Hey HG, I get this, and I love your melancholy post, I can just imagine that shopping centre and walking past it, knowing, while everyone else busies about in ignorance. A lonely feeling for sure. But special. And secret...
There's a melancholy poetry to the notion of a disused railway station that captivates the maudlin side of my personality. These abandoned, overgrown, purposeless - and, in many cases, destroyed and no longer existent - structures act as metaphors for my insecurities and anxieties. Their impermanence reminds me that nothing is certain.
I first discovered them in the future. More specifically, in Arthur C Clarke's The City And The Stars, in which the protagonist escapes the confines of his sealed metropolis by discovering an abandoned underground rail link to similar cities. As a restless teenager in a provincial town, I wished I too could descend into the earth and re-emerge somewhere new.
My first real brush with mortality came when my grandpa died just before I became a teenager. My remaining grandparents lived until I was in my mid-to-late twenties, so I felt that I'd at least had some chance to know and understand them from an adult viewpoint. Grandpa F, however, remains half-remembered and enigmatic: photographer become spectral projection.
He worked in a railway station that no longer exists, now buried under the foundations of a shopping centre, but whose access tunnels remain under the city centre of Nottingham, unknown to most of its inhabitants, still serving a civic purpose of sorts. I sometimes wonder if I could walk back in time up these subterranean channels.
Such covert, submerged longings serve little purpose. Nor, indeed, do the broader feelings of claustrophobia and pessimism that conjure these fragmentary, ghosted broodings on transit and stasis. Indeed, in the blackened tunnels of the mind and the muted embankments of the heart, closure should surely bring peace and tranquillity.
And yet I return constantly to these erased tracks, caught off guard, discovering myself to be the driver but yet not driven enough. Again the engine rattles over the points, wheels sparking and grinding. Once more the steam whistle shrieks pitilessly. In the dark night, the passenger-less train hurtles forward, bound remorselessly for Black Dog Halt.
Posted by Hg on Tuesday 17 April 2007 at 23:41.
Received 6 comments so far.
Comments
Glad you enjoyed it. The odd thing is that although I've known about this stuff for ever, it has only really grabbed my imagination over the past five years or so. Probably as I've done more research and found more pictures on the web.
The tunnel in the picture included in this post was overgrown by trees until very recently. However, its companion tunnel north of the old station site was a constant throughout my childhood and adolescence, visible from the Victoria Centre bus station (itself now demolished and relocated).
I saw it regularly from the same perspective as this picture and I knew why it was there, but the enormity of what had disappeared never really hit me. It's still there, though there's now a car park on most of that green space (which actually means that you can get closer).
The thing that really blew my mind (and I appreciate that I'm getting deep into ranty geek mode here) was finding an online scan of a book that showed all of this stuff being built in the final few years of the nineteenth century.
I was particularly amazed by the bottom picture on this page of the tunnel being built and the top picture on this page, which is the same tunnel mouth as my own picture in this post.
On a more personal note, I think Grandpa F was one of the clerks in this booking office. Nowadays he'd probably be called a Retail Travel Configuration Advisor or something similarly horrendous.
As you can see from the link, Black Dog Halt really did/does exist. However, it has nothing to do with the tunnels in Nottingham.
The first four paragraphs are factual, but then things get a bit more figurative, reflecting my uneasy and restless state of mind when I originally drafted this piece late one night a couple of weeks ago. For that purpose, BDH is used with poetic license purely for artistic effect.
Too kind. The real BDH is in Wiltshire, just outside Calne on the road to Chippenham. I must remember that in case I'm ever in the area.
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