The images are not technically brilliant -- small negatives with grainy, low-contrast images -- but they are hugely atmospheric.
A shot of cars in one of the yards shows how intensive the service was at the peaks.
And many of the stations seem to be four-track jobs, allowing both stopping and express services.
Liverpool was a member of the select group of cities which operated these elevated delights, as was Boston (by which I mean the one in the US, not the original market town of that name in Lincolnshire). Here's a sneaky Boston shot, amongst all the New Yorkers:
Being a youthful cove I've only experienced the elevated "railroad" in Chicago and most of these glorious systems have long-since been dismantled.
Instead, the fashion today is to bury public transport in the Stygian underground darkness, leaving the streets free for capitalist private cars.
After all, people too poor or eccentric to have their own cars don't deserve exuberant public services like this:
You can still get a faint echo of what overhead railways might have been like on parts of Britain's urban national rail network -- flying out of Cannon Street, Charing Cross or Blackfriars stations onto a bridge over the Thames, or travelling for mile after mile on huge brick viaducts across south London. But nothing like this:
I'm sure they had their disadvantages, and they can't have been much fun to live next to.
But I would so like to have experienced more of them before they disappeared.
4 comments:
My Irish immigrant father was a track layer on the New York City Elevated system. Every day, he would go out and rip up rail and ties and replace them by hand with trains buzzing around him. Being from rural Ireland, he would come home nearly every night to tell me about some spot in the city that he'd never seen nor visited again and marvel at the vastness. Now that I'm a NYC banker and have to use the system daily, whenever I'm sick of being 'on the subway', I think fondly of the long gone aul' fella working on what he called a '39 footer' which I think was the weight of 12 inches of track.....and am thankful that it still exists for the benefit of all.
Thanks for sharing. In England, your father would have been called a "plate layer" -- from the pre-history of railways when they rails were in the form of "L"-shaped plates.
I well remember being taken for a trip on the Liverpool Overhead as a child - it ran from Dingle and Herculaneum in the south to Seaforth Sands in the north if my memory serves me well, and it was known as the Dockers' Umbrella. Sadly the patronage fell away as the small old docks for small old ships nearer the Pier Head were perforce abandoned and gave way to ever larger docks to the north and south and the Overhead became something of an irrelevance, and with inevitable corrosion of the structure it was closed at about the same time as the magnificent Liverpool trams, the 'Green Goddesses"
In case you were curious, that car in the lower right of xPicture+2.png is a 1953 Oldsmobile.
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