Sometimes little pieces of wisdom appear in front of you out of nowhere. You see or hear something that makes you stop and think, and you then find yourself carrying it with you as time passes.
A couple of years ago we paid a visit to the National Railway Museum in York. In addition to some rather impression locomotives and rolling stock of various vintages, the museum is home to a vast range of smaller items associated with rail transport through the ages. Whilst wandering through the exhibits, I was much taken with a simple cast iron sign that was bolted to the wall (shown in the photograph above). Painted a rather satisfying and suitably alert-inducing red, its white embossed letters spell out the message: ‘WARNING – STOP LOOK & LISTEN BEFORE CROSSING THE LINE.’
There are a few things that I particularly like about this sign – its colour, the neat, bold use of capital letters, the way that the words are perfectly balanced and centralized, and the inclusion of the final full stop. Somehow, that last grammatical detail adds to the feeling that this is a sign that was serious about doing its job…
…which was obviously to warn people to take care crossing an unguarded railway line.
I guess that most people visiting the museum walk past that sign without taking much notice of it. In fact, many probably don’t even register that it is there. But as soon as I saw it, I knew that it was a sign and the message that it conveys, were something that I wanted to capture for posterity:
-WARNING-
STOP LOOK & LISTEN
BEFORE CROSSING THE LINE.
Isn’t that great advice, not simply in relation to navigating the obviously dangerous act of crossing a railway line, but for life in general?
Tim O'Hare 