Creating Railway Culture, 1830–1947

Abstract

In 1844, over twenty years before the accident Marx refers to, J.M.W. Turner completed his famous canvas Rain, Steam and Speed. The paint-ing, which now hangs in the National Gallery in London, depicts one of the Great Western Railway’s locomotives thundering over a viaduct on the newly constructed route between Bristol and the capital. The enduring appeal of the picture is the way it captures the tension in modernity itself — at once creative and destructive — the brash, technologically advanced railway cutting a swath through a timeless rural landscape, fire spilling forth from its iron belly. The railways brought into being the modern world, they accelerated communication that had hitherto been tied to the pace of the fastest horse, they opened up new markets for goods and services, allowed cities to expand and imposed uniform, ‘railway time’ on the nation.

[I]n London three railwaymen — a guard, an engine-driver, and a signalman — are up before a coroner’s jury. A tremendous railway accident has dispatched hundreds of passengers into the next world. The negligence of the railway workers is the cause of the misfortune … their labour often lasts for 40 or 50 hours without a break. They are ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a certain point their labour-power ran out.

(Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 1976 [1867]: 363)