The Railway Journey

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986.

In “The Mechanization of Motive Power,” the first chapter of The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch offers a glimpse into his methodology by starting not with the invention of the railroad but with the history of fuel resources. As he explains, the exhaustion of wood resources caused by the mass deforestation of Western Europe in the eighteenth century served as perhaps the main incentive for the development of industrial capitalism because it forced social leaders and engineers to develop new resources simply to maintain the same standard of living. The exhaustion of wood resources created two problems. Wood was not only a fuel source but also the main material for building structures. As such, diminishing wood supplies created a need for both new fuel sources and new building materials: Thus it was scarcity that led to the use of coal and iron. This notion that technological development proceeds along the lines of basic cultural needs anticipates the approach to the railroad in the sense that, for Schivelbusch, the railroad is not an isolated, inevitable, or neutral development but instead a phenomenon integrally related to and influential in the shifting modes of temporality and spatiality in the 19th century.

Central to Schivelbusch’s understanding of the railroad is the idea that the topos of the 19th century was “the annihilation of time and space” (10). The ideological underpinnings of this topos are the aims of industrial capitalism to increase, expand, and make more efficient commerce. Land travel, according to Schivelbusch, was the weak link in the expansion of industrial capitalism because it could not be intensified beyond a very low level (7). Traditional forms of land travel, such as horse-drawn carriages, had to conform to the irregularities of the terrain and were constrained by the exhaustion of draught animals. The technology that emerged to overcome these constraints was the steam engine. First developed in the late eighteenth century, the steam engine developed rapidly from the large and unwieldy low-pressure engines of Newcomen and Watt to smaller, more fuel-efficient high-pressure engines, such as that developed by Oliver Evans (3). The advantage of the steam engine was that, unlike draught animals, which were always still a part of nature, the burning of coal was artificial energy capable of prevailing against nature: “The mechanical motion generated by steam power is characterized by regularity, uniformity, unlimited duration and acceleration” (9). The ability to prevail against nature meant that new forms of mechanical power were able to remake space—mechanical power “created its own new spatiality” (10). No longer would the terrain be a series of obstacles. It would instead submit to the logic of steam power. If the road would not rise to meet them, steam engines would raise new roads.

New technologies and new forms of spatiality also meant new forms of consciousness. Schivelbusch draws on several contemporary accounts of the railroad that express concern about the “loss of experience” associated with the annihilation of space between departure and destination (19, 38). Such concerns were short-lived, however. Schivelbusch points out that, quickly, older forms of transportation, such as carriage riding, became upper-class leisure activities and that soon it was no longer mechanical travel but animal travel that was experienced as unnatural. Nevertheless, new mechanical forms of travel created a sense of anxiety: increased speed meant that the railroad threatened instant death.

Whereas previous modes of transportation were characterized by a distinction between the route and the means, the railroad was a single transportation machine. Roads and canals made both technical and commercial distinctions between route and means. On the technical side, roads and canals could be established without consideration of the types of vehicles they would accommodate. On the commercial side, there was no consolidation of toll ways and carriage companies. Franz Realeaux explains the accomplishment of the railroad nicely: the joining of rail and wheel meant that the railroad effectually “joined carriage and road into one machine” (19). For Schivlebusch, the joining of route and means was decisive in another sense: “the development of the railway completes the detachment from nature initiated by the discovery of steam power” (20). The unnatural character of the railroad was twofold: the steam engine generated uniform mechanical motion and that motion was transformed into movement through space by the combine machinery of wheel and rail. This allowed the railroad to overcome both the irregularity of the terrain and the friction between wheel surface and road surface. In a sense, the railway was merely an extension of the steam engine—the steam engine remaking space in its own design.

Throughout the book Schivelbusch outlines the experience of 19th century travelers. He makes an interesting point about the relationship between the railroad and the telegraph system: “The landscape appeared behind the telegraph poles and wires; it was seen through them” (31). In another interesting section, Schivelbusch outlines the role of the railroad in the creation of standardized time zones (39-44). Interestingly, what later became the four continental U.S. time zones were from the 1880s to the 1910s simply railroad times. Local times would often differ from one another and from the railroad time standards. A final point of interest is a reference to Hans-Theis Lehmann, who argued that in the 20th century the voice was dissociated from its natural place by the emergence of microphones, radio, and phonography (48). The second half of the book draws extensively on Benjamin and Freud to address issues of shock, trauma, neurosis, etc. associated with the development of modern technologies.