British Railway Enthusiasm (review)

"Railway enthusiasm" is, according to Ian Carter, a particular tendency of the British. He makes an informed estimate that in the mid-1990s some 10 percent of the population "entertained a significant interest in trains and railways" (p. 12). Such a situation implies a demand for sociological investigation. Carter identifies railway enthusiasm as being an abiding preoccupation of, in the main, the "white,middle-class and male" (p. 279). He goes further to assert that it was the postwar baby boomers who were the leading generation to engage with "trainspotting," model railways, and steam preservation. This leads him to conclude that, with relatively little interest being shown by younger generations today, railway enthusiasm is facing a decline.

Carter begins by affirming that his investigation will be "written from within the culture which it seeks to understand," and he creates his distinct habitus by adding that his book describes "a life-world for those unfortunate enough not to live in it" (p. 10). In the chapters that follow he identifies areas of railway enthusiasm and examines each in turn. This begins with an account of the rise and decline from 1946 to 2005 of book and magazine publishing dedicated to railway subjects, as well as railfan societies and clubs. Useful statistics and historical accounts are provided, as is the full range of academic apparatus, yet Carter often breaks from a conventional writing style and at times uses literary allusions and turns of phrase that some readers may find difficult.

The middle, and most substantial, section of Carter's book recounts one episode from the history of steam preservation in Britain. With an insider's eye for detail (he declares himself to be a member of one of the societies involved) Carter explores the legal and political attempts to reinstate the Welsh Highland Railway, and not without justification does he give this chapter the title "Blood on the Tracks." The account of the judicial reviews, financial maneuvers, and infighting among various groups of supporters of rival steam preservation groups, though gripping, is not necessarily typical of the preservation movement as a whole in Britain during the past sixty years.

Carter next moves to the world of railway modeling with an investigation into the complexities of scale and gauge, which he explains with such clarity that the reader is left wondering at the inability of British railway modelers to agree on a standard for their hobby. This is followed by a historical account of the leading firms involved in making, distributing, and selling model locomotives and equipment from 1901 to the present.

What Carter has achieved is a groundbreaking account of a quintessential aspect of mid- and late-twentieth-century life in Britain. His accounts of each particular form of railway enthusiasm, from trainspotting—standing at the end of a windy station platform to note down locomotive numbers—to working as a ticket collector on a steam heritage line to grappling with the fine detail of a model railway layout, are all laid out in substantial historical detail. Carter's work fully answers the how; what is required now is an understanding of why such an enthusiasm arose among a substantial segment of British society. Carter does not provide detailed answers but he does point to a nonacademic work, part autobiography and part travelogue, that provides the much-needed ethnographic input: In Parallel Lines or, Journeys on the Railway of Dreams (2003), Ian Marchant's thesis is that enthusiasts have created a fictional railway in their model layouts and steam heritage rides as a direct reaction to the inefficient, dirty, and overcrowded trains that have marked the reality of public rail travel in Britain for almost two centuries. The two volumes are worth reading together.