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Tracks, Trains, and Tremors Observations on the Cultural History of Railroading (or: A Huff-Huffing Tour through the Cultural Geography of the West) Victorian & Modern Literature & Culture, Dr. Michael Wutz |
Most of the working people, who came to the Great Exhibition on the "Shilling Days," arrived by rail, often from the north of England. King's Cross station had been opened in 1850 and there were nearly 7,000 miles of track linking London with the towns of the Midlands and the North |
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I had been unluckily
separated from my mother in the first distribution of places, but by an exchange
of seats which she was enabled to make she rejoined me when I was at the height
of my ecstasy, which was considerably damped by finding that she was frightened
to death, and intent upon nothing but devising means of escaping from a
situation which appeared to her to threaten with instant annihilation herself
and all her travelling companions. --- Fanny Kemble attending the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 1830 John Leech, Railway Undertaking Punch Magazine (1852) |
It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then. Then was
the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift riding horses,
packhorses, highwaymen . . . . But your railroad starts a new era . . . . We who
lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world are like Father Noah
and his family out of the Ark.
--- William Makepeace Thackeray
St. Paul's had best be converted into a terminus, what else will it be fit for
when every railway runs right into London.
--- Punch magazine, 1840s, at
the height of "railway mania"
NOTE TO STUDENTS & USERS: The quotations and images in the links
above have been assembled from the sources listed at the end this page (and---in
many cases--from web sources not listed in the bibliography).
To share these ideas in a class room format would take an entire semester and is,
hence (as the late Victorians would have put it), "immensely
impractical." My hope is that you can take the time and dip into some
of the segments to get a sense how one can "think railroad" (or
"do trains")---arguably the single-most decisive technological
innovation of the nineteenth century.
For the purposes on how railroad
technology has changed the human sense of speed and perception, the most important segments
are "Industrialized Consciousness" (esp. as it appears in Wolfgang Schivelbusch's study,
The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the19th Century),
and "Cinematic Vision."
Some sources relevant to the cultural history of railroading
Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son, 1847.
Faith, Nicholas. The World the Railways Made. New York: Carroll &
Graf, 1990.
Jennings, Humphrey. Ed. and Intro. Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge. Pandaemonium.
The Coming
of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary
Observers, 1660--1886. New
York, Free Press, 1985.
Jensen, Oliver. Railroads in America. New York: American Heritage, 1981.
Kirby, Lynn. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and
Silent Cinema. Durham: Duke
UP, 1997.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1964.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time
and Space in the 19th Century.
Berkeley:
Univ. of California P, 1989 (1977).
(Semmens, Peter. Railway Disasters of the World: Principal passenger train
accidents of
the 20th century. London: Stephens Ltd., 1994.
Simmons, Jack. The Victorian Railway. London: Thames & Hudson, 1991.
Wosk, Julie. Breaking Frame. Technology and the Visual Arts in
the Nineteenth Century.
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992
For a comprehensive site on English railroads, see
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/railways.htm
or
The Industrial Revolution and the Railway System, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/ind_rev/indrev.html
The Art of Memory: trains + cinema
Victorian Railways and their
Predecessors (Victorian Web), http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/victorian/technology/rrov.html
How did the railways change the lives. . . in Victorian Britain?, http://learningcurve.pro.gov.uk/victorianbritain/happy/main.htm
Institute of Railway Studies and Transport Technology, http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/irs/irshome/links/links.htm
Pictures from Punch magazine, http://www.wandleys.demon.co.uk/punchpix.htm
Railroads and technological innovation, http://www.bk.psu.edu/academic/sts/transun2.htm
Charles Dickens, "The Signal Man," http://books.mirror.org/dickens/signalman/
Railways in the 19th century, http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/railways.htm
Ghosts, trains and trams: the technologies of transport in the ghost stories of
M. R. James, http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/irs/irshome/papers/ghosts.htm
References to class issues at http://cityofshadows.stegenga.net/victorianrailway.html
The British Rail System of Vict. England and the People, http://www.gober.net/victorian/reports/railroad.html
Chronology of Railway Crashes, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/465475.stm
The Victorians, http://www.schoolsliaison.org.uk/astonhall/changingtimes/victorians/vmenu.htm
Railways & Empire, http://www.btinternet.com/~britishempire/empire/science/transport/railways.htm
Train safety in UK, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/992144.stm
20th-century UK rail accident timeline, etc, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/465475.stm
Railway disasters in England, etc. http://danger-ahead.railfan.net/
The Transcontinental Railroad, http://usparks.about.com/library/weekly/AA051099.HTM
History of Railroads and Maps, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/rrhtml/rrintro.html
Narrow Gauge Railroads, http://www.co.el-dorado.ca.us/stories/narrow_gauge.html
Western Railroads, Transcontinental, http://www.linecamp.com/linecamp/camp_fire/camp_fire2.htm
From Travel to Tourism, http://www.traverse.com/people/dot/tourism.html
Steam technology & railroads, http://www.traverse.com/people/dot/tourism.html
Union Pacific homepage, http://www.uprr.com/aboutup/history/
Steam Railroad Cartoons
This page was created and is maintained by Michael Wutz; last updated 29 June 08 (site to be revised one of these days ::))