The Railway Journey

The Railway Journey

 - Wolfgang Schivelbusch

      The Railway Journey by Wolfgang Schivelbusch is about how the steam train drastically changed life for 19th century society. Schivelbusch wrote about how the steam train was able to change psychological perspectives for 19th century society.
Before the steam train travel was based in periods because of animal exhaustion. A horse can only travel so far in a single run. Because of this humans understood the power necessary for this travel. Steam travel completely changed this, the speed of a steam train was triple that of a stagecoach. Now the idea of traveling 30 miles per hour seems very slow compared to modern technologies but at the time people felt much the same as many of us feel in planes. People reported that steam trains felt like projectiles and that the lest problem would surely kill them all.

     One point i was very interested in, and then struck by on our steam travel in Virginia city was how the speed of travel can change your perception of the size of a space. I had never contemplated how big of a difference that would really make on how you perceived earth. For instance merchant traveling around the silk road could walk for 3 years to travel from Europe to Asia, where as today the distance can be transversed in mere hours. To a modern human such as myself the earth doesn't really seem that large. You can travel to almost any location on the globe within 24 hours. I cannot even fathom how large the earth must have seemed when even a trip just within the United States could take you months of travel. 

   Another aspect of this changed human perspective I found very compelling was that time zones were never invented until the invention of steam travel. Now that i think of it this makes a lot of sense, society would have no need for timezones unless we had the ability to travel faster than the earth was rotating in relation to the sun.

   At first I have to admit I was rather confused as to why we were going to read this work considering its an art seminar class and the book is about trains. But I think its about how society can have very large shifts in perception due to new inventions. Much like new technologies have and continue to affect art making processes.