Locomotion: The Railway Revolution by Nicholas Faith

Author:Nicholas Faith [Faith, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2017-04-24T07:00:00+00:00

7 Steam and Society

From the outset railways were thought of as progressive, democratizing institutions. The feeling was natural, since they carried rich and poor alike. In the stirring words of a speaker at the Internal Improvements convention held in New York in 1836: The railroad is the poor man’s road. It is the rich man’s money expended for the benefit of himself and the poor man.’

The feeling was summed up in the words of Dr Thomas Arnold when he saw a train passing Rugby School. He was overjoyed ‘to see it and think that feudality is gone for ever. It is so great a blessing to think that any one evil is really extinct.’ Ironically his sentiments were echoed by the reactionary Emperor Francis II of Austria who opposed the development of railways within his empire because they would bring in democratizing influences, what he described as ‘rebellion’. In the event his successors found that railways’ subversive influence was less important than their usefulness in helping to bind together their dominions, and as we saw in Chapter 4, in controlling them through facilitating troop movements. Politically, in other words, they were neutral.

Socially they were more effective, though railways could not by themselves reform societies or break the habits of centuries. The effects were patchy and varied from country to country. One simple but obvious example is the provision of railway services on the Sabbath. In the United States the railroads were powerful enough to impose their Sabbathbreaking will on small towns. The railroad at Galesburg, wrote Ernest Almo Calkins, in They Broke the Prairie in 1937, ‘was no longer a neighborhood enterprise, controlled by the little group of pious men who had founded Galesburg to be a Christian town after their own ideal.’

In Britain rail services helped to erode the rigours of the traditional Protestant British Sabbath — even though the Victorian Sunday coexisted with them. British railways have always had special timetables for Sundays, offering services which are invariably less fast and frequent than those of weekdays, whereas in continental Europe timetables are virtually the same throughout the week.

The Victorian era is generally thought of as a time of feminine enslavement, but contemporaries believed that the railways had greatly helped to free women. In 1844 an eminently respectable periodical, the Quarterly Review, noted with approval how the railways had brought about a change: ‘the emancipation of the fair sex, and particularly of the middle and higher classes, from the prohibition from travelling in public carriages, which with the majority was a prohibition from travelling at all.’ This new-found freedom was extended by the fact that many compartments on trains were mixed (although railways provided ladies-only compartments until well after 1945).

Typical of the way railways could encourage natural social trends but fail to shake older-rooted habits was in education. For a generation or more railways were thought of as the highest and most challenging form of construction. In Russia cadet engineer officers deemed it a great honour to work on

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