All right. It’s not Sex and the City (as I titled my University dissertation [PDF]) but I suppose if you have a fetish for metro sex, it’s one way of getting your kicks. I got the photo from the insightful, urban, lively Gothamist:
Gothamist was struck by this photograph of the railyards the new development would replace, because there’s something beautiful about this mass of trains in the middle of the city.
There certainly is. The convergence — or, should I say, collision? — of trains and river is superb, particularly against a river of this breadth. In your mind, they just do not belong together, and yet when you see this in a city, in the flesh, as it were, it is perfectly fitting.
You get the effect in London somewhat, but London’s large stations don’t abut the water in the way these yards do. Waterloo station (which is currently London’s — and the UK’s — only international rail terminal) has a wide splay of tracks like this, but it isn’t as close to the aqueous and vaguely oily ripple of the Thames as it should be.
I have fond memories of Waterloo. Particularly the little coffeeshop which used, as its interior walls, the old bare masonry of the station’s outer shell. And my early days in London, when I worked at the National Film Theatre in their Press Office, and stopped in Waterloo each morning for breakfast and contemplation. How close by everything seemed then… *sigh*
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