INDUSTRIAL DESIGN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 22, 26 January 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN.

CHANGE IN RAILWAYS.

FROM ROCKET TO STREAMLINE

(By CYRANO.)

The industrial revolution may take discredit, I think, for creating more ugliness in a hundred and fifty years or 60 than civilisation produced in whatever the number of thousands in which it may be reckoned. Machinery was ii£ly; houses and factories were ugly; (owns were ugly. Iron and coal and dirt, smoke and grime and litter—all these were characteristic of the enormous development of the new idea. Men were so intent on making things, and through them making money, that they simply ignored beauty. Already we feel our consciences pricking when we look at a Black Country manufacturing town; our great-grandsons may be as horrified at the contemplation of such hideousness as wc are at the thought of small children working in mines.

Beauty, however, will not lie denied. It is coming back to the world through (he crust of the industrial revolution. Men arc not only demanding that the poor shall be comfortably housed. Tliev are asking that their homes be aesthetically designed. A factory is 110 longer regarded purely as a box in which men and women work. The aesthetics of architecture are being applied to it. And we sec the same consideration being applied to many objects great and small, '['ho British Government appoints a commission to study the application of design to manufacture, and an exhibition illustrating (his application is now running in London. The old idea that so long as a thing is useful nothing else matters, is being discredited. It must be beautiful, or at least dignified, as well. Design of Trains. Take trains for example. The pictures tell their story. Stephenson, in designing the Rocket, had no eye for aesthetics. We can hardly expect him to have had; he had to concentrate 011 the utility of his daring invention. 80 had the first makers of motor cars. The ugliness of the old-time railway engine is illustrated in the desigu of the Belpriau engine used as late as IK7 0. The railway engine improved in appearance as they shortened its smoke-stack and made its wheels less spidery, but it remained ugly. According to that fascinating book, "Design in Modern Life," railway designers were hampered because they inherited the plan of a horse-carriage.

When railways began, passengers were just packed into trucks nnd left in the rain and the smoke and tlie grit to get on as best they could during the journey. But wealthy people used to have their horse-drawn coaches hoisted up on to a flat truck, and,lashed down safely, so that a vehicle that was really designed l'or the road was perched like a piece of luggage on a vehicle that -was designed for the railway. When covered carriages were made at last,, the memory of the coach tied on the railway truck was a fearful nuisance. It prevented people from thinking that a railway coach was an entirely new problem, needing an entirely fresh design, which would make the coach really fit for its purpose. Instead, everybody remembered the horse coach riding on top of the truck, and in consequence the early railway coaches were made to look almost exactly like two or three horse-drawn coaches sandwiched together. To this day the tradition of the individual coach still lingers on in the individual compartments of most railway carriages, for the saloon carriage is still comparatively rare, and vis usually used as a restaurant car.

This is not just to designers outside Britain, for the saloon car has long been used in American, Canadian and Dominion railways. Probably economy was largely responsible for the persistence of the old type of railway carriage. The type of carriage in which passengers sit back to back seems to one preferable to tlio English compartment type in which three or four passengers face another three or four. It is embarrassing sometimes to have to look at faces every time you raise your eyes, and when I say this I am not unmindful of my own plainness. Moreover the adjustable chair is much more comfortable than the fixed seat. But exterior and interior designs are changing. Look at the streamlined steam engine in the picture to-day, an<l compare it with the old type with the heavy smokestack. Streamlining is being applied to railways as to motor cars (which in a much shorter time have made much progress in design tlian trains), but I for one hope that it will not go so far as it has in motor design. The new cars that make an angle front and back so that you are in doubt which is the front and which is the back, seem to me less beautiful than many of the designs of the transition period.-But it is interesting to note how trains are following motor cars in design, and there is no doubt that competition is partly responsible for this. The road has challenged the railway, and the railway, after a period of semi-panic, is taking up the challenge. Recent messages

from England state that the English railway companies plan to spend millions in modernising their services. In America a streamlined train has been evolved that looks as if it had no engine. A person accustomed to the funnelled engine with its plume of steam and smoke, might fail to recognise it as a train. Effect of Association. Of course prejudice and association enter into one's judgment in those matters. To me an internal combustion engine drawing a train is less human than a steam engine. The absence of a funnel worries me, just as it does in a ship. The French, who are more logical than the British, are said to be considering the abolition of funnels on motor ships. If I travelled in a funnel-less ship 1 would feel there was something lacking—something that gave balance to the ship, something familiar and friendly. Incidentally, it is doubtful

if some recent developments in ship design have been improvements aesthetically. The towering, heavy-looking superstructures of some big ships are oppressive to me. Compare the lovely lines of the Monowai, including the straight-run relatively low decks, with the piled up amidship mass of the Strathnaver. The Monowai looks like a ship, the Strathnaver (and there are many like her) suggests a hotel superimposed on a ship. But much depends on surroundings. A ship may look much better under way than tied up to a wharf. Similarly, a railway engine may look ugly and prosaic in a station or a siding, but attach it to a train and scud it tearing along a wooded stretch of the North Island Main Trunk line on a still night —what a change! The train cleaves the silence of the night as the liow of a liner divides the sleek .swell, and in the rush and c'amour of engines and carriages there is tlie beauty of imperious and triumphant power.