#electra the electric train | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bellesdomain · 2 months ago

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I'm loving the amount of thought and the connections being made here...

just two crucial things being discounted - Electra is blatantly, unequivocably, a super-rich popstar. They are the epitome of arrogance and 1980s excess. They have an animal handler in their entourage, to take care of their travelling pets! There's not a passing thought of that money being government funds being misused, but criticising the cult of Celebrity and its excesses.

And more importantly - although there's an American dressing on the show, it is absolutely English in its core. It's English school boys playing with a model railway. Then we had Trevor Nunn come along with an amazing cast who layered so much depth into the characterisation on the frame based on "Cinderella"! But the attitudes to what IS a steam train, a diesel, an electric, is absolutely that of people who are using commuter trains daily, reading newspapers with updates of the latest projects (APT being a standing joke - there's the government funding being misused).

UK Electrification is an ongoing project - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Great_Britain (though I am not keen on the thought of replacing our third rails with overhead cables - we're far more storm resistant and the number of pantograph issues is a problem!) It's absolutely understood now, as in the 80s, that Electric powered trains *IS* the future, as that electricity can be generated however you like. The British attitude to Electric trains is just acceptance, I guess...

Another thing to bear in mind is that although we are familiar with the fabulousness of Jeffrey Daniel's Electra, in the workshop the role was played by Zaine Griff - who, without wanting to be disparaging, was very much a David Bowie wannabe. They did not initially plan to have a black performer in the role, which would have made the racial parallels much clearer with both the "Ugly sisters" being white. But if Jeffrey Daniel from Shalamar agrees to do your show, you're not gonna say no!

Equating the "Superstar challenger" Electric train to the real world politics and beneficiaries of US rail electrification is... quite a reach. But very interesting how there are parallels!

Electra as a Reagan-era slander of Amtrak as a “welfare queen” (and why they would be a better fit for the OLC social messaging than Rusty)

(Yes, that term is racially loaded and I am using it very deliberately for reasons to be explained later.)

People often make fun of how Electra makes such a big deal of being electric and futuristic when electric trains are just kind of the norm in most countries with substantial rail networks. But when you take into account that toothpaste-era Electra is considerably Amtrak-coded and look into the politics and railroad history of what they’d be like irl…. Their framing goes from kind of stupid to pointedly malicious.

Caveat: this is largely based on US railroads and politics of the 70s-80s and probably not what writers intended. Starlight’s overall themes of bootstrapping and “being under your own control” are blatantly conservative and shared by Thatcher and Reagan, but she seems to have been less terrible on the train front than him. But man, things are so on the nose I really wonder if some of this was intentional.)

You know what else WAS the norm in the US (and still is in much of Europe) until Reagan started treating it as a radical freak? The big bad “liberal agenda” of the government actually funding things like social programs and infrastructure, including railroads. And you know what kind of trains are almost completely dependent on that kind of government support? Electric ones. EVERY SINGLE REPLICA NATIONAL represents a country that (at least circa the 80s) had a nationalized rail network that actually invested in electrification. It’s not impossible for private companies to fully fund themselves but very hard, especially now.

Who are “electric train politics” heavily associated with in the US? Black people, LGBT people, damn near every minority, you know, like Electra was regularly early on.

You may not realize this if you’re from elsewhere, but the US has very, very little rail electrification vs other rich countries. You have some commuter rail and local transit systems in a number of cities, the Northeast Corridor and Keystone Corridor, and that’s…. about it. Intercity service between a line of the big northeastern cities and that’s it. The rest is all diesel domain irl. Behold the wikipedia page for electrified lines in the US and see just how many are GONE. (Passenger service is also absolutely threadbare if not nonexistant in most of the non-electric network and often offensively slow, not even local road speed. But that’s a whole separate can of worms)

Why is this? Heavy simplification, but the government subsidized highways and airports instead after WWII and that along with antiquated laws and losing mail service made passenger rail a massive money pit for most the railroads forced to continue it. Instead of passenger rail service and infrastructure improving like basically all the other Nationals’ countries, routes dropped like flies and many railroads sank into financial ruin until Penn Central’s collapse in the late 60s. That’s when the government finally stepped in and took over passenger services as Amtrak. Electrification infrastructure and equipment was dated then due to years of desperate finances, and while there was active rail investment in the 70s to improve, Reagan’s administration was hostile to it and it’s been an on and off uphill battle since to get enough funding to keep things going, let alone improve or expand. Literally left decades behind by the system. The 2013 tour is the most accurate version of Electra as a realistic reflection of electric passenger rail in the US- a guy who’s been at it since the 80s that still looks like a decades-old vision of the future in a notably cheap, torn up, worn out costume. Actually the AEM-7 locomotives used then date to 1978, even older than that.

“Electra must be rich” sounds like something a stingy conservative politician would say about Amtrak needing billions of dollars (to just be barely functional due to years of neglect). Oooo handouts bad. Oooo you must be so extravagant if you need that much. You “welfare queen” sucking government funds to blow on exotic pets and glitter and other frivolities.

You “strapping young buck buying T-bone steaks with food stamps”. Those are Reagan’s quotes, not mine, I hate even typing them out but god, can it be more obvious? Painting those who need government assistance (usually coded as black) as extravagant has been weaponized to destroy social programs and further inequality.

“Or unreliable”- electric trains have so few moving parts they tend to be notably reliable in terms of the physical locomotive/multi unit*. A lot of their issues are actually due to structural failures with powerlines, and this is ESPECIALLY true with the NEC and other ooold electric commuter lines in the US. This has also limited the maximum speed of trains at times. See video below for more on this, also explains a lot of the stuff I’ve mentioned earlier. Huh. Gee whiz. Someone held back and suffering due to structural problems being blamed as personal failing. What DOES that sound like?

youtube

*technically CC 40104 used as Electra’s helmet actually was an unreliable model because it was a weird complicated niche thing with four voltages for a uniquely European situation but that’s downright cherry picking. The other Nez Casse engines with that styling actually were reasonably reliable and realistic Amtrak Electra from the 80s to 2018 would be an AEM-7 (common fanon choice too) that was also fine.

When you think about it, the likes of ��only you have the power within you” and “needn’t beg the world to turn around and help you” might be the most offensive things you could say specifically to an electric train in the US besides“lol they shoulda replaced your line with even moar I-95 lanes”

Anyways, isn’t it funny how people conveniently ignore how steam preservation was actually very popular (compared to almost any other obsolete tech) in the 80s and had been since at least the 60s? You had steam engines pulling the 1976 Freedom Train. A small, relatively “young”, mechanically functional steam engine would have tourist railroads FIGHTING over them back then. That was the era when the majority of the steam engines left in Barry Scrapyard were scooped up and preserved, Crown Metal Company was making new build ones for amusement parks, and some tourist railroads even bought new builds from the last company in China building steam engines for regular service.

But you know what did go out of favor in the late 30s and was treated as downright laughable to go back to after the 50s, just like the regular revenue use of steam locos in the US?

The kind of small-government conservatism Reagan preached. And the steam engines in the show promote. Barry Goldwater was openly mocked for it in the mid-60s. It was thought genuinely unthinkable to go back to.

So, those laughably historically inaccurate depictions of electric and steam engines. Isn’t it uncanny how near-perfectly those unrealistic traits of them align with other things?

Also a funny aside: probably 90% of those new build Crown Metal steam engines were dressed up in western themes. Literally cowboy actors, just like Reagan was.

(I’ve got an extended unhinged theory about Starlight being about the rise of Reaganism and it unexpectedly spreading world over and destroying everyone else’s railroads too. That’s still in progress though. But these two aspects are so freakishly dead-on I really needed to get them out.)

#starlight express #electra the electric train #Zaine Griff #looks like Zaine Griff needs a page on the wiki

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