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

Wolfgang Schivelbusch refers to the railroad as the nineteenth century symbol of modernity, literally the engines of progress, heralding a new, mechanized utopia. This symbol of modernity has, in his view, also drastically restructured the way we perceive time and space in a way unlike any technology before it.

The development of the railroad, particularly in Europe, which is the focus of this book, is driven by many factors beyond any potential technological imperative. The railroad served to fulfill the necessities of capital by facilitating movement and was born at a time when resources such as foodstuffs were rising in price to the point where it was cheaper to find faster ways to ship them than to make due with current transport systems (horse and sea). But this transformation of transportation is the first to truly move beyond the limits of organic nature in terms of speed and capacity.

Schivelbusch sees many threads of the contemporary world coming out of this technological advent. In its day, much as with the Internet today, the railroad was seen as an agent in the annihilation of space and time. It denaturalized transport by speeding it up. It changed the landscape in that all that could be perceived in passing through a place was the panorama, instead of the detailed setting. Art began to follow suit in its own development of the panoramic view. The points between ceased to be an active part of the journey, leaving only departure and arrival as the real events of the railroad journey. The railroad also led to the standardization of time, a mechanical time that had authority over any older sociocultural time.

The changes began to show up in the rebuilding of roads purely for transport between points, and even the development of the department store, a place meant to be moved through as if in transit, not lingered in. Schivelbusch also ties in the development of the industrial accident, a momentray etherealization of architecture with the fad of the glass pavilion, and numerous other topics that are interconnected with the social development of a railroad culture.

The book itself is an excellent work tying together many social threads that interrelate with the development of the railroad and the way it has implanted itself in our culture and ideals. It is not only worth reading for this aspect, but also to remind one that some things do not change. Many of the quotes he cites to describe the advent of the railroad and of the glass pavilion are intentionally selected for their striking similarity to current discourse on the effects of the Internet and of post-modern theory in general.

Some salient quotes:

Neither the general fear of the mechanical and the specific frights of accident and injury, nor the social fear of boundless economic power entirely effaced the Utopian promise implicit in the establishment of speed as a new principle of public life. [p.xiii]

'Annihilation of time and space' was the topos which the early nineteenth century used to describe the new situation into which the railroad placed natural space after depriving it of its hitherto absolute powers. Motion was no longer dependent on the conditions of natural space, but on mechanical power that created its own new spatiality. [p.10]

The empirical reality that made the landscape seen from the train window appear to be 'another world' was the railroad itself. [...] It was, in other words, that machine ensemble that interjected itself between the traveller and the landscape. The traveler perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machine ensemble. [p.24]

Transport technology is the material base of potentiality, and equally the material base of the traveler's space-time perception. [...] If an essential element of a given socio-cultural space-time continuum undergoes change, this will affect the entire structure; our perception of space-time will also lose its accustomed orientation. [p.36]

When spatial distance is no longer experienced, the difference between original and reproduction diminish. [p.42]

The motion in the department store was part of the general motion of traffic that generated the panoramic perception of railroad and boulevard landscapes. [p.192]

By the end of the nineteenth century, the capitalist world's recomposition on the bass of modern traffic had been completed. From then on, traffic determined what belonged where. [p.194]

The nineteenth century's preoccupation with the conquest and mastery of space and time had found its most general expression in the concept of circulation,which was central to the scientistic social notions of the epoch. [p.194]