Home

Trains

Tracks, Trains, and Tremors —
Observations on the Cultural History of Railroading

The Cultural A Priori
The Transcontinental Railroad
Industrialized Consciousness
The Modern Accident
Cinematic Vision
Miscellaneous & Picture Gallery
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

Fanny Kemble

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




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 Cathedral

St. Paul's Cathedral 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 the 19th Century), and "Cinematic Vision."


Some sources relevant to the cultural history of railroading

This page is maintained by Michael Wutz; last updated 30 November 2016