Ghosts of Infrastructures Past

“Castles, forts, ruins, abandoned mines, empty buildings, depleted fisheries,” the cultural theorist Barbara Kirchenblatt-Gimblett (1997:5) tallies the body count on a visit to Wales, where “waning economies litter the landscape”. Death – of economies, and pasts, and with them futures – she concludes, “leaves a mess”. Yet, among littered landscapes, ghosts lurk; afterlives – like a railway to nowhere, the spectral traces of a past that has left, and is left unresolved.