No more delay! definition
No more delay! means above all: the emptying of the route and its immediate surroundings. Anything that does not sustain the goal-oriented movement is a potential hindrance and a source of danger. The railway is cleared and declared off-limits to man and beast; the dissidents are inter- cepted with cowcatchers and kept at bay by means of barriers and gates. Delay has acquired all the characteristics of a contentious and combated adversary force. The battle against delay turns into a battle against the earth’s surface, which disappears beneath the levelling projects of civil engineering, such as bridges, railway embankments and tunnels. The level- ling of the route, of which the Gotthard Tunnel and the Moerdijk Bridge are a case in point, shifts the manifestations of the earth’s surface with its obstacles and objects to the fond of perception. This fosters the desertifica- tion of space, which finds its psychological counterpart in the ‘panoramic gaze’,1 the dreamy and mentally retreated orientation towards the distant horizon. The material and mental-visual desert-form of space is the nec- essary complement to speed. That the train, as it put the territory into perspective, would come to represent an assault on and liquidation of the city and the urban community, was astutely presaged in 1873, by Victor de Stuers, the founder of the Dutch Historic Building Council,2 when he pro- tested against the demolition of Maastricht’s city ramparts and gateways for the sake of the railway line.