50 years on, Chennai lensman to shoot trains Australia man shot

CHENNAI: In 1965, he arrived from Australia to Madras Christian College, Tambaram, to teach economics. And in the three years that he taught here, Ian Manning, an intrepid trainspotter, managed to click more than 1,800 photographs of trains across the country.
Fifty years later, S Venkataraaman, a Chennai-based photographer will take off from where the young professor left off and embark on a project that presents the “then and now” pictures of those very stations and trains that Manning shot.“We have drawn up a list and I have spoken to Manning about the locales and the times of the day he covered, so we get the same angles and frames,” says Venkat (Poochi Venkat as he is otherwise known).
A photo taken by Ian Manning in April 1965 at Tambaram station
As a first, the two took Mannings' photograph of the Tambaram station from 1965 and took a present-day photograph from the same angle. “I suppose the conspicuous changes at the station are the extension of electrification. In the 1960s, each cigarette stall kept a smouldering rope so patrons could light up -- these ropes have disappeared, along with a lot of the smoking,” says Manning, 79, who has made several visits to the country over the last 50 years, armed with a film camera, so he can keep tabs on his trains.
“The old tablet machines that used to sit in the station masters' offices have also vanished. The station peons no longer stand by the track to exchange the tablet with passing expresses. This was quite a sight at night, for example on the country line through Pallavaram, with the peon holding the tablet loop in one hand and a stick ending in a fiery wick in the other,” says Manning.
Venkat, also a trainspotter, will present Manning’s photographs as part of a Madras Week exhibition at Dakshinachitra, which is on till the end of the month. He says he met Manning at an Indian Railway Fans Club conference a few years ago. “I offered to restore his photographs and that was when I struck upon the idea of a 'then-and-now',” says Venkat, who will be giving a talk on Manning's photographs as well as Chennai's railway history on Saturday at 11.30am.
But of course, now for Venkat, shooting the pictures is a lot easier than it was for Manning. “For Manning in the 60s it was difficult as it was war time and a foreigner with a camera was a suspect. Manning has interesting stories about those times. For instance, on one occasion a driver of a stationary goods train caught him trying to take a photograph. Manning then pointed to his water bottle and pretended he was running to the fields nearby to relieve himself. When the driver turned away, he ran back and quickly clicked his photographs,” says Venkat. “None of those dramatics for me, I just applied to the rail authorities for a go ahead and shoot at the locations.”