RailEnquiry

Kalupur railway station's overbridges lead travellers to their trains , but through unsettling pathways of uncertainty : one can sense but not see where one is going. Gandhigram station has 14 benches , one of which is actually a luggage trolley used as a seat by the fatigued ingenuity of the Gujarati passenger . Though just one train rolls into Bhadran station every day on one of its two tracks , the station is home to three monkey groups .

When railway infrastructure is examined not merely as a system of amenities and equipment but also as a space crammed with human instincts and cultures , it emerges that architecture is more than masonry and structural angles . A French researcher has now studied the fluctuating needs of passengers in that light . These needs force passengers to either disregard restrictions of railway facilities or - in their moments of defeat by the paleness of bureaucratic design - to suppress their expectations .

Sarah Drouet , has produced a study titled 'The Train Corridor - A Look In Passenger Trains' . The document , commissioned by Spade India Research Cell (Sircle ), is meant to provoke not only mechanistic interpretations , but also philosophical musings and sociological inquiries . The document invites urban planners , civic authorities , and indeed the railways to make anything they wish of it. 'The Train Corridor' intends to serve as an intellectual junction where resource planning , cultural codes, and evolving consumer desires can be explored as essential and overlapping constituents of infrastructure.

Drouet is a student of architec- ture at ENSAM, a school of architecture in France . She is currently studying photography and journalism at Cept, Ahmedabad. In the opening of the study, she writes: "Some people study others by decrypting their reaction in extreme situations . The train is the extreme space - minimal, standardized, and in motion."

What follows is a discursive and poetic investigation of that minimal space . For example , Drouet finds that compact 'cells' in Le Corbusier's Convent of la Tourette (a monastery in Lyon , France ) are of the same size as the compressed railway cabins of India.

In the monastery - which worships seclusion - corridors for movement are located at the end of cells to minimize human contact. In the case of railway cabins , corridors cut through their midsection . Besides, as most Indians would readily concede , information about platforms from which specific trains depart is provided by coolies more effectively than by electronic boards caught in the mist of human flux.

These insights will help planners include humans as vital 'moving pieces' of the infrastructure machinery.

Human dimension of physical space

The great French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has contended that societies cannot forbid what they cannot name and classify. Adjusting that thought slightly, one arrives at the proposition that society cannot change or improve what it does not map and classify. Sarah Drouet's study has shown, for instance, that the vestibule space contained between the toilets of two connected bogies is used for a range of 'non-designated' activities including smoking and sleeping. That area is marked as a site of danger because of the shaky nature of the vestibule. A map of human actions can aid rail authorities in showing flexibility towards design. "Authorities give a fixed meaning to space, but life in fact invades the space," Drouet said.