‘Nothing is moving’: Railway Travel

Abstract

If, as I argue in Chapter 1, the practice of walking has implications for every other means of getting around, it might equally be suggested that the railway formed a blueprint for our understanding of what it means to be transported. This is, after all, the first large-scale, public mobility-machine. As the sociologist Ian Carter suggests in his study of Railways and Culture in Britain, ‘transport by rail might have been largely superseded by cars, trucks and aircraft today, but the railway age laid tracks along which our world still runs’ (2001, p. 4). The railway is overladen with historical significance, and with more than 150 years’ accumulation of stories, events and images. The arrival of the first railways was momentous, we are told by many commentators (cf. Schivelbusch, 1979; Freeman, 1999; Carter, 2001; Urry, 2007), significantly affecting almost every other aspect of social, political and personal life. They connected places in ways that had not been possible before and required a radical rethinking of temporal relationships. This chapter attempts to find a route through the wealth of material about railways in order to examine the questions about mobility that train travel invites us to ask.