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Wednesday 8 April 2015

Typewriters and Trains

Royal Bar-Lock typewriter, London West Railway in 1910.
Bijou portable typewriter, Gare du Nord, Paris, early 1930s.
A businessman dictates a message for a typist, in a specially designed office on board a London and North Eastern Railway's express service operating between Newcastle-on-Tyne and King's Cross (London) in 1934.
A passenger on the Canadian Pacific Railway typing on her Remington portable typewriter during a three-day journey across Canada in 1939.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill at work during a train journey in 1940.
Reporter Roy Rowan with a Royal portable typewriter on the Simplon Orient Express in Yugoslavia in 1950.
War correspondents on the Korean Press train in 1951.
Aboard the Eisenhower Campaign trail train: Reporters at work in the press car in 1952.
Rock Hudson in Grado in Italy on the set of the movie of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in 1957.
Germany secretary using an Olympia SF Splendid 66 portable typewriter in 1960.
Page Lambert with her Royal portable typewriter in 1965.
Pascal Inard spent eight months writing his time-travel mystery Web of Destinies on an Imperial 70 typewriter during his daily commute to work on a Frankston line train, from Cheltenham to Melbourne, in 2014.
 Remington portable on the Orient Express 2015
 Victor typewriter
World typewriter, 1890.

7 comments:

Ted said...

Fun photo series! I should note that the photo "War correspondents on the Korean Press train in 1951." is reversed. Funny how the return lever on the wrong side really catches the attention :D

Bill M said...

Sure is a fine bunch of great old photos.

Anonymous said...

Fantastic photos. I love the stocking feet of the lady with her Remington. How wonderfully relaxed she looks.

Anonymous said...

Neat! That Imperial is huge! It takes dedication to lug that around AND write a novel on it while commuting.

Richard P said...

What a wonderful theme! This really makes me want to take a train trip with a typewriter NOW. Would people be more understanding than they were when I tried it on an airplane? Probably ... maybe the click-clack would blend into the trick-track. I'd make it a noiseless, just in case.

I agree with Taylor, hauling the Imperial onto a train is quite a feat. Did he use it as a laptop? If so, was he permanently injured??

Robert Messenger said...

Thank you Ted (I shall re-reverse the pic if you're certain), Bill, Type the, Taylor and Richard for your kind words.
Richard, the newspaper article doesn't make it clear, but the blurb states, "If you enjoy time travel mysteries, you're going to love Web of Destinies. But it's a time travel mystery like no other: Guillaume Chambon, a French doctor has inherited a mysterious typewriter that can change the past. He doesn't have to travel in time, the past comes to him by giving him a vision of anterior events that he describes using the typewriter, and then he types a different continuation. Reality is thus modified, with consequences that he didn't necessarily foresee. To use the typewriter to stop his sister from losing her life twenty years ago, he is going to have to remove the safeguards put by the inventor, a friend of Jules Verne who found crystals with extraordinary properties. As Guillaume tries to unravel the mysteries of the typewriter, assisted by his friend Sylvie who has secrets of her own, he is confronted with a secret agent who wants to use it to make a major change to history, and a Buddhist monk who is trying to stop him because if he succeeds, the universe is in danger of collapsing."

Don Lampert said...

Brilliant set of photos - wish that they were of us on recent vacations, and the like. It's been my dream for over twenty years, to travel on the Venice Simplon Orient Express from London to Istanbul - a Remington Portable is a perfect, and important accessory for travel in "high style"!
"Web of Destinies" sounds fascinating will search for it at the library when I work there on Friday - thanks