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SOCIÉTÉ
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High Speed Rail dreams
SUR LES RAILS. Un nouveau projet de train à grande vitesse reliant Londres à Manchester et remontant, à terme, jusqu’en
Ecosse, a été dévoilé en Grande-Bretagne le mois dernier. Il faut bien admettre que suite à la privatisation radicale du réseau
ferroviaire, la rapidité et la fiabilité des trains ne faisaient plus depuis bien longtemps la fierté des Britanniques nostalgiques de l’épopée du rail ! Tout cela devrait changer.
THE INDEPENDENT
BY ANDREW MARTIN
High Speed Rail dreams
Des rêves de trains à grande
vitesse
High Speed Rail TGV / route itinéraire, ici ligne /
enlightened éclairé (civilisé) / presumably probablement, sans doute / moneyed aisé, riche /
subterranean souterrain / close to completion en
voie d’achèvement / at a loose end désœuvré /
to proceed aller / instance cas / Brummie (fam.)
natif/habitant de Birmingham / to lobby exercer des pressions, faire campagne / to fork bifurquer / stage étape, phase.
2. tingle picotement, fourmillement / wet dream
rêve érotique / pipe dream chimère.
Network Rail is the government-created
owner and operator of most of the rail
infrastructure in Great Britain (England,
Scotland and Wales). It owns the infrastructure, including the railway
tracks, signals, tunnels, bridges, level
crossings and most stations, but not
the passenger or commercial freight
rolling stock. Although it owns over
2,500 railway stations, it manages only
18 of the biggest and busiest of them,
all the other stations being managed
by one or other of the various train operating companies.
10 • VOCABLE Du 14 au 27 avril 2011
The Napier Deltic engine was quite famous in it's time. (DR)
he Government has just announced
the beginning of its consultation on
the proposed High Speed Rail route
that will be built from 2015. That is, 2015 or
so – in that enlightened, and presumably
moneyed, era when the subterranean London expressway, Crossrail, will be close to
completion, leaving our civil engineers at
a loose end. It will proceed in the first instance from London to Birmingham or – as
the Brummies who’ve been lobbying so hard
for the line would probably have it – from
Birmingham to London, where it will serve
a rebuilt Euston station. It will then fork to
Leeds and Manchester in a second stage of
building and go to Scotland in a third.
2. When the announcement was made I felt
that same tingle of excitement I’d experienced when Cameron, days after coming to
power, first confirmed that he would pro-
T
ceed with the line. Because it is every rail enthusiast’s... I was about to say “wet dream”
but I think “pipe dream” is more appropriate in this milieu.
Memories
3. The last time I’d experienced this tingle was in the late Seventies, when I would sit
on the parapet of St Helen’s railway bridge,
just south of York station, and watch the
Deltics go by. Deltics (introduced 50 years ago
this spring) were powerful, roaring diesel-electric locomotives that looked as though they
were wearing ray-bans. They worked the East
Coast main line and were named after either
racehorses or regiments, which is exactly what
locomotives should be named after. (In the
Nineties, when the PR men had got control of
the network, I saw an engine at King’s Cross
called The Richard and Judy Show).
One of the many propositions for the high speed train. (DR)
Network Rail
i
i
3. to introduce lancer, inaugurer / to roar rugir,
vrombir / to name after baptiser du nom de /
racehorse cheval de course / PR = Public Relations / engine moteur / The Richard and Judy
Show émission de divertissement/talk show diffusée de 2001 à 2009 et présentée par le couple
Richard Madeley et Judy Finnigan.
4. I shouldn’t be surprised if the withdrawal
of the Deltics could be closely correlated with
the declining numbers of young men wanting to read engineering at university. In
terms of railway glamour they left a very big
hole indeed, only partially filled by the arrival of Eurostar, which now runs along the
route designated High Speed One, as opposed
to 2015 project, which is to be High Speed
Two or HS2. I did continue with my railway
interest in the post-Deltic era, but in such
a way that my excitement over a high speed
future is tainted with anxiety...
The underdog
i
One of the many propositions for the high speed train. (DR)
5. In adulthood, I began to appreciate
trains for much the same reason John Betjeman did: because they represented the
past; because they were the underdog; because they were more redolent of the countryside than the town. Today, Britain is the
world capital of heritage railways, with hundreds of Quixotic lines dedicated to turning
back the clock – so many Titfield Thunderbolts or, in the more mawkish cases, so many
Thomas The Tank Engines. It is arguable that
this has been the dominant tone of rail enthusiasm for a hundred years and that the
preservation movement takes its cue from
the early-twentieth century railway romanticism expressed in The Railway Children,
where the eponymous youngsters treat the
tracks as a playground.
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6. Most of the main trunk railways had been
completed by the end of the 1860s and the
hewing of those lines had produced a very
different sort of poetry. It bemoaned the despoliation of the countryside, the triumphalism of the engineers, and the greed
of the speculators – the “Thirst of Gold” that,
according to William Wordsworth in A Just
Disdain, “rules o’er Britain like a baneful
star”. That was published in the mid 1840s
– the time of the second “railway mania”, in
the midst of which Dickens published his
novel of railway speculation, Dombey and
Son. In Staggs’s Gardens, north London (a
Stag was a railway speculator), the “earthquake” of railway construction has arrived.
“There were a hundred thousand shapes and
substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air... as
unintelligible as any dream.”
Today, Britain is
the world capital of
heritage railways.
7. It was the building of the London and
Birmingham railway’s route out of Euston
that Dickens had observed... And do those
proper nouns ring familiarly? Yes, because
HS2 takes us right back to those fraught, elemental days: a brand new route connecting
the cities served by the very first trunk route.
But this new one can’t follow the route of
the existing London-Birmingham line (too
crooked, too built-up), and so must veer west,
blundering into attractive countryside.
Change
8. The railways are presuming to change
Britain again and so they are upsetting
Britain again. The focus of the opposition
is upon the effect of the new line on the
Chiltern landscape. The anti-HS2 campaigners argue that when the line is complete, an area the size of Manchester will
have been concreted over. But it does seem
as though the historical dynamic is once
more with the railways – that HS2 will, as
Dickens wrote of its predecessor, be “defiant
of all obstacles”. ●
4. withdrawal retrait, ici suppression, mise hors
service / closely étroitement, de près / to decline
baisser, diminuer / to read, read, read ici étudier / hole trou, vide / to taint entacher, gâter.
5. underdog opprimé, (candidat, concurrent)
défavorisé, donné perdant / to be redolent of
rappeler, évoquer / countryside campagne / heritage (du) patrimoine historique, culturel / Quixotic chimérique (de Don Quixote Don Quichotte)
/ to dedicate consacrer, dédier, vouer / to turn
back the clock remonter le temps / Titfield Thunderbolt Tortillard pour Titfield (film de Charles
Crichton, 1953) / mawkish mièvre, niais, cucul
/ Thomas The Tank Engine Thomas et ses amis,
série télévisée britannique pour enfants, mettant en scène les aventures de Thomas, une locomotive anthropomorphe / arguable possible,
vraisemblable, plausible / tone ton, tonalité /
preservation protection de l’environnement, écologie / to take, took, taken a cue from prendre
exemple sur, s’inspirer de / The Railway Children
livre pour enfants d’Edith Nesbit (1906) d’abord
paru sous forme de feuilleton dans The London
Magazine en 1905 / eponymous éponyme, du
même nom / youngster jeune / track voie / playground terrain de jeux, cour de récréation.
6. trunk railway grande ligne / to complete achever / to hew, hewed, hewed or hewn tailler, couper, ici hewing construction / to bemoan déplorer,
pleurer, se lamenter sur / despoliation pillage, saccage / greed avidité, cupidité / thirst soif / to
rule over dominer, régner sur / baneful funeste,
maléfique / in the midst of au (beau) milieu de
/ speculation conjectures, suppositions / earthquake séisme / shape forme / incompleteness
inachèvement / wildly furieusement/au hasard
/ to mingle mêler, mélanger, to mingle out of
one’s place bouleverser, déplacer / upside down
sens dessus dessous / to burrow creuser.
7. proper noun nom propre / to ring, rang, rung
résonner, do they ring familiarly ? est-ce qu’ils
évoquent encore quelque chose ? / fraught
pénible, éprouvant / elemental fondamental,
essentiel / brand new complètement nouveau
/ crooked tortueux / built-up construit / to veer
virer, dévier, s’orienter / to blunder into s’engager,
pénétrer (par erreur, maladroitement, à l’aveuglette) dans.
8. to presume avoir la prétention de / to upset,
set, set contrarier, irriter / focus concentration
(de l’intérêt), focalisation / campaigner militant
/ complete achevé / to concrete bétonner / to be
defiant of défier, affronter.
NETWORK RAIL
operator exploitant / level crossing passage à
niveau / freight fret / rolling stock matériel roulant / busy fréquenté.
Du 14 au 27 avril 2011 VOCABLE • 11