Despite the title, this post is about ecological re-conquest.
The train was a born in Great-Britain. Of course, it only modernized the old human practice of wheels on tracks begun at the Isthmus of Corinth in Ancient Greece and known in mine works then. It followed a local animal traction over tracks form with the marvel of a motor doing the work matted to rails and the locomotive was born. The rails dated back to 1763 but the steam engine of Thomas Newcomen, adapted from earlier English and French designs and already over 50 ( the engine not the inventor ), was still immobile : it moved stuff but it didn’t move itself. Enter a Scottish inventor ( remember he’s Scottish, it will come in handy later ) named James Watt as the light output from bulbs and was he bright for he made the steam engine small, powerful, portable ( and reciprocating ) and had the locomotive in mind. That happened on February 21st 1804 thanks to Englishman Richard Trevithick. 10 years later in 1814, two hundred years ago as I write, George Stephenson made the flanged wheel and modern rails into the most commercially acceptable proposition yet. His designs and licenses brought the train to the US and Germany & France.
Europe developed rapidly enough if unequally by country but it was in the USA that the future of trains would bets shine at the time. First through the size of the country and second to the rapid growth of it. Not only was there place for trains but as conquest of the West ( 1830+ ) was raging, they’d soon be necessary! Railroads grew like ( magic ) dust on your computer screen : some covered barely over a mile ( < 2km ) and one railway was trying to cross the continent. In America more than anywhere else, the formats varied a lot, over 20 in all. And yet all these were rationalized to build the world’s largest railroad network. Sadly, between technology as the passenger plane and staunch individualism as the car, this impressive realization embodied by the Twentieth Century Limited legendary train line began to decline by 1950. Another rationalization fixed the cargo speed at a mile an hour but locomotives still evolve and pull more and more wagons or mass per load.
For passengers, the contest moved to higher speeds in Japan in the mid-1960s then France circa 1981 where it became a necessity that spread all over. Those high speed lines mirror the track width debate. To go fast, you need wide tracks. A small country will choose small tracks though. But different countries that interconnect with rails need a common width. And high speed trains require their own track to reach 200 mph and not one! Still, by beating the plane on 400 to 700 km distances they move a lot of people. And speeds beyond that have a reducing revenue curve.
From the above, one could conclude that 300kph trains on 1435 mm tracks would work everywhere which would be wrong. Some places like Australia do not expect many ferries and have no need for an external standard as long as they build their own, that is. In Nepal or Tibet, you won’t find a patch of flatland wide enough for big gauge tracks and the engines need more power to pull up in the rarefied atmosphere ( no electrification, so atmospheric motors ) but nearly idle save to brake on the way back down to the valley. In Spain, there is no where else to go, end of the continental (rail)road. So that the Spaniards hung on to their odd track trains but also adopted the French TGV ( normal track ) where needed … and invented a variable width wheelbase wagon platform to move from one to the other that they can now sell to other narrow gauge railroads.
All of which is offered as an example of human made network for further, more philosophical, examination. Should we rationalize some more and force Spain to use the same gauge as everyone else? The answer is no. In a world of globalization, the exception becomes refreshing and priceless. After all, why is a voyager on that train that adapts widths at the French border Mumbai to Madrid and had the same McDonald burgers as anywhere else on Earth or almost but no, they wanted to travel through Spain as well as to it. It is not Spain the geographic if Iberian peninsula but the people that call it home they are visiting. Chances are that they’ll try to learn the language. To these true travelers, the funky railroad track width is part of Spain, what the French call cultural exceptions.
I cherish cultural exception but one has to wonder, how refined can it get? If everyone had a secret ingredient not two the same for their burgers, even the fast food joint mentioned above would get slower for it. Standardized has advantages, costs less, more available, safer products, etc. How small is too small? Well, there are networks in nature that can compare and serve as example. I’ll pick the human body. It has biological railroads called veins and arteries. By the end of the blood loop ( in Spain ), the little living pipes that carry your blood get to be so tiny that in the end the red life liquid is suspended freely in the tissue from which it is grabbed by the pressure tide of a nearby superficial vein before making its way back to the heart and lungs for recycling. You never worry about this twilight zone for your blood network, do you? The best reason not to being that it doesn’t matter; it’s even made that way! At such a small scale, the over all network loses worth and singular solutions, cultural exceptions, apply instead.
Thus there are places fit for smaller trains and some not fit for trains at all; one such as the latter is called Eigg. It is a huge rock with a tiny island around it found on the Scottish coast ( remember Watt, our Scottish engineer? 😉 ) amongst a smattering of dots called the Small Isles of the Inner Hebrides. And a dot it is, 5×9 km or twelve square miles. A dot which despite being so minute has a long history that includes another type of networking.
Photo Mitch Garrat. Click for link.
Around the eighth century, the assemblage of Nordic people we think of under the single term Vikings began colonizing the Scottish Isles where the Picts were just finished resisting Irish Christianization. Eigg was already populated by then, maybe even since the Neolithic, certainly by the Bronze Age. The Vikings must have found the area by Cleadale a great spot as did the sheep on the highland plain around An Sgurr ( the big rock ). Their influence is felt yet and Clanranald, the subdivision of the MacDonald clan Eigg relates too, sounds almost as Norse as it does Scottish Gaëlic. The clan system, which by the way as they warred each other earned Eigg a massacre, virtual island genocide, from which the place rose as the proverbial Phoenix is not however the network that changed its destiny and interests us. From the Middle Ages, Scotland kept a complex system of land ownership. Not only is it based on a bouquet of strange and sometimes conflicting sets of measurements sure to give headaches to a user of such an elegantly simple one as the Metric /IS is but what these define is not fixed. The most basic unit was known as a croft. I should not say was since Scotland still has a croft overseeing office, having kept its traditional ways which is commendable ( i.e. cultural exception again ) & which plays a role in Eigg’s modern and particular status.
The croft was essentially a sublet agricultural land. Back in the days, some tenants had about as much power as the Middle Age serfs or slaves while others were normal farmers if not owners. If status varied which was fixed since by the Highland Council and both Parliaments, so did size which here matters. Croft size you see varies by a factor 100. While a normal croft should be 5 hectares, some are a tenth of it only ( 0.5 ha ) and some ten times as big ( 50 ha ). You can surely guess that rent but also rentability varies just as wildly as a consequence. It could have worked and there is an analogy to a body network here too as hormones vary in dosage to adapt to particular times and needs, a supple adaptive response. In the Early Industrial Age however, with land work giving way slowly to factories, landlords favored smaller crofts which in smaller places was no good. On a small island, too many ( read too small ) crofts ended up putting the inhabitants and community in danger by pauperization. Eigg has regularly carried 500 souls. If you make 500 crofts out of it, they’d be hard pressed to survive.
As modernity and its trademark rural exodus took place though, such small “outdated” places as Eigg lost most of their folks : it is now below the one hundred mark which is quite fine! One of the reasons for this that modern folks in rich countries take for granted is electricity ( which in Scotland played a role in adapting the croft status ). Not so long ago, electricity was a manna so attractive that it alone warranted leaving an ancestral land. Interestingly, full speed modernity is now generating more folks that want back to nature than ever. 😉 Eigg, on top of not having railroads ( it does have a ferry but for cars not trains ), has none : no electricity incoming from the mainland. Now I know what some will think at this point : -No electricity, no bridge, no trains, few people, what a hellhole, why are we even discussing this, etc. Well precisely as an example of small is beautiful. For if the island is pretty, what has been done with it is brilliant figuratively and factually.
When the landlords began forgetting about their insular slavery patches in the twentieth century, the population dwindled. An Sgurr remained as a reason for mainlanders to visit but not good enough of one to stay there until … the faeries came back.
As the island’s fate seemed sealed, likely being bought, electric lines paid for & installed and turned into a rich and famous resort or attraction park, some of the new style residents partnered with the Highland Council and Scottish Wildlife Trust ( birds like small quiet islands a lot) and in 1997, Eigg was bought out by the Eigg Heritage Trust from crazy Maruna, it’s last Laird ( owner/master ).
Green and pristine it would stay.
The ferry was modernized, a building to house guest facilities by the jetty was built so that tourism would grow but the big investment went of course to electricity. Croft houses had adapted by adding some source of current : diesel generators and more recently wind or hydro ones when possible not all reliable and expensive. A grid was built. There is still a diesel emergency system but there are now batteries to stock some electricity and regulate it over time and the main sources have become solar panels, 3 hydro plants and a field of wind turbines. And cultural exception makes a comeback : because Eigg is small and the project young, there is not that much to go by on, you just can’t have both indoor and outdoor Christmas trees nor leave the TV and appliances on when not in use but because Eigg’s residents want to live on that small scale frame of a bit of world, they share! Until the grid provides enough, they have a warning light that tells them when to restrict their consumption. By adhering to the idea, demand is reduced by up to 20+ % at times and all have enough for essentials. Which has reduced diesel use to less than 2 %, the rest of the community’s needs being from renewable energies. And while it develops towards more output and zero percent footprint, the place serves as an example, prototype and public voice on climate change which earned it multiple awards.
Big and uniform is not my idea of a perfect world; I hope it is not yours. Humans come in many variants of sizes and tastes and so should their living quarters, transportation and communities. Networks to link us, fine; networks to control us, not so much! Standards to make life safer and better, sure; standards to limit your movements or choices, forget it! Big Macs may taste alike everywhere, I still want to be able to differentiate between one Long Island and the next Eigg. One size does not fit all and innovation is never standard!
In fact, Eigg again hints that maybe, just maybe the solution to our global growth pains may not be in bringing the network to the Spains and Eiggs of this world; in fact may be not to!
We’ll come back to it.
Tay.
A very nice pictorial tale of quiet Eigg life ( to see why they live there ) :
http://nomadandvillager.com/en/destinations/isle-eigg-in-the-picture/
Beautiful images by a talented professional that were used for the faeries story in French only :
http://www.arthur-dressler.com/2011/03/eigg-island-une-revolution-verte/
Official links :
Additional reading :
Definitive Lapse of Reason 