Off the Rails: Animating Train Journeys

In 2012 the average resident of the UK spent 361 hours travelling a total of 6,691 miles. 11 % of this travel was done by public transport. During their travels, the experience that these average residents had of landscape was of passing through places before arriving at their final destination. The mobility paradigm in urban geography and sociology proposes that cities and society can be studied in terms of travel rather than stasis – through the movement of peoples, resources, data, finance – in order to understand the formation of identity, ideology, power and society. In accord with these ideas about mobility, rather than considering landscape as a static entity, this chapter focuses on animations that move between locations and are concerned with trajectory and locomotion. After noting the connections between early cinema and the train, it examines a body of works that are all thematically linked through their association with animated train journeys, although the individual pieces of work may take different forms – from the pre-filmic phantom rides, to Ivor the Engine, Thomas the Tank Engine, Madame Tutli~Putli, Polar Express, transport information films and post-filmic subway zoetropes and railway simulation games. To conclude, it is argued that the animated railway journey can be read as a metaphor for the transience and flux at the root of contemporary society that Zygmunt Bauman has termed liquid modernity