Large-scale travel is a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies - it is easy to forget how profound, irreversible andrevolutionary the changes caused by mass transport have been. Beforethe invention of the railway, travel was largely restricted to the rich- or the energetic and determined who could walk for long distances. Inthe middle of the nineteenth century, it was quite common to findpeople even in a comparatively small island like Britain who had neverseen the sea. Fifty years later such sedentariness was most unusual,and by 1914 the Powers were waging war on a massive scale, possibleonly because of the means of mass transport. {Indeed, as historianshave often pointed out, the Great War was in a sense made inevitable bythe railways themselves, for once Russia and Austria had started tomobilise, there was no way of reversing the trains carrying troops tothe front.}

Notwithstanding ever more sophisticated developments in electroniccommunications, mass transport systems seem bound to continue to growin popularity. For all its reliance on fossil fuels and destructiveeffects on the atmosphere, air travel will grow almost exponentiallyfor the foresee-able future. Soon the citizen of a developed countrywho has never been in an aeroplane will be as rare as the person whohad never been in a train at the turn of the century. Rail itself ismaking a strong riposte on practical and ecological grounds - even inBritain, where the railways have been under attack for 15 years fromshort-sighted and simplistic governments. The opening of the ChannelTunnel has finally re-alerted the British to the benefits of railtravel {once the system is working properly, there will surely be fewwho will wish to travel from London to Paris or Brussels by planerather than train}. The connection to the Continent makes all too clearthe difference between the British system and those of, for instance,France and Germany where huge amounts of public investment have goneinto improving and extending the rail system.

But Britain has got at least one thing right. Nicholas Grimshaw`sWaterloo terminal for the Channel trains {AR September 1993} is atriumph, and is largely so because it reinterprets for our time a verywell-loved building type, the great glass and metal train shed, usingcontemporary technology and circulation management. The train shed{which emerged in England in the 1840s} is one of the most successfulinventions of a new building type in the last 200 years. It orders anddirects passengers to the trains, protects them from the weather andfacilitates the transition from pedestrian movement to rail travel. Itseems so natural now that it is difficult to remember how dramatic andrevolutionary it was when it was first evolved: never before had somany people been moved with such frequency and efficiency; never beforehad the new technologies been used on such a scale to create anintermediate world between inside and out. It was remarkably disturbingand exciting, not least to the critics. Ruskin for instance hated thetectonics, the style - and perhaps the notion of lots of peopletravelling around rapidly.{1} Even Gottfried Semper, often regarded asthe great apostle of material-based aesthetics, was only prepared towelcome the `simple, exposed iron roof-truss designed by engineers forrailway stations ... which bear witness to their provisionalnature`.{2} Semper feared `the dangerous notion that a new style mustneeds emerge if one applies construction in iron to monumentalarchitecture`.{3} He was wrong on two counts. The train sheds haveturned out not to be provisional, but have become some of our mostcherished monuments, which we love because they celebrate with greatpanache the bravery of our ancestors in embracing the machine age.

Have we got any hope of acquiring similar daring and understandingof the nature of th
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