There’s a piece of rail­way track in my house. It looks, unsur­pris­ingly, out of place. It wasn’t inten­ded for the man­tel­piece or to be a door­stop. But now it’s here it would be quite a job to take it any­where else. You see, it’s incred­ibly heavy. You need two hands to lift it even though it’s only about nine inches long. I’d say it weighs 15 kilos at least.

It came from a friend of mine who used to work as a navvy.[1] One of the most demand­ing things they had to do was to stretch the rail. It’s import­ant to make sure there’s no give left in the rail to pre­vent it from expand­ing then buck­ling in the sum­mer heat. You get less than 10 inches from a quarter of a mile of track, but still, that’s enough to real­ise the mal­le­ab­il­ity of it. At the same time, the stub­born­ness of the piece that was left over, cut off, and is now in my house, makes it hard to believe it could be any­thing other than rock-solid.

Sit­ting here now, what it reminds me of is the sheer phys­ic­al­ity of the work that goes into main­tain­ing the track; and the sheer mater­i­al­ity of the track. Of just how much work con­tin­ues to be done in the world through the strength of bod­ies and hands. And how much stuff there is around us that’s dis­carded mater­ial itself pro­duced through work.

 

[1] See his account of that, entitled, ‘Being a Navvy’, on this site.