Now the traveller was to have no voice in the transport process - while on a coach you could bang on the roof to get the driver's attention for him to pull over for you to be sick by the road side, this was not an option on the early train services which had no communication cords. There was a deliberate intention to make the new mode of transport look like one familiar to upper-classes travellers, even though it was profoundly different to what they were familiar with. However all the same in Europe railway carriages were constructed like coaches (as in coaches and horses). At the same time the need for storage and sidings turned the areas around stations into industrialised zones. Stations, particularly the great terminus stations on the verges of major cities, needed arterial roads capable of servicing them with goods and passengers. The arrival of the railway industrialised the layout of cities by creating new intense flows of traffic to and from the station. You travel from a form of warehouse to another warehouse, at a given time - not traditional time determined by the position of the Sun - but one decided by the Rail company (as many as four different times applied in a Pittsburgh station which served multiple companies). Even a new technology – and you may have noticed this if you have switched from a paper system to an electronic one in your working life – does not start out to realise its own potential but instead seeks to replicate what already exists.
The violence, disruption, overthrow of traditional approaches, alien discipline and structure, all experienced by workers in industrial workplaces was shared in by the travel experience of rail travellers.Īt the same time as all this newness existed there was also no blank slate, no white page. Schivelbusch tells us that rail travel was for many people their only experience of an industrial process. And that distinction is one of the points of the book. Unless you are in the USA, in which case you are shipped. It builds up steam towards the industrialisation of travel, with the traveller as product, delivered to their destination. Long enough for others to have drawn from it and for its messages to have passed through many stations. It helped to remember that this book has been rattling around since 1977. What this is, is a cultural history, culture very broadly understood, of the railway.Īt first everything seemed so familiar that I could hardly perceive the insight. Since I read this book with twinkling eyes and a smile on my face I tenderly recommend it to other readers, at least those who are interested in trains.