#RAILWAY JOURNEY WOLFGANG SCHIVELBUSCH SERIES#

One can experience each part separately or in relation to the whole. You come in through an imposing entrance to a different kind of space, open, enclosed, industrial, are buffeted as you watch the departure board, there is a book shop concession, platforms. Alternatively this book is like being on a station concourse.

#RAILWAY JOURNEY WOLFGANG SCHIVELBUSCH SERIES#

Reaching the destination is only possible by at least travelling through those stops, in this case a series of chapters. A train journey and a book are similar in that set off with a destination in mind with a number of stops en route. There the railroad conformed to the contours of the landscape, it brought the passenger to the wild places of the country (while in Europe it reduced the landscape to make industrialised travel possible), it was a form of industrialisation that made the settlement of much of the country practicable while in all ways it sought to reproduce the familiar feel of steamboat travel, an influence still built into language – hence items are shipped in the USA while in the rest of the English speaking world we are a bit drier and prefer dispatching or even plain sending. Labour was expensive, while land was everywhere. In Europe the railway ran as straight as possible, cuttings were dug, embankments built up, tunnels and viaducts constructed because land was expensive while labour was cheap. The train maintained traditional class divisions, nowadays only two classes remain, but originally there were up to four.

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.

Railway journey wolfgang schivelbusch