![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The alien new was thereby made to look reassuringly familiar, except that, after entering via the seemingly domestic door, you were shot out across a transfigured landscape as if from a cannon (as contemporaries frequently remarked). Their locations speak of the intimate connection of the station with industrial modernity, yet the stations themselves resembled classicising townhouses. The first purpose-built stations opened in 1830 at either end of the Liverpool to Manchester line, the world’s first intercity service. Opened in 1830, the Manchester–Liverpool line was the world’s first intercity service For many others, however, the station was a portal to hell: among them the indentured Chinese labourers who built railways across the US and Canada, the Indigenous peoples whose lands they occupied, and the Jews who were sent from them to their deaths. Larbaud was heir to a fortune, and could afford to muse with pleasurable melancholy on that terminal named happiness, which must exist somewhere, albeit in some now-inaccessible other place. In 1913, Valery Larbaud published a poem titled ‘The Old Station at Cahors’, which included the lines: ‘Station, a great door open to the lovely immensity / Of the Earth, somewhere on which divine happiness, / Like an unexpected, dazzling thing, must be.’ The obsolescence of the building he describes, which once connected here to everywhere but is now marooned, anticipates the war, when inveterate travellers such as Larbaud would have to shelve their Baedekers. While railway infrastructure enables new connections across countries and continents, the stations keep their face turned to the city ![]()
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