"This delightful, probing, and very quirky book is, surprisingly, a pioneering work in the sociology and
psychopathology of the railway revolution. . . What's more, it's a gas."
--The Village Voice
The University of California Press Web Site, April, 2000
Summary
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. 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.
But, Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes in this vivid history of early rail travel, the promise of progress and democracy
was swiftly compromised. 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. The railroads,
Schivelbusch writes, changed the 19th-century world for good and ill. 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.
Delving 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.
Table of Contents
The Mechanization of Motive Power
The Machine Ensemble
Railroad Space and Railroad Time
The Space of Glass Architecture
Panoramic Travel
The Compartment
The End of Conversation while Traveling
Isolation
Drama in the Compartment
The Compartment as a Problem
The American Railroad
Transportation Before the Railroad
The Construction of the Railroad
The New Type of Carriage
River Steamboat and Canal Packet as Models
for the American Railroad Car
Sea Voyage on Rails
Postscript
The Pathology of the Railroad Journey
Industrial Fatigue
The Accident
Accident and Crisis
Railway Accident, `Railway Spine' and Traumatic Neurosis
The History of Shock
Stimulus Shield: or, the Industrialized
Consciousness
The Railroad Station: Entrance to the City
Tracks in the City
Circulation
Bibliographical Note
Index