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. They helped rewrite the industrializing world's sense of time, for now precise schedules had to be kept they reinforced a sense of forward-plunging movement into the future they even introduced the reality of mass disaster, for railroads were always crashing, sometimes taking hundreds of riders to their deaths.ĭelving into urban planning, psychology, architecture, and economics, as well as the history of technology, Schivelbusch paints a revealing portrait of the role of the railroad in shaping the 19th-century mind. The railroads, Schivelbusch writes, changed the 19th-century world for good and ill. The railroads became an agency for the concentration of wealth in a few hands, and they created a class of passive consumers who simply got aboard and waited to arrive at their destinations. Because anyone with the price of a ticket could board a train, regardless of social class, the railroad was also seen as a democratizing technology.īut, Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes in this vivid history of early rail travel, the promise of progress and democracy was swiftly compromised. Because it made possible rapid movement and shipping across large distances, joining far-off towns to economic and cultural capitals, many people who lived in the early 19th century regarded the railroad as an instrument of progress.

Schivelbusch railway journey summary