But such was the novelty of the railway as a mode of transport that, at first, society misunderstood its needs and possibilities as a technical concept. The development of the railway ushered in a new era of travel, heralding the decline of stagecoach travel whose complete disappearance would eventually take place with the widespread use of the car in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The new way of travelling and the institutionalization of the ‘machine-ensemble’ Lively and detailed descriptions of fellow travelers and the landscape are an essential element of the many literary accounts of the stagecoach journey written at the time. Moreover, the windows enabled the passenger sensuous proximity to the landscape being traversed. The interior design –two rows of seats facing each other– encouraged conversation during the journey, something that became a social convention. Stagecoach travel presumed a particular way of relating to others and the landscape. It provided a high degree of flexibility in terms of destination – as long as one had the money, one could travel to almost any place connected to a road network – and routes were operated by different companies in a regime of open competition. The stagecoach was the most extensive and reliable mode of land transport before the emergence of the railway. To fully understand the degree of novelty introduced by the railway as a mode of transport Schivelbusch constantly refers the reader to the stagecoach as the form of transport that it displaced. The old way of travelling: the stagecoach
This review focuses on what are arguably the more central elements of his analysis such as the institutionalization of the railway as an autonomous mode of traffic, the creation of new ways of experiencing landscape and the emergence of new urban spaces. Schivelbusch illustrates his argument with reference to the railway journey itself but also makes incursions into other related spheres that are symbolic of the modern culture of movement such as of Second Empire Paris and the department store. The Railway Journey provides an exemplar of the type of interdisciplinary synthesis needed to understand the dynamics of social and technological change. By looking at how the encounter with a machine destabilized old habits and invented new ones, this classic of railway and transport studies traces the emergence of the new ‘industrial subject’ or ‘industrialized traveller’.
It analyses how this new mode of transport found its place in European societies and, in the process, changed not just ways of travelling and communication, but also modes of feeling and sensing. The Railway Journey examines this co-evolution. Looking at the origins of the railway journey Like other modes of transport aspiring for a relevant place in society, the railway journey had to fit, wrestle with, change and adapt to an existing order, a social, cultural, technological and politico-economic habitat with which it co-evolved.
But essentially the act of travelling by train seems fairly natural, something deeply ingrained in the background of our everyday lives. Some may now seem contingent, for example whether the railway should be a state monopoly or open to competition and privatization. In this ensemble we have aesthetic dispositions, social conventions, economic doctrines, legal structures, technological imaginaries and political agreements. On the most basic level, this in itself presumes that the rails are in place and the whole infrastructure is run under social, economic and political criteria that make it sustainable. It may presume also the certainty that the train will safely arrive at its destination at the scheduled time. In Western Europe, it presumes that it is aesthetically pleasing to look through the window, that the carriage is relatively safe and quiet and the person does not feel the need to talk to others, that she thinks of herself as a passenger, a consumer, a citizen who can, and wishes to, move freely. Such a simple gesture presumes certain elements that make it possible. The view of a passenger sitting by the window, her eyes lost in a passing landscape, is a rather unremarkable urban scene, a banal expression of our mobile lives repeated infinite times with the precise regularity of a train timetable.