More and more I am intrigued by the simple things of everyday life, for often they appear to be not so simple as they seem on the face of it. Many simply daily activities appear to be basic. Look, for example, at the photo at the top of this blog. It is a picture of the hall of the most important railway station in the Netherlands: Utrecht Central Railway Station. I have used this photo before in another blog, but then in another context. Actually, I should have put here a photo of the Central Railway Station of Amsterdam or the one in Rotterdam, as will become clear in a few moments, but I haven’t such a picture, and this photo will do as well. The hall of the Utrecht Central Railway Station is not just an ordinary station hall of an average railway station. So it’s not just a space where you enter a railway station, where you can buy tickets, where you find a shop where you can buy magazines and books and maybe flowers as well and which maybe has also a small supermarket, and that’s it. Actually, such station halls have become somewhat old-fashioned – at least in the Netherlands – but that’s not important here. I’ll concentrate on two characteristics of this modern station hall. You must pass it when you want to go to the platform for your train. You can buy there train tickets. You find there shops. All this is like in an old-fashioned station hall. New is that you must pass through this hall from one side of the town to the other side, also if you are not a traveller (if you don’t want to take a long detour). Or rather this was so, when I took the photo, but now there is an alternative route that avoids the station hall, when you want to go to the other side of the town. But in Amsterdam you still must walk through the station hall for doing so in order to avoid a long detour, and in Rotterdam it is the same. This makes that in the photo above you see many people moving there, travellers and people who want to go to the other side of the town. The travellers are passing the hall when they go to or come from the platforms. Some are standing still for a moment for looking at the information panels: They want to know at which platforms their trains will stop. Those who don’t go to or come from the trains are just crossing the hall. Both the travellers and those who only cross the hall use it for passing.
Not all people are walking through the hall or watching the information panels. Some are sitting on the benches. Why? There can be many reasons why people are sitting there in this public space. Since the space is the hall of a railway station, at least some of them, if not most, are waiting: Waiting until they must go to the platforms for catching their trains; or waiting for people who will arrive by train; or waiting for another reason. Since Utrecht Central Railway Station and other railway stations have no separate traditional waiting rooms any longer, as old-fashioned railway stations had, the benches in the hall replace the waiting rooms that are not there. It’s true that also the platforms have benches and simple spaces for waiting for your train or for passengers that will arrive soon, but many people prefer to wait on the benches of the station hall instead of on the platforms.
So, two important characteristics of the station hall in the picture are that the hall is a space where people pass, not only for going to the platforms but also for going from one side of the town to the other side, and that it is a place where they wait. As for this, the Utrecht Central Railway Station is not unique. There are more railway stations like that, for example the Central Railway Stations of Amsterdam and Rotterdam (but, for instance, not the one in Antwerp, Belgium, or Gard du Nord in Paris). A station hall like the one in Utrecht is, what I want to call, a passage and it is also a waiting room or waiting space. Most of its other characteristics are dependent on these two main characteristics. For instance, the small supermarket there doesn’t sell what you find in the average supermarket in your town, namely your daily shopping, but it sells what you need as a passenger or a passer-by: fast food, sandwiches, drinks in bottles, coffee, sweets and such things. It’s the same for the other shops there and for the restaurants: they focus on passers-by and on travellers who are in a hurry.
Passing and waiting belong to the life of a traveller and generally to the life of people on the move. It is no coincidence that the station hall is both a space for passing and a space for waiting. Passing and waiting are two sides of the same coin. Passing is about space and waiting is about time, and that makes them different. However, passing can also be seen as waiting in space or waiting on the move. On the other hand, waiting can be seen as passing at the same placing so while standing still. Both connect past events to future events in their own ways. And just this makes them basic in life. They are the infrastructure of life in the abstract.
2 comments:
Yes. A train station is an interesting place. I remember only one, in Columbus, Ohio. I was no more than eight years old, travelling with my mother and older brother. Our family was in transition, moving from country to city, towards a better life. The great hall of the station was breathtaking for a country hick like me. Even then, though, its' glamour was fading. By 1955-56, people were not travelling by train. They either went by car, flew or stayed home. Today, in downtown Columbus, there is a lonely arch, marking where the train station once stood, dwarfed by sky scratchers, all around. I call those buildings that tbecause there are no sky SCRAPERS in Columbus, Ohio. So, that is a piece of who I am. My story, and, I'm sticking to it.
Thanks, for the memory!
Thank you for sharing your memories, Paul. The Netherlands has a very dense railway network (like several other European countries) with many railway stations, also in the countryside. Therefore I noticed the differences between railway stations. Many people here travel often by train, also if they have cars. I, too, for travelling by train is often more practical than using your car. Also my little town has a railway station with every 15 minutes a train in both directions.
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