Geography Reference
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notion! 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.
. . . Just imagine what will happen when the lines open 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.
(Quoted in Harvey 1990:426)
This pattern re
ects the profoundly uneven national geographies of indus-
trialization facilitated by the railroad, i.e., the rising prominence of cores of
capital accumulation at the center of national transport systems. In trans-
forming French space, the railroads also transformed French time: “Bit by
bit, as lines from Paris wound deeper into the hinterland, they had chased
away local times until, by 1888, Paris
fl
fixed the whole country's railroad time”
(Galison 2003:99). Similarly, the British railroad heavily favored London, and
brought most of the island within ten hours' traveling time of the capital
(Figure 4.2).
In addition to shortening travel times, railroads also dramatically changed
the subjective experience of travel. Accelerated speeds transformed the
dominant former means of travel, horse-drawn carriages, into something
slow, whereas previously it had been the quickest way to go. Moreover,
older, animal-driven technologies, Schivelbusch (1977) maintains, preserved a
“mimetic relationship” to the space traversed, permitting travelers to perceive
space intimately. With the introduction of steam power, however, animal-
based transportation was rendered hopelessly anachronistic, and the close
relationship between traveler and the traveled space was uncoupled. Unlike
animal transportation, which was irregular and bumpy (horses' hooves
needed traction), railroads moved smoothly at a constant rate, and the mech-
anism of propulsion was largely invisible, incomprehensible, or misunderstood
by most travelers. Many early descriptions of railroads liken them to project-
iles or rockets. The sheer speed of rail travel appeared unnatural to many
early riders, and prevented them from close observation of their surround-
ings. Railroads ushered in new perceptual landscapes, divorcing travelers'
bodies from their traditional experiential linkage to external space, forcing
them to construct new forms of consciousness to interpret the landscape as it
whizzed by. As Cresswell (2006:20) observes, “Just as the railway was instru-
mental in ordering modern life through the production of abstract time and
abstract space, so it was the source of new anxieties.” Among other things,
this new phenomenology of movement entailed a much greater ability to
de
fi
ect irrelevant stimuli. Unable to hear sounds in the places they passed by,
unable to look ahead, passengers confronted a rapidly passing blur that sub-
stituted for the foreground. Victor Hugo complained in 1837 that “The
fl
fl
owers
by the side of the road are no longer
flecks, or rather streaks, of
red or white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak”
fl
owers but
fl
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