It’s all in the name.

I noticed an enamel station door sign, “Cartage,” in a [not so recent, now] railwayana auction catalogue. It is defined, not surprisingly, as “the act or cost of carting” and elsewhere and more precisely, as “the charge for transporting goods for short distances, such as
within a commercial area or town, also called drayage or haulage.” Although the word itself has not quite disappeared from use, perhaps, it struck me as a quaint description in a world now dominated by “logistics” - as currently splashed over every other lorry on the motorway. In the end, it all boils down to moving stuff round, though cartage has the lingering smell of antiquity, or at least of horse manure, about it.

What a wonderfully rich language we have, and it is being added to all the time. Go back a few years and I would have said that a drone was the sound made by planes or insects. Now it has become something much more potent, and sometimes much more sinister than a means of filming moving steam locomotives from alongside or from above. A media snippet of them being used to round up sheep recently drew the response from a representative of the National Farmers’ Union that the idea “would not take off.”   

In the same auction catalogue, there were BR green doorplate signs that had once adorned entrances to various rooms at Southern Region locations - for “Cycles,” “Inspectors,” “Staff Only,” “Station Master,” “Goods Agent,” “Police,” “Private,” “Ticket Office,” “Ladies,” “Female Staff,” “Foreman,” “Ladies Room,” “Asst. Works Management,” “Gentlemen” and “Guards.” Today, if anybody was to go around putting up notices willy-nilly like that it would no doubt be described as “signage gone mad.”    

Signs, per se, have often amused me. Take these two seen in our village, for example. How rural are we in our commuter settlement with our own scarecrow festival? My wife offered to enter me in the competition. I think she was joking.

 

The instigator of the second one, which was carefully attached to a BT pole in an un-adopted road and just a stone’s throw from our house, seems to be going to quite a lot of trouble in order to avoid making a polite request in person. On reflection, I suppose that makes it a typically British modus operandi. I hasten to add that we do not have a dog, though our cat has been known to spread himself around a bit from time to time.

Outside our local bistro pub there is a notice claiming “Fresh food locally sourced from the land and the sea.” And the sea? We are so far from the sea here, that the “L” of ENGLAND is written right across our village in my road atlas. I nearly ran off the road recently, having done a quick double take and accompanying head jerk, when passing a bin lorry which announced across the side that it was, “Ambitious for the people of Nottinghamshire.” Maybe they had in mind the regular dash to Grimsby necessarily being made by our local publican to justify that promise to his customers. 

A quick flick through other recent railwayana auction catalogues has filled me in about doorplates, an area of the hobby that I had previously not taken much notice of [if you get my drift]. Enamelled signs in the six, still familiar, regional British Railways colours having clearly taken over from a wide range of cast iron - and relatively few earlier enamels - after 1948. There seemed to be lots of different ways of referring to similar things and there was certainly an extraordinary variety of plates.

As examples, I soon found - “Ladies Room,” “Ladies Only,” “Waiting and Ladies Room,” “Ladies Waiting Room,” “Ladies Waiting Room 3^rd Class,” “General Waiting Room,” “General Room,” “Waiting Room,” “Waiting Room 3^rd Class,” “General Room and Booking Office,” “Booking Office and Waiting Room,” “Booking Hall,” “Tickets,” “Ticket Office,” “Tickets and Enquiries,” “Enquiries,” “Enquiry Office,” “Station Master and Enquiry Office” and “Station Master.”

Signage had caught my eye when we were in America, as well. Cape May had the “Hell, Yeh, Water Sports Centre,” and outside what we would have described as an off-licence, was the blunt warning, “Liquor store - 10 minutes free parking or towed away.” We left as quickly as we could for a walk on the beach, only to find that a charge was made for using parts of it during certain times in the year - “No dog walking on beach or promenade – $8000 or 90 days in jail.”

My very unscientific survey of recent railwayana auction catalogues also turned up doorplates for Lamps, Porters, Porters Room, Refreshments, Parcels, Parcels and Left Luggage, Post Office, Telephone, Isolation Telephone, Goods Delivery Office, Goods Office, Gentlemen, Lavatory, Cloak Room, Telegraph and Linesman’s Hut, Permanent Way Inspector, Registered Weighing Machine Keeper, Foremen, Traffic Agent, Fire Brigade, Police, Guards Room, Signal Lineman’s Hut, Engineers Department, Ambulance Room, Stores, No Admittance, Shut This Door, Staff Private, Staff Only, Smoking Strictly Prohibited, No Smoking and even Scrap.

At the Sochi winter Olympics, an event-side advertising hoarding, “Cool Hot Yours,” reminded me how jarring comments designed to sound hip in English can often actually come across. In Tallinn, Estonia, I had been briefly transfixed by the name above a gift shop, “Jingly Jah Nooby Pood.” Back in time for the next auction, and the Penrhiwceiber Upper Signal Box board was up on the big screen. The auctioneer paused for a moment. “Looks like all the letters are there but they’ve got them in the wrong order.”

[This article was published in the May edition of the Railway Antiques Gazette, with thanks to the editor, Tim Petchey]