Watch Everything and Nothing Change Over 60 Years of British Train Travel

In 1953, the BBC boarded a passenger train from London to Brighton, and rolled tape along the way. The agency recorded the same 54-mile route three decades later, in 1983, and then again three decades after that, in 2013. Now, it’s gone ahead and strung the three trips side by side in a sort of time-lapse glimpse into the hamster wheel that is modern transit. 

The three takes are about as different as they are identical. Sixty years ago, the London-Brighton route was a straight shot, uninterrupted; of course this is not so today, something that’s apparent in the gradual uptick in tracks and stations and lines along the route over the years. At the same time, we experience the same lurching momentum through the same tunnels and gradual bends, the same eerily hushed deboarding walkabouts once we’ve arrived.

If anything, it all calls to mind a great line from the H.G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia: “There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly,” the late English sci-fi novelist wrote. “Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.”

Well, then. What will 2043 look like from the window seat?

@thebanderson