In a generation where cramped airplane seats, invasive security and endless fees have become the norm for long-distance travel, the 19th-century railroad connotes a quaint era where one could leisurely enjoy the passing landscape.

Except, a closer look at early railway travel tells a different story.

In the years following the 1825 launch of the first passenger railway — which traveled at 10 mph — many described rail travel in terms similar to how we now describe air travel.

In The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space, author Wolfgang Schivelbusch offers dozens of 19th-century accounts of rail travel that bring perspective to how we view travel today:

“The train was experienced as a projectile, and traveling on it, as being shot through the landscape — thus losing control of one’s senses. The traveler who sat inside that projectile ceased to be a traveler and became, as noted in a popular metaphor of the century, a mere parcel.”

Among the writings he cites:

• “In traveling on most of the railways, the face of nature, the beautiful prospects of hill and dale, are lost or distorted to our view. The alternation of high and low ground, the healthful breeze, and all those exhilarating associations connected with “the Road”, are lost or changed to doleful cuttings, dismal tunnels, and the noxious effluvia of the screaming engine.”

  — Anonymous, 1844

• “The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak; the grainfields are great shocks of yellow hair; fields of alfalfa, long green tresses; the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy mingling dance on the horizon; from time to time, a shadow, a shape, a spectre appears and disappears with lightning speed behind the window: it’s a railway guard.”

  —Victor Hugo, 22 August 1837

• “From Albany to Schenectady, you travel by rail-road; and the least exciting of all traveling, it seems to me, is decidedly locomotion by steam on a rail-road. The traveler, whose train of ideas is always influenced by the manner in which he proceeds, thinks in a steam car of nothing else but the place of his destination, for the very reason that he is moving so quickly. Pent up in a narrow space, rolling along on an even plain which seldom offers any objects of curiosity, and which, when it does, you pass by with such rapidity, that your attention is never fixed; together with a number of people who have all the same object in view, and think like you of nothing else, but then they shall arrive at the journey’s end — thus situated, you find nothing to entertain or divert you, except now and then a spark flying into the window of the car.”

  — Francis J. Lieber, 1834.

To sum up:

• The face of nature is lost and distorted.

• Everything becomes a streak.

• Pent up in a narrow space, the traveler can only think of his destination.

These statements could just as easily have come from 21st-century descriptions of air travel.

Two centuries of perspective

At first glance, these writings would seem to contradict my project, which aims to illustrate that a 45 mph train ride provides a unique, intimate connection with the landscape and with fellow passengers.

But these early accounts of rail travel are a reminder that our thoughts on time, space and speed are relative to our environments.

When stagecoach was the norm, a 30 mph ride alienated passengers from the landscape, which seemed to pass by as a blur.

In the 21st century, we have become so accustomed to traveling 70 mph in a car and 500 mph in a plane that a 45 mph train is, at best, a relaxing break or, for others, a frustratingly inefficient way to get from Point A to Point B.

In either case, no one today would complain about 45 mph being too fast.

Even 19th-century travelers who didn’t complain about the speed still found it jarring.

In a journal article titled “The Annihilation of Time and Space,” Rebecca Solnit writes about the opening of an early passenger railroad in 1830:

“The celebrated young actress Fanny Kemble had been given a preview of the Manchester and Liverpool Railroad that August. In a letter to a friend she exclaimed, "The engine ... set off at its utmost speed, thirty-five miles an hour, swifter than a bird flies (for they tried the experiment with a snipe). You cannot conceive what that sensation of cutting the air was; the motion is as smooth as possible too. I could have either read or written; and as it was, I stood up, and with my bonnet off 'drank the air before me.' ... When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description." Thirty-five miles an hour was nearly as fast as the fastest horse, and unlike a gallop, it could be sustained almost indefinitely. It was a dizzying speed. Passengers found the landscape out the train windows was blurred, impossible to contemplate, erased by speeds that would now seem a slow crawl to us.”

Annihilating distance

Just as our sense of speed is relative, so, too, is our sense of distance.

Today, thousands of people board flights from the United States in the evening and, hours later, awake in Europe. In 2020, a British Airways flight made the journey from JFK to London’s Heathrow airport in less than five hours, a record for subsonic passenger flight.

And airlines continue to push the limits of annihilating distance.

In May 2022, Qantas airlines announced that it would “conquer the final frontier of long-haul travel and enable non-stop flights to Australia from any other city including New York and London.”

The direct flights were labeled “Project Sunrise,” a nod to the flights operated by Qantas across the Indian Ocean during WWII that remained airborne long enough to see two sunrises.

In the words of Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce, these flights mark “the final fix for the tyranny of distance that has traditionally challenged travel to Australia.”

These flights will shrink the distance between Australia and the rest of the world, in the same way that rail travel shrunk the distance between European and American cities in its early days.

Today, a Parisian would take for granted reaching the city of Orleans in less than two hours by car or by public transit — and a 4.5-hour journey would seem interminable.

But in the early 19th century, that compression of distance — while no doubt a significant convenience for many — was suffocating to at least one writer.

Schivelbusch quotes Heinrich Heine on the 1843 opening of the railways from Paris to Rouen and Orléans.

“What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone. … Now you can travel to Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.”

The railway didn’t just make faraway cities — and the goods they produced — more accessible, but they also changed the feel, the mindset, of distance. The linden trees of Germany felt as if they were encroaching on Paris.

If distance was measured in time, then the world had suddenly begun to shrink.

Places connected by railroads were, for all practical purposes, several times closer to each other than they ever had been.

For those of us drawn to the romance of the rails, these accounts are a sobering reminder the the rails were not always alluring, and that they were developed at a time of rapid — and often times unwelcome — change.

⮕ Fast forward 150 years, when higher and higher speeds became the norm, some began to rebel, giving birth to a series of Slow movements.

Bibliography

Qantas News Room. (n.d.). Qantas announces Project Sunrise aircraft order for non-stop flights to Australia. Qantas News Room. Retrieved February 4, 2023, from https://www.qantasnewsroom.com.au/media-releases/qantas-announces-project-sunrise-aircraft-order-for-non-stop-flights-to-australia/

Schivelbusch, W. (2014). The railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the nineteenth century. University of California Press.

Selyukh, A. (2020, February 9). British Airways Sets Record, Crossing The Atlantic In Under 5 Hours In Strong Winds. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/02/09/804266975/british-airways-sets-speed-record-crossing-the-atlantic-in-under-5-hours

Solnit, R. (2003). The Annihilation of Time and Space. New England Review, 24(1), 5–19.