![]() ![]() You see, it wasn’t just the people who built the railway and ran it. ħThe elderly enthusiast’s concept of the railway embraces those that built it and those that travelled on it, all caught up in a venture of epic scale: ![]() Confidence in ambition Don’t sneer at the Victorians, my lad. ĦThe elegiac old fugger is in sympathy with the drive and enterprise of an earlier age: ![]() Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a Channel Tunnel to the Continent. Can you imagine-they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. ĥHe rattles off the various stops and cannot contain his admiration:įifty miles from Vemey Junction to Baker Street what a line. The first Pullman cars in Europe to be hauled by electricity. The Extension Line they used to call it There used to be a Pullman car right up until Hitler’s war started. ģThe narrator is taken with all aspects of the past-soaked carriages, from the sepia photographs of the line’s beauty spots to the various fittings such as the loosely strung luggage racks and the broad leather window straps.ĤThe limited knowledge of the sixth-former is supplemented by the unqualified admiration expressed by a more seasoned passenger, described by the narrator as “an elegiac old fugger,” who is a fount of information: The carriages were high and square with broad wooden running-boards the compartments were luxuriously wide by modern standards, and the breadth of the seats made one marvel at Edwardian femural development. The rolling-stock, painted a distinctive mid-brown, had remained unchanged for sixty years some of the bogeys, my Ian Allan spotter’s book informed me, had been running since the early 1890s. In the early 1960s, the Metropolitan Line still retained some of its original separateness. It would be possible to range widely, exploring the rich variety of travelling experiences depicted by Barnes, but this paper will be primarily concerned with travel by train and will take a its starting point two of Barnes’s most striking celebrations of travel by train, the first very early, the second recent.ĢIn Barnes’s first published novel, Metroland (1980), the main character Christopher Lloyd, a sixth-former with a passion for French culture, likes to think of himself as being “sans racines,” but also proclaims with a degree of pride: “J’habite Metroland.” The Metropolitan line, which provides link with the past, is described in loving detail: ![]() Barnes is drawn to both humdrum and exceptional journeys, ranging from the daily trip into London on the underground to the extreme situation of the survivors on Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” which provides such a striking image of man’s existential plight. The experience of travelling by train or boat is often carefully recorded and the journey frequently functions as a structuring device, linking the different sections of A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters or setting the parameters for some of the stories in Cross-Channel. 1One of the distinctive features of Julian Barnes’s fiction is the close attention paid to different forms of transport. ![]()
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