Criterios para la selección de la prueba de evaluación inicial y final.

As I progressed through the data generation stage of this research, I began to wait until participants talked about the railways first as in previous interviews, participants had placed greater emphasis on other aspects of ‘place’ and not on the railway. However in some interviews, the railway almost became an issue that was being ignored or required attention. This perhaps reflected the sampling strategy as participants were recruited via the Defra project. Also, the information provided to participants for taking part in this research conveyed railways as the research focus (also see Chapter Five).

Around half an hour into my interview with Kerry, she asked why we were not talking about railways. Kerry lived in a three bedroomed semi-detached property alongside an overground section of the WCML. Prior to the excerpt below, we had just talked about Kerry’s separation from her partner with whom she had initially bought her property. At the time of interview, Kerry lived with her brother and her friend who rented rooms to help with the mortgage payments.

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Kerry: We’ve not talked much about railways Jenna: Well it’s not really all about that

Kerry: Isn’t it, is it more about the psychological? Jenna: It’s more about, if you like, your story Kerry: Really?

Jenna: Yeah more about sort of how you’ve come to live where you are and

the, you know, factors that play a role in where you are

Kerry: And where you’ve come from, that’s very different Jenna: What do you mean?

Kerry: Nothing just like, loads of different reasons, quite very personal reasons but nothing really to do with the environment or railways, I don’t know if it would really be relevant to your study

Switching the subject matter to railways appeared to enable her to avoid the discomfort of talking about her separation any further. However, given that I was there with the main purpose of understanding what it is like to live alongside railways, it makes sense that Kerry should question the relevance of what we were discussing. Like all of the participants, she had completed a social survey questionnaire and also had measurements of vibration taken at her property for the Defra project. By questioning how our talk was relevant, she presents railways as insignificant. Kerry positions herself as living where she does due to “very personal reasons” and thus “the environment or railways” have “nothing really” to do with her location in ‘place’. Elsewhere in her interview, she had emphasised how her moves to different places in her adult life were to further her career and also to be within a commutable distance from her parents.

Kerry did not portray railways as a reason to buy a property but elsewhere in her interview, railways were a factor to be taken into consideration. I have included another excerpt from Kerry below where I asked whether her previous employment in the railway maintenance industry had any influence on her decision to buy her property alongside the WCML.

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Jenna: So you had a bit of an idea about that sort of thing? Did that affect when you were buying your house?

Kerry: It didn’t really at all but in the same respect my other half at the moment

is looking to buy a house and found one in S [nearby suburb] and it’s literally right next to a railway bridge and we looked and we just said, no far too close to the property, and I believe that’s happened to the venders all the way, lots of people have said beautiful house, yep, could really see us doing something with it but it’s too close

Jenna: So it’s kind of like, it’s ok at the bottom of the garden?

Kerry: Alright at the bottom, and I mean you’ve got a good thirty metres away

from the house and big fir trees going up

Jenna: Right ok so can you see it?

Kerry: I can just see it, I’ve got another three years for those trees to get back

up

Through shifting positions, Kerry constructs railways as both significant and insignificant. The railway is the main reason for her partner not buying the property they viewed alongside a railway, even though it was a “beautiful” house that prospective buyers could envisage “doing something with”. Her construction of the physical differences between the two ‘places’ appears to minimise the significance of the railway for her property. In relation to past research, Hugh-Jones and Madill (2009) found that participants residing near a quarry also worked to minimise any negative effects, including those that they self-reported. The dialogical negotiation between railways as significant and insignificant is managed discursively when Kerry says “but in the same respect”. She manages this further by emphasising the physicality of ‘place’ in terms of the greater distance between the railway and her property. Furthermore, her railway will soon be ‘out of sight’ which emphasises how railways present a visual intrusion on ‘place’. Other participants’ accounts of ‘place’ emphasised the importance of the physical environment, where they positioned their residential move as a necessity.

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