wolfgang schivelbusch the railway journey

Wolfgang schivelbusch the railway journey full#

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. Now updated with a new preface, The Railway Journey is an invaluable resource for readers interested in nineteenth-century culture and technology and the prehistory of modern media and digitalization.

Wolfgang schivelbusch the railway journey full#

As a history of the surprising ways in which technology and culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics, including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and the railroad and the city.īelonging to a distinguished European tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored in rich empirical data and full of striking insights about railway travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change. In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy, speed, and risk were altered by railway travel. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad. But this was not always the case as Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out in this fascinating study, our adaptation to technological change―the development of our modern, industrialized consciousness―was very much a learned behavior.

The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern society.