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Spacing reader Mark Slutsky sent us a link to this video today, showing a market lining a railway in Thailand. Within seconds of a train passing through, the market springs back to life.
Naturally, the video raises some pretty obvious questions, like why on earth would a market be located on a set of train tracks? Andrew Leonard, on Salon’s How the World Works, points the way to some explanations. Apparently, the train tracks in question are actually part of the the Mae Klong Railway, an interurban line that runs diesel trams along local roads from Bangkok in the east to Samut Songkhram in the west. Along the way, it passes through a local wet market. The trains are infrequent enough that they don’t pose much of a danger or inconvenience to shoppers or vendors.
According to Justin Bur, who wrote in to Salon, this is not so different from streets markets in Belgium or France through which trams pass. In Hong Kong, trams pass right through the middle of a street market in North Point.
Photo by Richard Barrow
5 comments
this idea is strange to us becasue we are used to seeing unused, voided strips of land adjacent to tracks. We are also used to the idea that infrastructure is mono-functional and can only do one thing – provide transit, hold back earth, deliver waste + water etc.
here they have used a narrow space for an activity that requires length and a narrow space. Ingenious! Mono-functional infrastructure is coupled with a use and its traditionally adjacent unused land is filled with a activity!
Man, that’s tight.
I saw something similar in Ghana, West Africa. This shot is from the edge of the market in the capital Accra but the market around Kumasi was even more tightly packed.
Having a street market on a railway is dangerous – much more dangerous that having it on a road because trains can’t brake quickly. This should be banned.
I love the contrast in how we think. In our world: that’s dangerous! Ban it! There: great space for a market, let’s use it.
Judging from the speed of the train in the video, and given that the driver must have noticed by now that the train goes through a market, I imagine there haven’t been very many gruesome accidents involving trains, body parts and green papayas…