lift girders

[Ya Sam]

It's in the very beginning, the famous passage:

"It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There 
are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old 
as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of 
day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will 
fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming 
down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible 
crashing.
Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen 
darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and 
connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a 
poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, 
second sheep, all out of luck and time: ..."
"They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of 
downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the 
city.."

I also thought about the elevator (British lift), but he appears to be in a 
train car (British carriage) so the "lift girders" would logically be, as 
you correctly said, the beams, perhaps like those of the overhead structures 
at all big stations in the UK. But the question still remains, why "lift 
girders?" Where did P. take this term? The guide to GR (the older one at 
least) doesn't explain this term.


>From: "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>To: "Ya Sam" <takoitov at hotmail.com>
>CC: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: lift girders
>Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 16:15:50 -0600
>
>Can you provide a few lines of context?
>
>We know what a girder is (a primary beam in a steel frame structure),
>and we know what a lift is (an elevator).  So a "lift girder" could
>mean a part of the structural frame in an elevator shaft.
>
>David Morris
>
>On 11/10/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>Was going to ask this long ago. Just now remembered. I couldn't find the
>>term "lift girder" in any dictionary, even google didn't yield anything
>>coherent. So what do "lift girders" (in the beginning of GR) exactly mean,
>>and in which way are they different from girders proper? (Sorry if that 
>>was
>>asked before, but I couldn't find anything in the archives as well).
>>
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