Century Railway Research Articles

Nuts and bolts of informal empire – 19th century railway bridges in South America

Pedro Guedes explores the role of British, European and US engineers in developing the railway networks that spread across South America in the 19th century.

Tunnel Vision

A 19th century railway tunnel has become home to one of the most advanced vehicle test facilities in the world. Chris Pickering reports

言説分析によるデザイン史叙述の背景にある困難さ析出の試み : エリスの「NINETEENTH CENTURY RAILWAY CARRIAGES」を事例として

言説分析によるデザイン史叙述の背景にある困難さ析出の試み : エリスの「NINETEENTH CENTURY RAILWAY CARRIAGES」を事例として

Clinical Case Reports in mental health: the need for nuance and context.

Sharing an interesting clinical case report with a colleague recently elicited the remark, “… sounds like one of my clinical supervision sessions!” The comment got us reflecting on the value of clinical case reports. Research regulators such as Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council [1] place “case reports” alongside “case studies” as the lowest ranked type of credible research design. Apparently, this is because replication and generalization of case reports are normally either difficult or impossible – but is not that just the point? Clinical case reports are vitally important because, like precious gems, they often represent difference, describing cases and insights that are out of the ordinary and challenge current assumptions. Surprisingly, however, there has been negligible formal study of case reports and not infrequently there have been calls to cease publishing them [2]. In mental health, case reports may focus on the consumer's journey or life trajectory, providing the clinician with an opportunity to reflect and strengthen their practice. Sharing case reports and stories of hope, resilience, and struggle can provide a template of recovery that is within reach of all consumers. Clinicians often use jargon and medicalize people when in fact mental illness may represent only a small part of a person's life. Many mental health consumers are interested in how they and their “cases” are represented – in what clinicians are saying about them in notes and whether the content will harm their prospects and reputation. Thus, when reporting cases, clinicians need to provide a context to the consumer's journey. In this way, cases will be richer, more meaningful and useful to a professional audience. In mental health, one of the best-known examples of an influential case report is the story of 19th century railway worker Phineas Gage [3]. Recorded in 1948, this case report outlines medical observations and care provided by the General Practitioner John Harlow in the hours and days following a terrible railway accident. The report outlined how a doctor was called to attend following an explosion on a railway line that had blown a long iron rod completely through the left frontal lobe of Gage's brain. The fact that the patient survived became a front page news “miracle story.” However, within months of the accident friends and family began to notice that Gage's personality substantially changed. He was described as transforming from a polite, well respected member of his community preaccident, to an impulsive, aggressive person after the event [3]. The nature of Gage's personality change and his survival for many years after the accident, despite having his left frontal lobe destroyed, had considerable influence on neuroscientific theory of the day, challenging old ideas about the role and function of the frontal lobe of the brain [4]. Despite his injuries, which many assumed would cause permanent disability, Gage managed to keep working after his accident. Initially, he worked as a kind of living museum exhibit where people would pay money to marvel at his injuries and stick their fingers into the hole in his head. Later, he became a stage coach driver, a job he maintained for 7 years including several years working in Chile, before retiring [5]. Historians contend that Gage's ability to maintain employment in these occupations suggest he must have regained a more polite, stable character as he aged and his social circumstances changed. Insights from the clinical case report made about Phineas Gage have lent weight both to modern neurobiological theories on brain plasticity and to psychosocial models of rehabilitation that focus on mental health recovery [6]. Despite being a historical account of a single person's experience, Gage's story exemplifies the value of clinical case reports. They have a particularly important role in stimulating reflection and debate, as well as challenging traditional approaches to practice thereby influencing the direction of theory and research. Imagine what theory, practice and research might look like if we did not record and publish clinical case reports today? Where might the future of health science be if we ceased to study or write about difference? The case of Phineas Gage was truly a gem – his survival was miraculous. Through this man's misfortune and the careful recording of his case, the implications for the longer term of surviving such a horrific injury was able to be communicated to a community of scholars. As a consequence, there was enhanced understanding of the awareness that recovery is not linear and that for every step forward there may be steps backwards that in turn allow reflection and, in due course, renewed progress. Despite their lowly position in “evidence-base practice,” it would appear that case reports can make a significant contribution to the education of all mental health professionals and students, and enhance our understanding of the patient's journey.

London Underground: nineteenth century railway, twenty-first century standards

London Underground (LU) was the first underground passenger railway in the world. It was extended in three phases by different owners, all of whom used new techniques and materials to reduce costs. Like all pioneering works, some of the techniques and materials proved to have inherent faults, and the changes in ownership and the quest for cost reductions resulted in incomplete records. As a result of these various factors, LU suffered in-service failures. This paper describes failures associated with cast iron, longitudinally timbered bridges and clinker aggregate concrete. It outlines how LU dealt with the failures to enable continued safe operation, the investigations carried out to determine why the failures occurred and the solutions adopted to prevent similar failures occurring in the future. In each of the three cases, the paper explains how investigations into the failures enabled LU to retain the structures and avoid the prohibitive costs of replacement.

Characterization of the Fouled Ballast Layer in the Substructure of a 19th Century Railway Track Under Renewal

The purpose of these field and lab studies undertaken during rehabilitation work being done on an ancient railway line was to characterize a layer of ballast fouled with soil found in the track substructure. The field studies included the characterization of the thickness, grain size distribution and void ratio of the fouled ballast layer, as well as a large number of plate load tests, both on the fouled ballast layer and on the subgrade. The resilient behaviour of the fouled ballast was evaluated in the lab by cyclic triaxial tests on large size reconstituted specimens with distinct fouling indexes (different grain size distribution) and distinct humidity states (dry or wet). The results obtained were used as support for the decision to maintain the fouled ballast layer under the new sub-ballast in a number of stretches of the renewed line.

Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 127. Anglo-Scottish Relations, from 1603 to 1900. Edited by T. C. Smout. Pp. 294. ISBN: 978 0 19 726330 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. £40.00. Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 128. Anglo-Scottish Relations: from 1900 to Devolution and Beyond. Edited by William L. Miller. Pp. 284. ISBN: 978 0 19 726331 0.

A review of the book:Charles McKean, Battle for the North: The Tay and Forth Bridges and the 19th Century Railway Wars, Granta Books, (August 7, 2006), ISBN 1-86207-852-1.

Money and Sentiment: A Psychodynamic Approach to Behavioral Finance

This article tackles one of the timeliest issues for both practitioners and patients today: sentiment, psychodynamics, and the stock market. Economic bubbles and crashes have occurred regularly through history -- from Holland's 17th century tulip mania, to America's 19th century railway mania, to the 1990s high-tech obsession. Though most investors regard themselves as investing rationally, few do. Instead they react collectively, buying high and selling low in crowds. Being subject to the illusion of control, they follow regressive behavior patterns and irrational, wishful thinking. They are victimized by their own emotions of hope, fear, and uncertainty. Crises happen often in economics. Indeed, the market itself may be quantified as a conglomeration of human sentiment. The relationship between magical thinking and the pictorial language of the market will be explored. Psychodynamic conceptualizations about risk and speculation are discussed, as are the interplay of affects versus judgment, rational thinking, and the knowledge of one's own capacity for stress tolerance.

Validated analysis and strengthening of a 19th century railway bridge

A systematic study of a historic railway steel truss bridge, still in use, is presented. The study includes static and dynamic field measurements as well as laboratory tests. The tests have been conducted to develop a validated analytical model, which in turn is employed to assess the capacity of the bridge to carry heavier train loads as well as seismic and wind loads, as specified by current codes. Members that require strengthening or replacement are identified, strengthening schemes are proposed and the remaining fatigue life of the bridge in its present condition and after the suggested strengthening is predicted.

The railway mania of 1845‐1847: Market irrationality or collusive swindle based on accounting distortions?

The wild boom and slump of 1845‐1847 was the most important of the nineteenth century railway manias, in terms both of its scale and effects on the economy as a whole. It has almost invariably been seen as a market irrationality, a view fundamentally challenged by Bryer’s theorisation of it as a deliberate and collusive device of the “London wealthy”, aided by central government, to swindle provincial middle class investors. This analysis also greatly extended previous perspectives on the rôle of accounting by asserting that accounting practices were crucial to the success of the process and were thus “deeply implicated” in a great, class‐based swindle. The acceptance of such a perspective would have important implications for the way we understand the functioning of accounting and capitalism in the mid‐nineteenth century, but this paper instead argues that such notions are misconceived, looking to both the evidence that was available when Bryer’s paper was written and to recently collected data on the depreciation accounting practices of the time.

Working the System: Journeys through Corporate Culture in the ‘Railway Age’

In the 19th century railway work was a high-status occupation; a strong sense of occupational community and identification with work was present within the industry. Railway companies were uncompromisingly modern large-scale bureaucratically organised corporations, developing extensive networks of lines, changing physical, social, and economic geographies, and producing new forms of administrative space, In this paper it is argued that for its workers, both as the immediate subjects and as the producers of new forms of spatial organisation, experience of the corporate geography of the railway was intrinsic to the meaning of work and the status of railway workers in society. The metaphorical relationship between the story and the journey made by de Certeau is used to trace the relationships between the large-scale public geography of the railway corporation and the intimate private geography of individual biography.

The Railway Navvy: “That Despicable Race of Men.” By David Brooke. (North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1983. 216 pp. $21.00.) - The Railway Builders: Lives and Works of the Victorian Railway Contractors. By R. S. Joby. (North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1983. 200 pp. $19.95.) - Stephensons' Britain. By Derrick Beckett. (North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1984.

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Ground pressure and tunnelling from the nineteenth century to the present : Duffaut, P Underground Space, VI, N3, 1977, P185–200

The first deep tunnels were the 19th century railway tunnels driven through the Alps--the Frejus or Mount Cenis tunnel between France and Italy (13 km. under a cover of 1,600 m., driven from 1857 to 1866), the St. Gothard between southern Switzerland and northern Switzerland (15 km., cover 1,700 m., 1872-1881) and the Simplon, between Italy and Switzerland (20 km., cover 2,200 m. unsurpassed to the present day, driven in two successive tubes, the first from 1896 to 1906, the second from 1912 to 1921). Pt. 1. Tunnel design; Pt. 2, Tunnel construction.

Geotechnical aspects of tunnel construction for the Dinorwic power station : Whittle, R A Ground Engng, V10, N1, Jan 1977, P15–20

The main underground excavations in a folded and faulted sequence of purple, red and grey-blue cambrian slates interbedded with coarse, indurated sandstone beds is described, and the geology around the proposed caverns is illustrated. The report discusses geotechnical aspects of tunnelling in slate, and outlines the geotechnical data recording and prediction. The stability of old, 19th century railway tunnels was examined and found to correspond to stability conditions in the exploratory and access tunnels. It was found that discontinuities approximate to planes but deviate slightly with an amplitude of a few centimetres in about 15 metres. Considerable overbreak occurred when the tunnels were driven along or almost along the strike of the cleavage and hence along the most persistent of the near-vertical discontinuity sets. Most block failures from the roofs and walls of tunnels occurred at the time of blasting, and hand-scaling was carried out from the muckpile immediately after fume clearance. Post-blast loosening was more common in some rock types than in others. Tunnel records, together with detailed geological mapping in and around the Dinorwic Quarry and observations at the slate quarry to the north allowed a continuous updating of the contractors geological plans and sections.

The Engineer's Garden

This essay studies two nineteenth-century travel guides to Norway and looks at the way their descriptions and illustrations construe the national landscape. Written at the beginning of the railway era, these guides cater to a new kind of traveler – the railway tourist. This was a traveler who moved dast and effortlessly through the landscape and for whom the en route experience attained a new importance. The guides reflect this new perspective. They describe with meticulous care the attractions passing outside the compartment window and choreograph the travelers’ body and eye so that he (or occasionally she) would not miss a single vista. In his classic study of 19th-century landscape perception, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues that this particular view of the landscape was new to the nineteenth century, intrinsically linked to the new mode and speed of travel. This essay, however, suggests that the aesthetics of the mobile eye has a longer historical lineage, stretching back to the English garden of the eighteenth century. Using the notion of the fabrique – scenic elements placed as points of view in eighteenth-century landscape gardens – the essay identifies the particular fabriques of the nineteenth century railway landscape. It suggests, borrowing a term from the French historian Antoine Picon, that the nineteenth century railway landscape is a kind of “engineer’s garden”, conceived, composed, and experiences en route.

Railway Vehicle Flange Forces

Since the end of the last century railway engineers have known that when a railway vehicle passes round a curve a very large force can exist between the outer leading flange and the rail, even under equilibrium conditions. However it was not until Mr. S. R. M. Porter’s paper appeared in 1934 that a satisfactory method of calculating this force was established. Mr. Porter included in his paper two problems of considerable complexity which would take many hours or even days to solve. This may be one of the reasons why his paper is not more widely known.