The honesty of trains

We are falling in love with trains all over the place at the moment. As this piece by Stephen Bayley in sunday's Observer correctly observed, "What a horrible, inhuman, artless culture air travel has become... Trains have never been more popular and as the allure of air travel turns into ordure, they will likely become more popular still." The new St Pancras station is the most commonly cited cause for this new exuberance, but I have a hunch that the East London Line extension is going to attain a faintly iconic status within a few years. New and stylish bridges are cropping up amongst the flats and warehouses of Hackney and Shoreditch, and the route will be enjoyably tortuous, especially as it does a U-Turn over Hoxton. A railway at this height above street level is reminiscent of the Chicago 'L', offering that same perspective on the urban landscape that is neither birds-eye nor pedestrian-eye.

(I used to be a trainspotter. If you don't believe me, I can tell you that in 1987 there was only one Class 40 operating in Britain, and I, err, spotted it. Just thought I'd get that out of my system.)

Technology always involves recreating the relationship between freedom and constraint. New freedoms involve new types of constraints. We don't expect to be able to do anything with technology, but it helps if the technology speaks honestly to us. This honesty is central to modernism: modernists offer transparency, and with it, humanity. Like a maths student, modernist technology shows its workings, so that even if the final answer is wrong, we can sympathise. Postmodern architecture later abandoned this commitment to the facts.

We love trains because they display this honesty, while so much technology elsewhere has become deceitful and mysterious. The East London Line bridges have not been designed to make us buy anything, or to alter the image of East London, or as some pastiche of a previous era. They have been designed to carry trains and withstand the impact of tall lorries. There aren't many artifacts in our society that are quite that frank.

Airports are places where we are entirely victimised by technology - spied upon, x-rayed, shunted around. The relationship between us and the machines is entirely asymmetrical. The technology we carry around with us, and now depend upon, carries secrets and obeys invisible internal rules. When these digital machines break, nobody shows any interest as to why, and a replacement is simply dropped in its place. Most of all, twenty-first century technology is designed to encourage us to spend money. The one part of an airport where we are permitted any agency is the shopping lounge, while Apple products seem designed to commit suicide approximately two years after their date of purchase. Save for public-spirited geeks who resist innovations such as Phorm, most people are blissfully ignorant of how their consumer habits are monitored and manipulated by digital technology.

There is something about a new railway that resists the logic of capital, and with it certain deceits. When I worked on a review of the Tube PFI back in 2000, it was explained to us that the stunning Jubilee Line extension couldn't have been built through PFI, because the time horizons involved would escape the calculations of private sector accountants. The Fosters-designed Canary Wharf station was built to exist indefinitely, because nobody was obliged - nor able - to model its future statistically.

Disposable, flexible, personalised, deceitful rail travel makes no sense. This isn't kitsch fifties nostalgia; it's simply a set of technological and financial facts of how to help people move around.