Railways: Tracks, Trains, and Travellers

Abstract

The Victorian railway network of technologies and associated practices was a prime site of secularization. A secular time independent of motion was the condition of possibility underpinning railway travellers’ ability to negotiate timetables formally locating all spaces within the same temporal grid, or to engage in conducts allowing their bodies to be relatively at rest while in transit. The electric telegraph helped towards expanding this temporal grid on a national scale, enveloping the entire national (eventually imperial) territory as an increasingly temporally synchronized whole. In this way, and to the degree that it succeeded in moving human bodies without deterioration, the Victorian railway network mediated secular time.

One afternoon in the early 1860s, a gentleman disembarking from an express train arriving in Southampton suddenly realized he would not make it to the public restroom in time. The moment his feet landed on the platform,

his sphincter was taken by surprise, gave way, and then followed a deluge, with which he went to the water-closet, and there he left his drawers and stockings.¹

The gentleman’s doctor, Mr Hilton, would later seek to recount his anonymous patient’s embarrassing experience to as large an audience as possible, first in a lecture at the College of Surgeons and later in the pages of leading medical journal The Lancet. It was a matter of public interest; to the medical authorities the gentleman’s predicament exemplified a certain kind of ‘reflex paralysis of the lower extremities’ seemingly suffered by many ordinary railway travellers.

The Lancet had set down a commission to examine all evidence of railway travelling’s effect on public health, and throughout the 1860s this topic filled its pages with similar examples, as well as theories, diagnoses, and remedies to railway-related ailments psychological or physical. The commission highlighted, for instance, the ‘vague dread of certain undefined consequences to health resulting from influences peculiarly produced by this mode of travelling’.² The ‘almost incessant repetition of mere vibrations’,³ together with chilling draughts,⁴ the anxiety of being ‘in constant hurry’,⁵ the loud rattling sound of wheels on tracks⁶—in short, the constant jolts and starts of the moving railway carriage that the travelling body had to absorb—could cause nausea, headaches, fatigue, strained muscles, and weakened bones, in particular in those who were already unhealthy.⁷ Furthermore, declared the medical experts, the ‘constantly present … possibility of collision’ often caused a general ‘condition of uneasiness’ in season-ticket holders and other habitual travellers.⁸ Describing a case of such ‘railway sickness’, a travel guide book published the same year as the Lancet’s report concluded that ‘the performance of a journey of a hundred miles within so short a space of time, and at such a rapid pace, had too greatly excited the nervous system [of one passenger], and had otherwise disturbed the functions of a delicate organisation and a debilitated frame’.⁹ The traveller might not be consciously aware of the ‘thousands of successive jolts which he experiences’, warned the Lancet, ‘but every one of them tells upon his body’.

It is idle to say that journeys from one end of London to the other occupy as long or a longer period of time; for as you well know, and no doubt have carefully made out, the hurry, anxiety, rapid movement, noise, and other physical disadvantages of railway travelling, are peculiar to that method of conveyance, and a railway journey of an hour, at the rate of fifty miles an hour, is almost as fatiguing as half a day’s journey on the road.¹⁰

This extensive concern for railway-related health hazards represented a remarkable mid-century shift in perspective on public railways and their effect on human bodies. In preceding decades, the dominant assumption had been that the railways had an unparalleled potential to transport humans over long distances not only quickly but also without their bodies or minds undergoing any deterioration whatsoever. The earliest extension of the railway network ‘coincided with recurrent outbreaks of public disorder’¹¹; during the 1840s, army personnel were being rushed from district to district in order to put down Chartist disturbances. Already in 1830, just after its opening as the first public railway line in the country, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway carried soldiers on active duty in order to save them a two-day march. According to one contemporary estimate, between 1841 and 1843 no less than 118,000 soldiers together with 12,000 dependents were moved between districts by rail.¹² Testifying before the Committee on Railways, Quartermaster-general Sir J.W. Gordon was asked by Chairman William E. Gladstone about the potential cost benefit of transporting military troops by railway instead of having them walk on foot. The officer dutifully responded to the financial concern at the heart of the question, but interjected what to him was a more pressing matter, namely the influence of railway travelling on the soldiers themselves—or rather, its lack of influence:

[…] I should say, that this mode of railway conveyance has enabled the army (comparatively to the demands upon it, a very small one) to do the work of a very large one; you send a battalion of 1000 men from London to Manchester in nine hours; that same battalion marching, would take 17 days; and they arrive at the end of nine hours just as fresh, or nearly so, as when they started. By moving troops to and fro by that mode of conveyance, you do most important service to the public, so much so, that without that conveyance, you could not have done one-tenth part of the work that it was required of the troops to do, and necessarily do, in the year 1842.¹³

For the military, and so for the state and the public, the railway system’s ability to move human bodies over long distances, fast and without friction, was at least as important as any of its money-saving potentials.

Of course, this potential would be difficult to actualize. The earliest noted death directly caused by a public railway happened at the official opening of the very first one. When attending the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester line in 1830, MP William Huskinson had his leg crushed under Stephenson’s locomotive, and later died from the injuries.¹⁴ After having tried the same journey, merchant and politician Thomas Creevy declared that while travelling by railway was exhilarating, ‘it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion of instant death to all upon the least accident happening. It gave me a headache which has not left me yet’.¹⁵

The following decades saw an unprecedented investment of money, equipment, and human energy in an effort to evacuate all snags and frictions from the journey. The railway was offering a historical opportunity to turn human bodies into ‘entities moving while at rest’ as the medieval scholastics discussed in Chap. 2 might have put it. So when artist John Ruskin in 1889 complained that ‘[the railway] transmutes a man from a traveler into a living parcel’, meaning to lament a technology reducing humans to something less, he was also articulating the very vision of early railway enthusiasts, thereby giving testament to what had been achieved over the course of a century.¹⁶

Ever since Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s seminal study of The Railway Journey (1986), scholars interested in the cultural impact of nineteenth-century railways have been more concerned with the phenomenology of travelling—passengers’ experience of travelling at higher speeds, for instance—than with exploring the particular ways in which the railway network as such mediated specific temporalities.¹⁷ Michael Freeman’s Railways and the Victorian Imagination (1999) investigated the railway as an embodiment of economic and social changes and hence as a catalyst of novel artistic and intellectual expressions. Similarly, the essays in his and Matthew Beaumont’s edited volume The Railway and Modernity (2007) spoke of the railway’s many and various impacts across Victorian culture, arts, medicine, and economy. Literature scholars such as Charlotte Matthieson or Anna Despotopoulou have further explored the gendering of the practices and images associated with railway travelling.¹⁸

Generally speaking, these studies tend to treat railway time the same way Schivelbusch did: they contrast the artificial standardized (and spatialized) temporality of the railway machine ensemble to its phenomenological impacts on humans participating in its coordinated movements. As it did for so many of the Victorians, the railway becomes for these scholars a technological manifestation of the modern capitalist system and its reductive framing of the human. The question of what kind of temporality (or indeed temporalities!) mediated by the Victorian railway system itself remains largely unexamined.

This chapter, by contrast, attends to the question of precisely how the human-technological assemblage of the railway instituted a concept of time independent of motion, even regardless of what people were capable of consciously registering. It reads the extensive work done in terms of train coordination and timetables, track construction, carriage design, the creation of norms for passenger behaviour, and so on as aiming towards one and the same goal: turning the railway passenger into an immutable mobile. The argument is that the railway network mediated a time independent of motion—secular time—to the extent that it succeeded in moving human bodies without physical or psychological trauma. This approach allows us to locate this kind of temporality more precisely in the human-technological railway network (and also to discuss more precisely how its characteristic phenomenological experiences were generated and managed) rather than simply echoing the Victorians in declaring the railway a manifestation of a monolithic modernity.

Starting from the foundation developed in the two previous chapters—namely that there is a conceptual connection between a network moving an entity without deterioration and that network mediating a secular concept of time—this chapter presents the Victorian railway network as a prime site of secularization in the period. It should go without saying that apart from those who refused to join excursion trips on the Sabbath (but who gladly travelled on the other six days of the week), Victorians used the railway system regardless of their professed religious belief or lack of such.¹⁹ It was a site of secularization in the specific sense that secular time was actively invested in and materially mediated through the multiple movements and elements comprising the network as a whole. The network was at once premised upon and underpinning a conception of secular time, and this kind of time was implicitly assumed by whoever participated in its associated technologies and collective choreographies.

Moving Bodies

In his 1830 history of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway—which he with characteristic confidence published several months before its official opening the same year—its secretary and treasurer Henry Booth proclaimed that ‘perhaps the most striking result produced by the completion of this Railway, is the sudden and marvellous change which has been effected in our ideas of time and space’.²⁰ At the time of writing, Booth admitted, this pertained only to the Liverpool-Manchester line, but he maintained that the new experience of time would soon come to ‘pervade society at large’. And indeed, railways did turn out a crucial technology in the process of distributing uniform time throughout the national territory.²¹ In 1884, The Times commented that ‘[f]ifty years ago … it was the custom of each town to keep its public clocks regulated in accordance with its own local time; and it was only the development of the railway system which brought about the abandonment of the practice’.²² ‘Railways have made the uniformity of time within narrow belts of longitude a necessity’, declared Scottish geographer Hugh Robert Mill in 1892, ‘and so largely does the railway effect modern civilized life that railway time soon comes to regulate all affairs’.²³

Echoing these late-nineteenth-century voices, twentieth-century historians have often continued to describe ‘railway time’ as an instance of a modern, all-encompassing frame imposed on ‘local’ times, and/or as a catalyst of peculiar ‘subjective’ experiences spurred by modernity’s monolithic ‘objective’ temporality. ⁠Likewise, scholars concerned with modern temporalities have often commented on the importance of the Victorian railway network in instituting or at least advancing an ‘annihilation of space and time’²⁴; that it helped create an integrated national space through drawing far places near and making distant times present; and that it constituted new phenomenological experiences of time’s passage, its speed and imposition of straight lines reducing landscapes to fleeting panoramas.²⁵ It has become almost mandatory for historians concerned with modern temporalities to assert that prior to the extension of the Victorian railway network, every English town followed its own local time,²⁶ and to present this as a qualitative historical shift between premodern and modern temporalities.

It certainly makes for a powerful narrative. The new ‘railway time’ can be cast as representing a generic modernity, and ‘local times’ as more natural and irreducibly complex elements increasingly forced into (or out of) modernity’s procrustean frame. Yet while a case could be made that the establishing of English society as a precisely synchronized whole through conscious organization of homogenous ‘clock-time’ was a Victorian accomplishment, the experience of time during train travel is much more complex than allowed for by the narrative of temporal ‘compression’ or ‘acceleration’.²⁷ Furthermore, it was not as new as is often assumed. A concept of secular time was already emerging through the gradual establishment of local civic times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

For what exactly is local time? It is a kind of time seen as belonging to or rather covering a geographical area in its entirety, enveloping all the diverse interests and movements found there. This means that in principle ‘local’ time is distinguished from the ‘national’ time historians have often associated with railways only by its geographical extension and by the synchronized social entity (citizenry or nation) seen as inhabiting it. In other words, it is a shift only in terms of scale. ‘Local’ and ‘national’ (or indeed ‘global’) times both involve the postulation of an empty temporal interval which might in principle be extended indefinitely, and which contains or envelopes multiple spatial and temporal movements. The role played by the railway in this story was not to institute something entirely new, but rather to extend developments already emerging in pockets in the preceding centuries.

The following describes how local civic times were established and eventually expanded beyond parish and city borders through the construction of railways, temporal coordination, time tables, and telegraphically synchronized station clocks and finally through the integration of a national network. Crucially, the motivation behind this temporal integration and standardization was preventing passengers from experiencing physical and psychological trauma. In other words, this is not a story of imposing a universal frame from above using technology, but rather one of mobilizing workers, metallic wires, soft cushions, and informative wall posters in order to secure the immutability of human bodies in motion over long distances at unprecedented speeds. The uniform temporality mediated by the Victorian railways was an effect of the work performed in order to transform human travellers into immutable mobiles.

Local Time

There never was an abrupt or all-encompassing horological revolution where mechanical clocks were introduced and everyone’s sense of time changed into something characteristically ‘modern’. As Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift have demonstrated in their 2009 book Shaping the Day, modern scholars have tended to underestimate premodern people’s capacity for precise measurement of hours prior to the creation of mechanical clocks, as well as exaggerate the effect on entire populations of technological innovations that was really only relevant to a few, such as navigators or astronomers. Different networks of technologies and practices mediated different kinds of time as well as different levels of precision and accuracy. The fact that mechanical clocks were developed primarily within networks of specialized experts meant that the level of accuracy achievable within these specific contexts was high above what most people expected or needed. The development of clock technology was not synchronous with the development of most people’s skill sets or experience of time.

Long before the invention of personal clocks, most people navigated their daily lives with remarkable temporal precision and accuracy. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for instance, several decades before the development of mechanical minute and second hands on clocks, compilers of almanacs presumed their readers’ familiarity with minutes and even seconds.²⁸ Seventeenth-century diarists such as Samuel Pepys often sought to be specific about the time of birth or death of family members, doctors developed complex appointment systems, and facilitators of gambling activities used stopwatches long before these came to be applied in modern factories.²⁹ For quotidian tasks, people usually told time by drawing on a number of skills and embodied movements, irrespective of owning a timekeeper or being able to account for time in an abstract register. Carriage hire rates were determined in terms of time intervals (for instance, one shilling for 45 minutes), the daily departure and arrival of post and passenger coaches were advertised and timetabled according to the hour, and the movement of postmen was coordinated according to these timetables; letters addressed to other cities had to arrive at the office in time for the coach’s departure.³⁰ For instance, in eighteenth-century Bristol, the post offices were open between 7.00 am and 9.00 pm, its postmen making deliveries at 8.30 am, 12.00 pm, and 5.30 pm. Effective use of the postal system thus required some sense of ‘timing’ and tacit understanding of when to do what. In other words, people were navigating a temporal multiplex with adequate levels of precision, and did not need the high level of accuracy offered by mechanical clocks in the coordination of their daily lives.

Within this temporal multiplex, scholars have identified a number of related developments vital to a more collective everyday technological performance of secular time on a local (rather than national) scale: the establishment of a single time signal representing the town as a whole rather than specific interests within it; and a shift from aural to visual time signalling, which required a higher level of abstraction and encouraged a shift in people’s general time reading skills. Together, these developments constituted a shift towards a conception of time as abstract, isochronic, and independent of motion.

Before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, time signalling was primarily aural.³¹ Medieval clocks told (or tolled!) the time with bells. And rather than being automated and coordinated to strike at equal hours, these bells were rung manually to cue a number of communal events or occasions: the opening of city markets, the approaching of a church service, working times for various guilds, royal births, mustering of militia to face imminent dangers, or calls for celebration after military victories. Signals were distinguished by the physical location of the bell, and by the patterns and styles of striking (‘sharply’, ‘hard’, ‘softly’), and could vary considerably between parishes. Indeed, the borders and internal distances of parishes were marked by specific territorial ‘acoustic regimes’. These regimes might envelop quite extensive areas, and the shared experience of a particular sonic environment partly constituted the habitus—a ‘culture of the senses’—of the individuals and groups located within the soundscape.³² In urban areas, where churches’ soundscapes overlapped and confused parochial boundaries, the resulting cacophony could as such become a defining characteristic of the city’s ‘acoustic profile’.³³ In 1602, for instance, Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin-Pomperia, visited London, and was amazed by its distinctive sound.

On arriving in London we heard a great ringing of bells in almost all the churches going on very late in the evening, also on the following day… we were informed that the young people do that for the sake of exercise and amusement, and sometimes the lay considerable sums of money as a wager, who will pull a bell the longest or ring it in the most approved fashion… the old Queen is said to have been pleased very much by this exercise, considering it a sign of the health of the people.³⁴

Occasionally, there were deliberate attempts to bring the acoustic chaos of the city as a whole into harmonious unity. As Bruce R. Smith puts it, ‘[t]he installation of a new Lord Mayor, for example, gave foreign visitors a chance… to hear [the city’s] ordinary chaos of sounds brought into consonance’.³⁵ The cacophonous soundscape itself became an expression of local character, a manifestation of civic identity.

During the period between 1300 and 1500, pragmatic town authorities increasingly attempted to encourage some sense of order in the sonic chaos by introducing public mechanical clocks.³⁶ The new mechanical style of signalling was not always popular, and in many places the ringing of ‘equal hours’ was switched off at least during the night. Far from an anonymous process of modernization, its introduction was a ‘partisan and… conscious act of self-definition’ on the part of city authorities over against local guilds and their respective time signals. Historian Chris Humphrey argues that the introduction of equal hours was often coupled with a conscious endeavour to establish ‘a new “mean time” that was public and city-owned, both for the practical purpose of organising daily life and as symbolic of a distinctive urban identity’.³⁷ The sound of the town as a totalised and synchronous entity was deliberately distinguished from the cacophony of its overlapping interests. Humphrey gives the example of York, where in 1483 butchers were ordered to keep their shops open on Sundays, until ‘eight of the bell of the clock of commonalty on Ouse Bridge’, and to close them again according to the signals of their local parish churches. This is one of the first recordings in York of a time ‘of the clock’—that is, the bell on Ouse Bridge did not mark the time of specific guilds or groups (nor of course a global time of the world), but the time of York. In this way, the establishment of a time independent of specific local interests and movements went together with the political assertion of urban autonomy.

The introduction of bell signals based on equal hours during this period marked another tentative step towards the practice of a secular time whose abstract nature allowed it to envelop the entire urban community in equal measure. In most instances, municipal clocks were given a privileged position within the existing system. Whereas all other time signals represented specific interests, events, and movements, civic time stood as if above the cacophony, and would soon be considered the common background allowing the accurate measuring of all the other time signals. In cases of conflict, civic clocks, whether located in churches, town halls, or courthouses, were singled out as neutral points of reference; if in doubt, refer to the town clock. Gradually, as Rossum puts it, ‘times of council sessions, of market, or of work could be tied to the clock time signal instead of a [particular] bell signal’, thereby reducing the urban cacophony while also taking over its role as marker of civic identity.³⁸

Together with the establishment of a time signal representing the town as a whole came an increasing tendency to signal time by visual rather than aural means. Between 1300 and 1800, most towns in England saw a gradual interweaving of aural with visual representations of time, from which we might infer a certain mutation in the population’s sensory experience and embodied habits. There is after all an immense difference between reading time aurally or visually. Aural signals have a ubiquity to them that visual signals lack. Turbulent sound waves immerse entire bodies all at once, arresting the attention of everyone within their spatial reach, spurring bodies from rest to action. By contrast, visual signals demand active decoding, a conscious shift in attention, a deliberate turning of body and mind, as well as sophisticated skills of mental abstraction: One must be able to imagine time as continually passing, without constantly being made (bodily) aware of it. A dial, especially one featuring both hour and minute hands, presents time as having a continuous presence, mechanical clocks with dials give the impression of measuring a time independent of the worldly flux. They represent a kind of time that passes uniformly, even when not measuring anything in particular, and whether or not anyone can sense its passage.³⁹

The effect of these developments was a gradual and subtle but nevertheless fundamental shift from the idea that the parish border lies wherever one can no longer hear the local church bells, or that the identity of a town is manifested in the cacophony of all its sounds. It required a conception of time abstracted from the world, enveloping everything in equal measure. Again, this does not entail that the concept of secular time simply replaced other forms of time with the introduction of visual dials on churches and town halls, which measured the time of a given civic community—as noted above, people did not need visual dials in order to ‘know’ the time or navigate the temporal schema of their daily lives. But such technologies were still important in that they ‘expanded the physical space in which a temporal order was applicable beyond the zone delineated by acoustic or even optical time indication: they made possible the coordination of temporal fixations independent of the time signal’.⁴⁰ The visual signalling of mechanically measured hours, minutes, and seconds carried the implicit assumption of a time independent from such signals, and so time could be measured even beyond the physical reach of the signal itself. The secular time mediated here had a potentially infinite reach.

While the spatial reach of secular time was unlimited in principle, the technologies and associated practices mediating it were still limited to urban areas and peripheries. Only towards the late eighteenth century was the general population becoming aware of the possibilities of coordination beyond ‘the boundaries of the “urban monads”’.⁴¹ Earlier, the only way to extend the reach of a local time beyond its aural or visual borders (i.e. beyond the reach of visible public dials or audible bells) had been to manually transport a timekeeper from one place to another, while trying to ensure that it remained completely stable throughout its passage. By contrast, the Victorian achievement of successfully extending the secular present so as to envelope the entire national territory (and beyond this, the entire globe) was accomplished through mobilizing a range of technologies and forces, and through the active work of temporal coordination, synchronization, and standardization. In this expansion of secular time to national and global scales, one specific technological network became crucial, one centred on moving a new kind of immutable entities between spatial locations without deterioration: public railways carrying human passengers.

Writing in the 1840s, during the first ‘railway mania’, Henry Booth—ever the hyperbolic visionary—saw no reason not to extend the shared sense of civic simultaneity beyond city borders. Indeed, he stated, the rapidly evolving railway network had already made this a practical necessity. ‘All ordinary measurements, whether of time or distance, will soon become obsolete … We have discovered that twelve does not mean twelve, nor ONE, ONE. P.M. in the east is A.M in the west.’⁴² This temporal incongruity was made increasingly felt in everyday life by the use of railway travel and transport, he argued, and would only increase with the establishment of telegraphic networks, which he expected would soon be extended throughout the country. For Booth, this national temporal synchronicity was more than a pragmatic necessity; it was a thing of beauty. Peaceful and safe coexistence was at stake: ‘instead of confusion, there would be harmony; instead of complexity, simplicity; instead of multiplicity, unity.’⁴³

[B]ehold the portrait as it might be. The great bell of St. Pauls strikes ONE, and, simultaneously, every City clock and Village chime, from John of Groat’s to the Land’s End, strikes ONE, also … There is sublimity in the idea of a whole nation stirred by one impulse; in every arrangement, one common signal regulating the movements of a mighty people.⁴⁴

One other technology besides railways would be particularly important in achieving this, he argued. ‘[I]f the introduction of railways, from the multiplication of travelers and increased rapidity of transit, add a five-fold strength, by practical illustration, to the necessity which is more and more felt, for uniformity of Time, the urgency will be rendered infinitely more glaring, by the establishment of the Electric Telegraph.’⁴⁵

Booth’s predictions were largely correct: The electric telegraph did come to play an important role in the process of integrating and synchronizing the nation in a uniform time. And as he had argued, it was indeed the rapidly extending railway network that enabled and necessitated the expansion of civic time beyond city borders.

Branching Out

In terms of its material extension, the beginnings of the national railway network were humble: the earliest public railways connected only two or sometimes three towns. An obvious early example is the Manchester and Liverpool line,⁴⁶ which opened in 1830, after the Parliamentary Act to authorize it had been stalled for two years by local canal companies.⁴⁷ For the first time, steam locomotives provided the exclusive means of traction. George Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ had won the preceding Rainhill Trials, demonstrating a speed of 29 mph, as well as the required ability to pull a load at least three times its own weight. Such impressive feats, combined with tracks made from wrought rather than cast iron, secured the regularity and reliability needed to attract investors. Though initially intended for transport of goods, the new railway carried 460,000 passengers in its first year alone—four times the number of people making the same journey by stagecoach the year before. Indeed, at the introduction of the line, the stagecoaches between the two cities ceased to run with immediate effect.⁴⁸

National integration of the network was a relatively rapid though somewhat chaotic process. Between 1825 and 1835, Parliament passed no less than 54 acts authorizing the construction of railways similar to the Manchester and Liverpool line. The network’s first real growth spurt came in the early 1840s.⁴⁹ By this time, most of its major arteries were in place, such as the London-Birmingham line (1838), which connected to the Liverpool-Manchester line by the Grand Junction line (1837), and to Sheffield, Leeds, and Newcastle by other lines; the London-Bristol line (1841); and the London-Southampton (1838–1840) and London-Brighton (1841) lines that connected the capital with the southern ports.⁵⁰ The network’s growth reached a preliminary peak in the infamous ‘railway mania’ in the mid- and late 1840s.⁵¹ By the end of 1844, a total of 2235 miles of railway were in operation in Britain, three quarters of which had been built after 1839.⁵² In the year 1845 alone, a total mileage of 2896 was sanctioned, with an authorized capital of £59.5 million. Only one year later, the numbers were 4540 miles and £132.5 million, sanctioned through more than 200 individual Parliamentary acts.⁵³ While many new lines were authorized (despite the bad financial climate), almost two-thirds of the mileage authorized between 1844 and 1847 was never built,⁵⁴ and hundreds of proposed schemes did not even get a first reading.⁵⁵ By the end of the mania in 1852, the total route mileage was approximately 7500 miles.⁵⁶

The early railways were relatively short and held primarily regional or local significance. Since many of them were only used for carrying coal, they had no need for high speeds; on many lines, horses remained the primary source of traction power. Most railways built before 1850 were treated as additions to the existing canal networks, which remained the primary system for transporting goods.⁵⁷ Furthermore, the pre-1850 railway network was not yet as integrated as had been the coach network it was abruptly replacing. Because the changeover was so swift, most rural areas ended up having less regular contact with urban centres than before. ‘It is even possible’, argues historian Andrew Charlesworth, ‘that the village world of the 1840s and 1850s had a more restricted horizon than had the village in 1830’.⁵⁸

Still, already by 1842 most of Britain’s major industrial centres were connected by rail directly or indirectly to London,⁵⁹ already then giving the country ‘the semblance of a national railway system’.⁶⁰ By the mid-1850s, half of the population lived in parishes boasting at least one station,⁶¹ and from then on until the mid-1870s, innumerable small branch lines were opened. Apart from another ‘mania’ in the 1860s, the latter half of the century generally saw railway companies focusing on connecting small urban centres and towns to the existing main arteries of their own network. By now the network was extensive enough to restore the contact it had temporarily disrupted between rural and urban areas (for instance, through its importance for daily newspaper distribution, as we will see in Chap. 4). Not everything went back to the old normal, however. Rural villages that lay close to a main line were more likely to be connected and hence get a station of their own—which in most cases could lead to substantial population growth. The 1860s and 1870s saw the emergence of completely new ‘railway towns’, such as Crewe and Swindon, as well as the decline of established urban centres such as Exeter and Norwich: the latter for various reasons deciding not to be connected to a main line, the former vying to get that much-desired railway station which promised to put their town on the map. From the 1870s, the number of stations opened grew about 10 per cent every decade.⁶² This was also a result of the new demand for leisurely railway excursions and seaside trips; a railway connection could boost the life of a seaside town to an extraordinary degree. When the railway eventually reached Bournemouth in 1870, the following decade saw the population grow from 5896 to 16,859, before reaching 78,674 in 1911.⁶³ Openings of branch lines were celebrated on a grand scale by the affected towns and villages, the station constituting a new gateway to the world and its goods for a whole generation.⁶⁴ For an older generation who remembered the ‘old’ map, however, it could be a sobering sight. ‘Much as we love them’, wrote Thomas Carlyle in his 1850 essay Hudson’s Statue, ‘an unexpected and indeed most disastrous result [of the railways is how they] shift … all the Towns of Britain into new places’.⁶⁵ In less than half a century, the railway network had changed the topographical face of the nation.

The railway network was a machine ensemble not constrained by factory walls, a technological monster extending its metallic tentacles through countrysides and cities until it was almost omnipresent. And yet, it was paradoxically inaccessible to the general public. For safety reasons, railway companies increasingly secured the tracks and associated equipment with embankments, fences, and walls, creating what one historian calls ‘an otherworld’ increasingly distant from people’s everyday lives.⁶⁶ This is an important point to note, because so-called railway time—the uniform temporality that would soon become associated with modern railways—was mediated primarily inside the network. It was not imposed on society simply because there were more railways around. Unless people entered the machine ensemble through stations as passengers, the public was literally fenced out from the network’s mysterious inner logic, including its temporal dimension.

As passengers, the population soon became familiar with the railway network through regular use. Already by the mid-1830s it was accepted as given that each new railway opened would generate at least twice as many travellers as before on the same (coach) route, and that all social strata would be included among them.⁶⁷ Indeed, an important element in the railways’ popularity was their apparent socially ‘levelling’ effect; anyone—in theory—could travel by train. The royal family were regular users. The Queen’s first journey was from Windsor to London in 1842—an event that, according to one historian, opened a ‘new chapter in the history of the British monarchy’—and she continued using trains as a means of travel, in particular when visiting her holiday home at Balmoral.⁶⁸ Following Gladstone’s Railway Regulation Act in 1844, even the relatively poor could travel ‘at moderate Fares, and in Carriages in which they may be protected from the Weather’, for no more than ‘One Penny for each Mile travelled’.⁶⁹ Railway companies were now legally obliged (generally against their expressed preference) to provide so-called Parliamentary Trains, which were to include a third class designated for the ‘lower orders’ on at least one day of the week. By 1860, most travellers were found in this third class.⁷⁰ This relative inclusiveness proved profitable. The Midland Railway deliberately fostered third-class travel, even upholstering the seats in the carriages for increased comfort, and several competing companies followed their example—no doubt because of the financial benefits of increased passenger numbers. Many companies likewise reduced the fares for children under certain ages, and began making price distinctions between more and less comfortable accommodation.

The growing network of branch lines made it possible for workers to live further away from their work place, providing means to commute to work as well as leisurely trips to the seaside. After opening the underground railway between Paddington and Farringdon, the Metropolitan Railway started running affordable so-called workmen’s trains in the mornings.⁷¹ The Great Eastern Railway saw the commercial potential in catering to the lower classes, and advertised itself as ‘the poor man’s line’, bringing workers from suburbs to city on a daily basis. The early 1840s saw the establishment of travel agencies such as the Thomas Cook & Son, originally trying to make ‘the newly-developed powers of railways and locomotion […] subservient to the promotion of temperance’.⁷² Trains chartered for the occasion—some of them carrying more than 2000 passengers—would take middle-class urban dwellers on excursions to historic sites or day trips to seaside resorts. The relatively cheap excursion tickets allowed everyone but the very poorest or the most remote to travel and develop leisure habits. The Great Exhibition of 1851 constituted something of a breakthrough in this respect, bringing the provincial population into the metropolis for their pleasure and edification. It is estimated that more than five million people travelled to the exhibition by railway, which was close to a third of the population in England and Wales at the time.⁷³ In 1854 alone, over 90 million railway journeys were made.⁷⁴

From the mid-1870s until 1914, the larger railway companies⁷⁵ consolidated and regulated their territorial monopolies rather than investing in new construction schemes⁷⁶: few new lines were opened, and the few that were mostly covered distances already covered by rival companies.⁷⁷ Inter-company competition shifted to explicitly focusing on moving passengers at higher speeds. The increase in speed further caused an increase in both the number and severity of accidents, which again—together with growing unpopularity and so diminishing profits—became an incentive for technological innovation in the areas of temporal coordination, synchronization, and standardization on a national scale. It was through these developments that the railways became a prime site for the dissemination of secular time to the nation as a whole. And it was all about turning travellers into immutable mobiles.

Temporal Trauma

With the expansion of the railway network, the civic time enveloping distinct towns and cities could be expanded and made manifest across larger geographical areas. But with new possibilities came new challenges. The most prominent of these was to maintain the immutability that human bodies required in order to move at railway speed across long distances without deterioration. In the railway network, fragile human bodies encountered machines of (at least outside of factories) unprecedented size and force. These encounters turned out to cause a range of enigmatic conditions at once physical and psychological, conditions demanding new definitions, diagnoses, and treatments, as well as spurring new genres of fictional as well as journalistic and medical literature (like the Lancet and its public health commission) concerned with the topic of ‘railway trauma’.⁷⁸

The 1870s saw 394 passengers lose their lives, making it the deadliest decade in British railway history.⁷⁹ By this time, trains could reach a speed of 80 mph, double what was possible a decade earlier. Railway companies remained as reluctant to provide proper braking systems as the government was to intervene in their free competition. The Royal Commission held on railway accidents in 1874 spent three years collecting a mass of evidence, but accomplished near to nothing. In the 1880s, a series of spectacular accidents culminated with the 1889 Armagh disaster, in which a set of carriages lacking automatic brakes became detached from the train, rolled backwards, and smashed into another train on its way up the hill. Eighty people were killed and 250 injured (most of them Sunday school children). Only after this event were automatic brakes and block working made compulsory by law.⁸⁰

Railway trauma could also be the result of encounters between human bodies inside the machines. Locking strangers of both genders into the enclosed and claustrophobic space of the railway compartment led to endless discussions of proper inter-class conduct, and inspired new theories of human psychology.⁠ The awkwardness and excitement associated with being thrown into the proximity of strangers and forced to spend hours together in the aphrodisiacal ‘rocking and rolling’ of the carriage underpinned widespread anxieties of (sexual) violence—soon a common topic in melodramatic plays, pornographic short stories, and morally indignant letters to editors of major newspapers.⁠⁸¹ By the 1860s, keeping carriage doors locked from the outside had become accepted practice on most lines, and women were encouraged to purchase their own keys for those occasions when the porter could not make it in time⁠ should they need his assistance.

Railway trauma was often cast in temporal terms; railways threw the body’s time off its tracks. The serious and sometimes long-lingering effects of what became known as ‘railway shock’ raised a range of questions as to the latter’s particular nature and possible treatment, both in physical medicine and in the emerging disciplines of psychiatry and psychology.⁸² What would today perhaps be classified as post-traumatic stress disorder came to be considered a ‘disease of time’: a failure to recognize the past as past, mistaking it for (an element of) the present.⁸³ According to the Lancet, the intense work the body had to perform in order to absorb the unfamiliar impacts of the carriages’ constant rocking caused regular travellers to process time differently than they otherwise would have. ‘I have had a large experience in the changes which the ordinary course of time makes on men busy in the world, and I know well to allow for their gradual deterioration by age and care’, declared one physician, ‘but I have never seen any set of men so rapidly aged as these [particular regular railway travellers] seem to me to have done in the course of few years’.⁸⁴ On these scientific grounds, the medical journal warned its middle-class readers to think twice before buying a seaside house with the intention of commuting there to sleep in the healthy sea air; the journeys back and forth and the bodily hardships associated with railway travelling might defeat the intended purpose.

If railway trauma was cast in temporal terms, so were its proposed remedies. ‘[P]erfect regularity in the time of the departure from and arrival at each station by the trains … would appear to be a material element of safety in railway travelling’, declared The Lancet. Unfortunately, ‘[a]bsolute punctuality in arrival of trains is the exception, not the rule; and the anxiety and urgent hurry on arrival thus entailed on men of business especially tend to increase any ill effects that the long and rough railway journey may have produced’.⁸⁵ ‘What would not be thought of a Government which could contrive to render railways universally safe, generally punctual, and always moderate in their charges?’ asked a Times editorial rhetorically in 1853.⁸⁶ ‘With strict punctuality, and careful management, railway accidents ought to be almost unknown’, declared another writer in 1862. ‘The most frequent cause of railway accidents is want of punctuality…Nine-tenths of the collisions which have occurred since the first railway was opened have been occasioned by neglecting to keep up to the time fixed for departure or arrival…collisions would be impossible if each train was despatched at the proper time, and travelled at the proper speed.’⁸⁷

In this way, after its initial rapid expansion, and motivated partly by the increase in violent human-machine encounters and accidents, the railway network as a whole regained, at least implicitly, the raison d’être articulated by its early proponents: namely, moving human bodies across long distances without deterioration, whether physical or mental. Its prime concern became removing snags and irregularities that might hinder the frictionless flight of passengers increasingly insulated from the resistances of their environment.

The Transport Machine

One could regard the railway as a

[…] transport machine, one part of which is movable, consisting of the rolling stock, and the other part fixed, comprising the permanent way and its auxiliaries, the whole thing being governed and regulated by traffic requirements.⁸⁸

In addition to these two aspects, we might add what is being transported. Inanimate cargo can be strapped down, but human bodies must be encouraged and guided to (at least ideally) voluntarily comply with new movements and predicaments. Tracks, trains, and travellers—each of these was vital to the network, and each of them required the mobilization of a range of technological, natural, and cultural elements in order to enable the network to move passengers without harming them.

Tracks

With respect to the tracks, the initial concern had been how to ensure they could bear the weight of steam locomotives. Early railways were ‘shaken and battered to pieces’ because the iron rails, iron chairs, and stone sleepers constituted a support structure that turned out to be far too rigid and unyielding. Over the course of the century, resilience beat rigidity, and the winning ‘formula, with refinements, lasted for about a hundred years’.⁸⁹ The second half of the century saw an unparalleled degree of technological experimentation and innovation. There was no abrupt or great change, but a gradual merging of various developments and inventions, which towards the end of the century were (to varying degrees) settling into industry standards. Iron rails were strengthened by welding layers of steel onto their upper surface in the 1850s. Companies experimented with different ores, different manufacturing processes, and different procedures for testing. In the 1860s, the North Western laid the first tracks using steel rails only. Another example: by the mid-1880s, ready-cut rectangular pine and redwood sleepers sourced from purpose-planted forests in Danzig or Memel and creosoted in companies’ own sleeper plants replaced earlier metallic and concrete sleepers, before Australian Jarrah wood eventually became a preferred material around the turn of the century.⁹⁰ Similar developments were taking place in material elements large and small across and in all parts of the network. As one historian summarizes, the railway network of the mid- and late-Victorian period saw innovations in the areas of

[…] switch and crossing work, without which not even the simplest railway system could be of the slightest use; the form and length of rails; means of fastening the rails to the sleepers and to each other; the design of sleepers, including the selection of the best timber and its treatment as well as experiments with steel; matters of geometry such as superelevation and transition curves; the adoption of superior materials and manufacturing methods for rails; and the form and best use of ballast.⁹¹

The successful construction of the permanent way, and therefore the mobilization of bodies and instruments needed for performing the actual construction work, was crucial to the new experiences of movement associated with railway travelling. Consider, for instance, the work that went into digging tunnels and raising viaducts in order to create ‘unnaturally’ straight lines cutting through the countryside.

The forces mobilized in order to build the Settle and Carlisle line serve to illustrate the point. In 1866, the Midland Railway Company received permission to build a line from Settle to Carlisle, through the Yorkshire Dales and the North Pennines, allowing them to connect London to Scotland without interference from rival companies.⁹² Work began in 1869, and quickly turned out to be more difficult than expected. The line’s 72 miles ended up costing £47,500 each, adding up to a staggering £2.3 million. When it opened, it had taken six-and-a-half years to complete its construction, two-and-a-half years longer than scheduled. From Settle, the first 16 miles of tracks climbed more than 700 feet at a gradient of 1:100—the so-called Long Drag. At some points, the line had to be raised more than 100 feet above the ground; in other stretches, it had to pass through mountains ten times that height. The unexpected capriciousness of the strata through which the more than 6000 hired ‘navvies’ would have to dig, together with bad weather, floods, snow drifts, and frozen ground, soon turned proposed cuts into deep and long tunnels, and planned embankments into giant viaducts. Furthermore, many of the latter often had to be lengthened or heightened in order for the feet to be sunk deep enough for the necessary stability. Some of the viaduct piers were sunk 55 feet through peat-washing and clay before hitting solid rock. The Ribblehead Viaduct, the greatest on the line, was carried by 24 arches, of which every sixth arch was made extra strong, ‘so should [it] ever fall, only five arches would follow’.⁹³ Similarly, the famous Blea Moor tunnel—a staggering 2629 yards long—required the construction of a curve inside a tunnel, which posed new challenges for engineers and diggers alike. In order for more men to work on the tunnel simultaneously, seven shafts were sunk on the line of the tunnel, at equal distance so that they would eventually meet at approximately the same time. First, however, winding engines for lifting workmen in and spoils out had to be dragged to the top and installed. These engines, weighing approximately six tons each, were pulled up a makeshift road either by the help of windlasses or manually, on a ‘four-wheeled timber wagon sort of thing’, as one work leader put it.⁹⁴ After the diggers and dynamiters had connected their ‘headings’, the tunnel had to be secured with masonry, and three of the shafts were preserved for ventilation. In the end, the line between Settle and Carlisle required 22 viaducts and 14 tunnels of this sort. It was indeed—and remains to our day—a comparatively straight line running through series of cuttings, embankments, tunnels, and viaducts, its journey so frictionless that it has later become known as much for its majestic panoramic views as for the amount of work required for its construction.⁹⁵

The effect on travelling human bodies of construction projects and technological innovations such as these was unprecedented. The irregularities and snags experienced inside the old stagecoach were being exorcised; instead of the passenger’s body wearing out from being tossed about, it was now the surrounding landscape that was shifting, tumbling, and turning before the gaze of the stable observer. Already in 1830, Henry Booth had drawn attention to this potential effect of railway travelling.

[T]he whole character, structure, and appearance of the Railway is altogether different from the general aspect of the turnpike road. Instead of a uniform, flat and uninteresting country, the line of Railway is diversified continually by hill and dale, offered to the contemplation of the traveler in a sort of inverse presentment; the passenger by this new line of route having to traverse the deepest recesses, where the natural surface of the ground is the highest, and being mounted on the loftiest ridges and highest embankments, riding above the tops of the trees, and overlooking the surrounding country, where the natural surface of the ground is the lowest—this peculiarity and this variety being occasioned by that essential requisite in a well-constructed Railway—a level line—imposing the necessity of cutting through the high lands and embanking across the low; thus, in effect, presenting to the traveler all the variety of mountain and ravine in pleasing succession, whilst in reality he is moving almost on a level plane, and while the natural face of the country scarcely exhibits even those slight undulations which are necessary to relieve it from tameness and insipidity.⁹⁶

In a treatise republished throughout the century, Irish professor and popular science writer Dionysius Lardner described the railway as the closest one could get to an ideal road: ‘absolutely smooth, absolutely level, absolutely hard, and absolutely straight’. A carriage travelling on such a road, he wrote, would pass without meeting any frictional resistance other than the air surrounding it; and, he added, ‘[o]n railways the resistance is extremely small’.⁹⁷ The railway, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch would later put it, constituted a Newtonian road ‘realized without compromise’.⁹⁸ The steam-driven locomotive’s mechanical motion along the smooth tracks was uniform and regular, making the train compartment a confined space-within-a-space, detached from the irregularities of rolling hills and unpredictable weather. One historian summarizes it this way: A well-constructed track ‘carries, it guides, it provides stability and predictability in ways that the road, the air, and the water do not, and its use is largely unaffected by the weather’.⁹⁹ It allows a train to move in straight lines through the rolling countryside while its interior remains relatively stable throughout its journey.

Trains

Equally important for creating this effect was the moving part of the railway machine ensemble. In the latter half of the century, first-class passengers saw carriages gradually turn into ‘parlours on wheels’ where railway luncheon baskets, railway rugs, and railway foot warmers soon helped form a new ‘psychic layer’ shielding them from physical and emotional shocks alike.¹⁰⁰ The short-bodied four-wheel carriages that remained in use for most of the nineteenth century was known to ‘work up an uncomfortable waggle at any speed’ on the short lengths of rail common at the time. In 1876, 12-wheel bogie carriages distributing the weight more evenly were constructed, and by the 1880s 8-wheel carriages came into use in several places. By 1900, such measures were applied on most main-line trains.¹⁰¹ Carriages were made increasingly inviting, and, for instance, provided with cushions to absorb the jolts during transit. Toilets started appearing, allowing shorter stops at intermediate stations. In some carriages, electric lighting was installed, though this did not become standard until after 1918.

The increasing comforts gradually accustomed passengers to living with the known risks of railway travelling, even—according to some contemporary commentators—conditioning them to mentally detach from the material danger they were actually in. As one traveller put it already in 1860:

[T]he railway carriage is … the safest and most luxurious conveyance. While the train is almost on the wing,—rivalling the eagle in its flight, rushing along the narrow embankment or the lofty viaduct, or above the precipice with the sea raging at its base,—the passengers are reclining on their easy couch, reading or writing, thinking, or sleeping, or dreaming, as if they were under their own roof-tree, and safer in many respects that there, for the highwayman cannot rob them by day, nor the burglar alarm them at night.¹⁰²

Another pamphleteer had declared in 1853:

we seem to travel, in a remarkable and special manner, at all times, but more particularly at the extremes of speed, under an Almighty direction for the benefit of man. It is true we are reminded of the mechanism which aids, and in some sense, still, under the same direction, controls; and that the fracture of a rail, or the tyer of a wheel, or an axle would, and occasionally (though not within my own experience) does disarrange the machinery, and throw a train off the line; and so we must acknowledge ourselves dependent as a means on mechanical contrivance; but when we reflect that this occurs so seldom, and so many tens of thousands of miles are traversed without damage or hindrance, the regularity and safety of railway travelling seems next to, nay, quite miraculous.¹⁰³

The effect these insulating measures had on the human mind was a recurrent topic in Charles Dickens’ railway journalism. As Daniel Martin has shown, Dickens’ many essays on railways portray a fragile system whose ideal of perfect and frictionless movement was ultimately illusory and potentially dangerous, but which nevertheless instilled in passengers a sense of transcending their own present material environment with all its dangers.¹⁰⁴ His observations and analyses of the railways’ effect on passengers’ experience suggest the degree to which the railway network succeeded in imparting the joint properties of mobility and immutability to human travellers. In pieces such as ‘A Flight’ or ‘Railway Dreaming’, for instance, Dickens depicted the effect of the railway’s rhythmic jolting of bodies as creating for passengers a perpetual somatic sense of spatial and temporal displacement. For Dickens, events labelled ‘accidents’ were in fact not accidental features of the expanding machine ensemble, but essential to its very expansion. Since any local accident will have global repercussions in the form of legal, technological, or other forms of improvements across the entire network, he argued, such events should be considered ‘not local nuisances to be eliminated, but rather glimpses of the potential for travellers to imagine the fanciful and terrifying experiences of becoming unbounded from local geography’.¹⁰⁵ Dickens saw travellers as largely unaware of how the various parts of the railway system thus worked in order to turn them into passive parcels dreaming of detachment and isolation from the flux of their material localities. Railway bureaucrats, engineers, porters, and navvies, as well as every small technological element of the railway, all contributed to this illusory sense of moving safely at high speeds. As such, they were, as Martin puts it:

symptomatic of an emerging passivity in modern industrial culture, in which operators and passengers alike rely unthinkingly on an unseen system […] for their safety.¹⁰⁶

Travellers

Finally, insulating passengers from their environment required mobilizing the passengers themselves, inviting them to take an active role in their own transfiguration into parcels being sent to and fro, as John Ruskin put it. Passengers could only function as immutable mobiles if they were guided towards allowing their bodies to be put in motion without themselves introducing friction or interruptions. The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book reminded them that their assigned place was within the confines of the carriage.

Some persons, when travelling by railway, have a knack of continually thrusting their heads out of the window. Nothing can be more dangerous than this, and numerous are the accidents that have resulted in consequence. The proper place for the head is inside, not outside the carriage, and so long as it is kept there, the chances are that it will remain whole.¹⁰⁷

The Handy Book also warned travellers that ‘the eye is apt to be greatly deceived in […] the relative pace at which the train travels’.

Few persons are experienced in the rate of railway travelling, and when the train is moving at the rate of twenty miles an hour, it appears not to be travelling faster than five or six miles an hour, and with this miscalculation it is easy to understand that a false step may be made, and the body thrown off its equilibrium.¹⁰⁸

Socially speaking, there was an unavoidable tension associated with travelling in close proximity with strangers. In order to smooth out any awkward wrinkles in the social fabric, passengers were encouraged to engage in pastimes such as light conversation (obviously avoiding contentious topics), sleeping, card-playing, chess-playing, smoking, ‘musing’, and of course reading.¹⁰⁹ Indeed, the habit of reading while travelling developed partly as a response to the experience of social friction, also because it might help divert the reader’s attention from the otherwise constant awareness of potential accidents. Other crucial ‘tactics of travelling’ included such skills as being able to find one’s way through crowded platforms without ‘causing a stir’, or understand when and where it was acceptable to leave one’s luggage. Passengers were expected to use public railway timetables to plan and prepare for their journey, internalizing where they had to be at particular times—to board a train, to make a connection, to meet travelling companions.¹¹⁰ In short, they had to be taught how to move in synchrony with the gigantic collective choreography of the entire railway network, whose principal purpose was to make their passage perfectly smooth and free from physical, psychological, and social friction.¹¹¹

Temporal Coordination

It was this collective effort to turn human bodies into immutable mobiles which motivated the extensive temporal coordination, synchronization, and standardization so often associated with Victorian railways and their place in the history of modern temporality.

Already from the early days of public railways, temporal punctuality had been essential. ‘[A] large proportion of the travelers by railway, possess only vague notion on the subject [of longitudinal variation], and many disappointments ensue from their arriving too late, in consequence of their not understanding that their own clocks show one time while the trains work by another’, clock maker and later official time regulator in London, B.L. Vulliamy pointed out in 1845. ‘If one uniform rate of time keeping was adopted on railways’, he added, ‘it would tend greatly to diminish the risk of collisions on trains’.¹¹² The spatial length of journeys were often measured in temporal terms. In 1842, the Illustrated London News wrote of one of the Queen’s journeys that ‘[t]he Royal train left the station at 7 minutes past 1 o’clock, and arrived at Paddington at 35 minutes past, performing the distance in 28 minutes’.¹¹³ But the temporal coordination of different trains was performed by measuring time intervals by independent (i.e. unconnected to each other) clocks, sometimes supplemented with simple hand signals.¹¹⁴ Provided the station clerk was attentive and had been supplied with a clock (neither of which were always the case), the train’s departure would be synchronous with the time displayed on the station clock. Yet this did not guarantee any overall accuracy relative to when other trains left other stations, or that the next departing train would not unexpectedly catch up with the previous one. The relative speed of the respective trains was not taken into consideration together with the time interval,¹¹⁵ and due to the obvious differences in local times, the time of arrival was left out of timetables during the first half of the century.¹¹⁶

The publication and distribution of periodical pocket-size timetables—in a steadily growing number of local, regional, and national versions—increased throughout the century. In a single year in the 1880s, one railway company (out of more than a hundred then in operation) printed 35,000 copies of its summer timetable.¹¹⁷ This did not include winter issues (33,000), posters for station walls, so-called working timetables aimed at railway employees, those produced by other transport providers or private publishers which included the same information, or special timetables for excursion trains (some of which counted more than a thousand pages).

The purpose of portable timetables was to enable passengers to coordinate their bodily movement with the movements of the railway, integrating them in the network long before they embarked on a train. In 1862, The Railway Traveller’s Handy-book ‘assum[ed that] the intending traveller [would] be sitting in his room a day or two previous to his departure, turning his future movements over in his mind, [and] the first things which will commend themselves to his attention are those useful publications known as RAILWAY GUIDES’.¹¹⁸ As historian Mike Esbester points out, it was not unheard of to read timetables simply for leisure, in order to spur the imagination.¹¹⁹ According to the Handy-book, ‘[c]ommercial travelers, and others who pass a great deal of their time on railways’ belonged to an emergent class of people ‘whose movements in life may be said to be regulated by the time-table’.¹²⁰ In 1885, Rev Edmund Venables, writing to The Times, felt that Bradshaw’s Railway Guide had become nothing less than a ‘necessity of life in these days of constant locomotion’.¹²¹ Indeed, figured as part of the extensive railway network, timetables were themselves seen as a defining characteristic of the present age: as The Times declared in 1874, it was ‘an age of timetables’.¹²²

Railway timetables took different forms—all of which had precursors in other transport professions¹²³—but in the more comprehensive publications two basic representational forms were common, both of which presupposed a time independent of motion. One common format listed selected points chronologically on a time continuum (marked as hours, minutes or seconds) along one axis, and stations marked according to their successive order along the particular line in question along the other axis.¹²⁴ This was the form originally adopted by Bradshaw, and which is perhaps most familiar today. Another representational form was typified by the Alphabetical Railway Guides, or ABCs, first published in the early 1850s, where the names of stations appeared in alphabetical order vertically, with the times of arrival or departure printed in adjacent columns.¹²⁵ This format uprooted the named places from their geographical position—the list of places, that is, did not correspond to their location along any actual line (obviously places without a station were ignored). But the alphabetical form made more readily available the kind of information that many passengers were looking for, since it allowed them to first find the desired place names and then negotiate the respective time differences. ABCs remained more popular than the Bradshaw’s, at least among people regularly travelling between London and a single other place who did not need to coordinate multiple journeys.¹²⁶

In general, timetables were still considered difficult to navigate. Comprehensive ones, such as those published by Bradshaw, sought to comprise all companies’ various timetables. The various places and times of the whole national territory (or the entire surface of the earth, if the journey extended beyond national borders) were represented to the reader as existing within a singular temporal grid—even if in its material manifestation this grid might be simplified and literally folded back on itself so as to fit conveniently into the reader’s coat pocket. This also meant that the timetable, in seeking to provide information about all potential journeys, necessarily included an abundance of information no single reader needed or was indeed supposed to process. Its form therefore demanded a particular mode of reading. The pieces of information the passenger needed were made available through him or her acquiring and applying a set of particular skills, for instance reading vertically as well as horizontally, leafing back and forth between specific pages connected only by certain signs, and decoding different fonts or symbols.

Even for experienced passengers, timetables were not considered particularly reliable. While the Railway Traveller’s Handy-Book (1862) assured its readers that ‘[t]he time of departure stated in the table is no fiction; the strictest regularity is observed, and indeed must necessarily be, to prevent the terrible consequences that might otherwise ensue’, the relative value of Bradshaw’s timetables, for instance, was a constant topic of public debate. Its first edition explicitly acknowledged the difficulty of representing the timings of the entire railway system in a complete manner, and included a caveat—‘with such alterations as has been made in the interval’—allowing for temporary misrepresentation whenever the system itself was in motion. Even towards the end of the century, long after the instigation of telegraphic time distribution, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide still displayed several local times, and many passengers had to keep adjusting their clocks as they were moving east or west of Greenwich.¹²⁷ The Times called the publication a monthly mass of fiction.¹²⁸ In 1885, one reader complained that during a journey from Canterbury to Faversham, he ‘quite accidentally … discovered that Bradshaw’s information [on the details of his journey] was worthless, and one of the ticket-collectors, to whom [he] applied, informed [him] that the directors did not acknowledge Bradshaw’s Guide as official, and consequently were not bound by it’.¹²⁹ If this was the case on all the lines, the author continued, Bradshaw’s guide was ‘practically useless’. Perhaps this is why the Traveller’s Handbook encouraged passengers to be ready for departure five minutes earlier than the stated time.¹³⁰

Secular time was carried in the timetables’ tabular form, which presupposed a time independent of passengers’ motion as a condition for making coordination possible and distance calculable in temporal terms. The printed numbers indicated points on an abstract and homogeneous time continuum, where the assumption was that time was isochronic—that the temporal intervals between each point were regular and of equal length—so that passengers might calculate the time of travelling in advance, and be sure of their own safety while in motion.

Conclusion

In October 1884, the International Meridian Conference proposed that the countries represented adopt the meridian running through the Greenwich Observatory as the initial meridian for longitude. For years, the national uniformity of time had increasingly come to be treated as a given fact whose global realization was merely a question of technological means. When in 1880 the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act, seeking to rid legal texts of any lingering confusion, proclaimed that if nothing else was stated, GMT was the time referred to, this was a formal acknowledgement of something already considered common sense.¹³¹ Many believed, as noted by lawyer and clock inventor E.B. Denison, that ‘the adoption of Greenwich time was a purely pragmatic matter’, and that local communities should adopt it for its obvious practical advantages.

The Post-office authorities ought to order their local clocks to be kept by Greenwich time, as that and the railway together would soon induce even the cathedral clocks to follow their example. Some of them have already sacrificed their principles so far to put on another minute hand to show Greenwich time; they had better quietly give up the old one altogether.¹³²

The eventual establishment of a global time was of course a far more complex process than Denison’s technological determinism would admit. What this chapter has tried to draw attention to is something that was also recognized in a contemporary leader in The Times, namely that the emergence of this time was ultimately ‘thanks to the railways and with a view to the convenience of passengers’.¹³³

The railway network expanded the geographical reach of early modern civic (‘local’) times beyond city—and eventually national—borders. The network’s function was premised on successfully moving passengers between spatial points without them undergoing any physical or mental deterioration. Charles Dickens suggested that due to the constant presence of risk managing actors and technologies the railway system as a whole served to insulate—physically as well as mentally—its ever-increasing number of travellers from the frictions of their environments. Describing how any traveller would need to comply with the rules in order not to ‘annoy his fellow passengers’, the Handy Book introduced a striking metaphor of their predicament:

A Person in a railway carriage may be likened to a prisoner of state, who is permitted to indulge in any relaxation and amusement to while away the time, but is denied that essential ingredient to human happiness, personal liberty. He is, in fact, confined to a certain space for so many hours, and cannot well remove from his allotted endurance without annoying his fellow liberty.¹³⁴

More than a century later, philosopher Michel de Certeau echoed this in his reflections on railway travelling and the tacit changes it works on human passengers.

The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car […] A bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible the production of an order, a closed and autonomous insularity—that is what can traverse space and make itself independent of local root.¹³⁵

The railway carriage becomes a place where ‘topical liturgies are pronounced, parentheses or prayers to no one (to whom are all these travelling dreams addressed?)’, and railway travelling is

a strange moment in which society fabricates spectators and transgressors of spaces, with saints and blessed souls placed in the halos-holes (auréoles-alvéoles) of its railway cars.¹³⁶

For de Certeau, the iron and glass of the railway carriage turns its inhabitants into static observers of silent landscapes passing by—or as he put it, ‘speculative thinkers or gnostics’. To keep with the conceptualization of secular time offered in the preceding chapters, perhaps we could rather say the railway turns passengers into angels. Technologically insulated in carriages moving along a frictionless ‘Newtonian road’, their movement orchestrated and synchronized by handbooks, timetables, and electric signals, Victorian railway travellers took on the defining properties of the immutable mobiles envisioned in medieval Franciscan angelology. Like the heavenly creatures imagined by the schoolmen, railway passengers were moving through a time independent of motion.

In this sense, the Victorian railway network constitutes a highly appropriate case study of secularization. Establishing a uniform time across the nation was a social and technological achievement stemming from an increasing concern for moving passengers without physical or psychological irregularities or interruptions. What we have here, in other words, is a technological system whose internal workings and associated collective practices mediated the saeculum. Secular time was implied whenever railway travellers negotiated timetables whose representational form located all spaces within the same temporal grid, or whenever they found their place in carriages allowing their bodies to be relatively at rest while in transit. Frictionless flight along a ‘Newtonian road’ allowed the calculation of departure and arrival times and coordination of all potential journeys. The telegraph helped towards extending the temporal grid on a national scale, enveloping the entire national (eventually imperial) territory as an increasingly temporally synchronized whole. In this way, and to the degree that it succeeded in moving human bodies without deterioration, the Victorian railway network mediated secular time.