Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
(quoted in Schivelbusch 1977:55). Slow, careful views of nearby objects were
replaced by rapid, super
cial scans of distant ones in the background, mak-
ing passengers feel disembodied from the places through which they
fi
fl
ew,
leaving them with a
fleeting, impressionistic understanding of their surround-
ings. Medical doctors of the time associated the rail experience with the new
health problems of eye strain and stress. As these changes became wide-
spread, romantic writers of the nineteenth century turned to earlier forms
of transportation with nostalgia; as Schivelbusch (1977:121) explains “The
'esthetic freedom' of the pre-industrial subject was discovered at the very
moment when the pre-industrial methods of production and transpor-
tation seemed threatened by mechanization.... When industrialization
suddenly caused these old forms to be seen from an esthetic and romanti-
cizing viewpoint, we learn less about those forms themselves than about
general attitudes toward industrialization.” Thus, despite the economic
gains unleashed by industrial time-space compression, the process also
entailed experiential losses: the quantitative size of spaces traveled through
expanded greatly, but the qualitative appreciation of the experience declined
(Harrington 2000).
Railroads also fostered an outlook that emphasized precision rather than
the old “inexact” habits. With the railroad, speed became an established prin-
ciple of public life and a synonym for progress. Punctuality (“on the point”)
became increasingly regarded as socially normative: a few minutes meant the
di
fl
erence between catching or missing a train. The new environment dem-
ocratized access to velocity: for example, women were able to travel alone
without a male escort, a rare phenomenon prior to the railroad. The psychic
transformation wrought by rail travel carried over even into the simple
process of embarking or disembarking. Schivelbusch (1977:174) notes, for
example, that “As the departing traveler proceeded from the city . . . he
experienced a process of expansion of space.... Conversely, the arriving
traveler experienced a process of spatial reduction.”
Within cities too, railroads were potent in restructuring urban land mar-
kets, initiating rounds of change in the urban rent surface that ampli
ff
ed some
land values and eroded others. Railroads simultaneously intruded upon older
cities, destroying the traditional fabric of urban space, and gave rise to new
ones. As the commodi
fi
ed, specialized districts
of production and social reproduction materialized apace within divisions of
labor that became spatially extended and more integrated. Outside urban
areas, railroads allowed the rhythms of the city to penetrate the countryside.
By making distant lands accessible, railroads dramatically extended the rent
surfaces of urban areas, commodifying land in hitherto inaccessible regions,
encouraging farmers, settlers, and planters to assault distant, relatively
untouched ecosystems.
The American rail experience paralleled that of Britain in generating a
transport surface increasingly ubiquitous across national space. “In a sense,
the challenge of American railroads matched that of other large-scale systems,
fi
cation of urban space intensi
fi
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