedded. These reforms were long overdue and had become especially dire after decades of neglect. They were a result of policy makers and governments generally favouring road over rail and which Sydney’s urban development compounded. The resultant urban sprawl produced a traffic-gridlocked city and outer suburbs with a dearth of public services, including transport ones. It led to a divided city, a rich inner Sydney and a poor outer one in terms of access to services. Righting this long-standing problem has become a matter of priority and urgencyone that will take decades to implement. In the meantime, CityRail and its successor, Sydney Trains, have been engaged in a process called “Fixing the trains”, which is in large measure focused on impression management, on improving the look, feel and sound of the transporting experience in Sydney. It is argued that the development is modelled on fast food philosophy.

Signage, which is an ubiquitous feature of public space, be it indoors or out doors, is a taken for granted aspect of the linguistic landscape, including mobile environments. Yet, without it, the travelling public would experience disorientation, lack of direction and run the risk of encountering a range of hazards in what are often potentially very dangerous environments. Railway signage thus fulfils important functions in regulating, normalising and administering passenger conduct. Hence, much of it is focused on prescribing good transport behaviour and in admonishing and proscribing its opposite, bad behaviour. From examining the history of signage in transport environments, it is clear that signage has not remained unchanged but has been subject to progressive development since it first appeared on stations and trains. This was especially true during the 1920s and 1930s when London Underground designers were instrumental in simplifying railway signage and transport design in general, and giving it a more modernist appearance and veneer. These traditions were eventually exported to Sydney, where they continue to be deployed and updated. In conjunction with ‘Fixing the trains’ agenda, these processes of upgrading signage have gathered apace.

That time and space lie at the heart of railway culture is manifest in the degree to which temporal and spatial representations, in the form of clocks, watches and maps, which are the subjects of analysis in this chapter, are ubiquitous features of the linguistic and numeric landscapes of stations and trains. This is because there is a need for them to be consulted regularly by mobile communities, by the travelling public and railway employees. It is noted that there has been a shift from analogue to digital modes of information representation. Thus large display boards that were mounted in stations and which once ‘recorded’ the arrival and departure of trains, and whose capacity to store temporal and spatial information is analysed, have been replaced by digital, screen based indicator boards. Fully automated, they are yet one more reflection of the fact that more and more of rail information, has been delegated to technologies. Like spatial information, as represented in rail maps, which are also analysed in the chapter, timetables are now available on-line, at home, away from station environments, on customised apps.

Although visual signage is a dominant part of railway life, so too is audible signage. It takes the form of announcements, whistles, train sounds and so on. Indeed, railway sounds, especially those of locomotives, have exerted a particular fascination, more so, than the sounds of other modes of transporta fact reflected in the prevalence of musical compositions and poetry endeavouring to simulate them. This chapter’s principal subjects of analysis are those sounds that are deliberately reticulated through trains and stations as part of the larger scale technology of passenger administration and regulation. It is argued that the development of public address systems (PAs) was a seminal development in the evolution of such technology, enabling passenger control to be conducted at a distance, invisibly, without direct human involvement. The development of recorded message technology and digital sound systems further extended the machinery of population administration. It enabled more sophisticated forms of action at a distance to be instituted, ones that in the main were exercised asynchronously. At the same time, the sound behaviour of passengers, especially that associated with mass adoption of portable technologies such as mobile phones and tablets, has been subjected to increased regulation through the proclamation of quiet carriages.

Until the mobility turn, the significance of the mundane journey as a component of everyday mobility was overlooked. This has been redressed and there is now considerable interest in mobility practices, in life on the move and in the cultures that are generated in vehicular environments such as trains. As a result, commuting, which is one of the most mundane, popular and ubiquitous forms of mobility, is beginning to receive the attention that is its due. In this chapter, the results from a mobile ethnography of commuting in Sydney are reported. It examines in particular the corporeality of commuting, the territorialising and de-territorialising that occurs within the crowded spaces of trains and platforms during peak hours. It argues that passengers engage in complex ‘choreographies’ to avoid contact with one another and to position themselves in situations of advantage in the time harassed and compressed conditions of commuting.

Interstate trains in Australia as elsewhere in the world have never recovered from the inroads into their markets made by airliners and automobiles. Rail networks were rationalised, lines closed and there was a concentration on suburban and inter-city services with high passenger loads. The services that survived the resultant rail rationalisation now service two constituencies of travellers: those needing to travel by rail for health and other reasons and those choosing to do so because they treasure the experience of long distance rail travel. In order to service the latter, there is now in Australia a market for tourist trains, which unlike traveller trains operate on select routes, offering a range of allures and attractions, both on and off the tracks. This paper compares the experiences of travelling on a tourist train with that of travelling on traveller trains and argues that both are inscribed with a secondary experience, one that the traveller and the tourist does not necessarily encounter, the history of Australian rail.

An analysis of transport’s future in Sydney and Australia is undertaken. The benefits of public transport, especially that of rail, are outlined. These are contrasted with other, less desirable forms of ‘personalised’ and privatised mobility such as the automobile. It is argued that the impact of mobility is an all encompassing one, not by any means restricted to the corridors through which trains, buses and cars travel. It also encompasses urban development, patterns of poverty distribution and the location of important services such as health and education. It is argued that the development of highly privatised transport systems has exacerbated their provision. It is recognition that being stationary is not an option for contemporary citizens. Too much hangs on having access to a high quality and comprehensive public transport and that the opportunity costs flowing from its absence are significant ones. It is argued that though governments have begun to recognise the need to ameliorate the transporting experience, they need to go much further and undertake a mobility turn that would lessen the dependence on automobility.