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Music and railways


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Off the back of the Hornby 4/6 wheel coaches thread, what music do you associate with railways, railway companies, regionss, routes, workings, or locations?   Elgar is clearly the musical embodiment of the GW's high ideals, the Dean/Churchward era and it's innate culture of superiority of others, but there are others; this is clearly an individual thing.  For me, any music in a 6/8 time signature evokes 3 cylinder steam, Gresley if there is syncopation. Some of my associations are from memories, some from my imagination.  Mike Oldfieild's final 1st side movement from the first Tubular Bells, the actual 'Tubular Bells' track everyone knows, puts me on the footplate of a fully loaded and rough riding 28xx banging up to Llanvigangel from Abergavenney (steam age spelling), with the fireman's battle with the pressure gauge, and shutting off as it breasts the summit and steam is shut off, and the fireman wrings out the scarf that has kept the sweat out of his eyes.  'The Hall of the Mountain King' evokes Box Tunnel, and John Lee Hooker's 'Highway 16' the Severn Tunnel, for reasons I cannot really explain.

 

Anything from Led Zeppelin evokes Snow Hill for fairly obvious reasons, but Cream's 'White Room' means New Street, the old, dark, smoky, hemmed in claustrophobic New Street which had places where the sun never shone on the Midland side. Gregorian chant takes me to the railway cathederals, a fairly obvious association, but especially the great single gothic vault of St Pancras.

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Honegger’s Pacific 2-3-1 puts me in the front coach behind an A4 setting out to climb Stoke Bank.

 

I suspect one of the members of Pappa Truck (Bluegrass Band) works for Chiltern Railways as one of their songs (The Sun is Rising)  is about driving a Chiltern train. Makes me feel like I’m in the cab of a dmu heading for Marylebone.

 

Lots of early blues music makes me feel like a hobo travelling in a freight train, I can hear the clickety clack of the rail joints and whistles blowing in the night.

 

A

Edited by ColinK
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1 hour ago, ColinK said:

 

 

Lots of early blues music makes me feel like a hobo travelling in a freight train, I can hear the clickety clack of the rail joints and whistles blowing in the night.

 

A

Howlin Wolf: Smokestack lightning:

 

Regards

Fred

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Sade's Smooth Operator always make me think of a class 56 (038 to be precise) with the line

 

"Coast to coast, LA to Chicago, western male. "

 

But then I'm a funny onion

 

Andy

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The first music I remember as a child, apart from nursery rhymes, I mean on record, was Leadbelly's 'Rock Island Line'; 'gettin' up a li'l steam, gettin' up a li'l, an' that driver gon' talk to the depot agent, with his whistle, an' he tell him; 'I fooled you, I fooled you, I got pig iron I got pig iron I got aaaaaaaallllll pig iron...'.

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I don't really associate any one type of music with railroading, either full size or HO modeling.

 

I do however listen to Antenne Bayern Schlagersahn while running my German DB HO railroad. Usually tipping back a good German lager whilst doing so.

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Vivian Ellis, who wrote the music "Coronation Scot" apparently never travelled on the train, he was on the "Cheltenham Flyer" when the melody came into his head.  At least he gave the music the name of a superior train.

Much as I like "Corrie Scot" it is a bit of an overworked cliche whenever a piece of music is needed to go with film of something steamy.  There are a number of other Light Music composers who have done music with a railway theme but most British light music for me captures the false nostalgia a lot of people have for the 1930s and 1950s steam railway (I say false nostalgia because reality was often very different from the idyll modern day "heritage" railways package - holiday trains would have been overcrowded, slow and relatively expensive for ordinary people on poor wages, branch line trains would have been slow, uncomfortable and old, and of course steam was notoriously dirty).

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Here's one I grew up with (no I'm not that old. I had my father's musical tastes  force fed )

 

Played on a 78

 

Sort of reminds me of the all shacks from  Brum on the way home after a long shift

 

 

 

Andy

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6 hours ago, wombatofludham said:

Vivian Ellis, who wrote the music "Coronation Scot" apparently never travelled on the train, he was on the "Cheltenham Flyer" when the melody came into his head.  At least he gave the music the name of a superior train.

Much as I like "Corrie Scot" it is a bit of an overworked cliche whenever a piece of music is needed to go with film of something steamy.  There are a number of other Light Music composers who have done music with a railway theme but most British light music for me captures the false nostalgia a lot of people have for the 1930s and 1950s steam railway (I say false nostalgia because reality was often very different from the idyll modern day "heritage" railways package - holiday trains would have been overcrowded, slow and relatively expensive for ordinary people on poor wages, branch line trains would have been slow, uncomfortable and old, and of course steam was notoriously dirty).

The near total collapse of the WR's 1959 West of England Summer Bank Holiday timetable, on a hot day in a hot summer, probably sold more cars than any other single event in British social history.  Of course the result was the superjams on the Exeter bypass, but in their cars, people could get out and walk around. 

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There’s a line in ‘Night Mail’ that raised the hairs on the back of my neck when I first read it in school, when I must have been 12 or 13; ‘in a farm near Beattock nobody wakes/but a jug in a bedroom gently shakes’.  
 

Still does. 

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25 minutes ago, cypherman said:

Hi all.

For me it is the open sequence from Poirot with the 1920's stylised A4. Sorry still cannot post links on this site.

I do like that intro - but it’s 30’s rather than 20’s.  I particularly like the graphics, closely following the style of the LNER’s promotion posters for the Silver Jubilee.

 

John

 

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