A review by arrr
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

5.0

Great book about trains and the way they changed 19th century European and American riders' perceptions of landscapes, accidents, and the self within this new greater railway system context. The railroad both shrank space by speeding the time it took to get there, while also enlarging space by making new places/countries accessible to people other than the super-rich. It separated riders from nature, from the experience of localities and independent vignettes (replaced by the new continuous panorama), from acknowledging the cost and exhaustion of resources necessary for travel (horses and feed vs. coal), and from the jostling and physicality of travel by carriage. The experience was different for the different classes, and different for Europeans and Americans. The cost was fear, anxiety and stress, new nervous illnesses (railway spine), and the shock of surviving crashes and accidents as the system, which represented our technological "progress" toward overcoming nature, malfunctioned. This book deals with the tale of trains not as a positivist argument, or as a set of necessary events that led to the conclusion of the railway. Instead, it takes a very modern approach to how certain circumstances, at particular times and places, made it possible for the railway to develop in the way that it did in different parts of the world. Oh, and there is Dickens!