The thesis for Schivelbusch’s book The Railway Journey seems to be that therailroad altered the traveler’s perceptions of space, time, distance, natureand the senses. Although the means of a quick and reliable mode of transport wasand is an important part of industrialization, it denaturalized anddesensualized the passengers (Schivelbusch 20).
Shrinking and reshaping theworld it touches with industrial fingers and alienating the riders to the worldaround them. With fast and reliable steam power engines replacing previouslyexpensive and unreliable natural sources of energy such as water or animal manis released from the constraints of nature. These engines do not succumb to thewhims of weather or exhaustion and are reliable enough to keep and dailyregulated schedule despite wind or rain. Yet, by replacing the age-old use ofthe horse and carriage and through sheer speed they have made the world smallerand more accessible to the people. Where in the olden days people experiencedevery step of the way with their senses now all they have to do is step on atrain and step out onto a different place. The railroad has annihilated thespace and time, which were characterized by the old transport technology (36).
To the perception of the people who had previously experienced every step oftheir journeys the world seemed to have shrunk. The detachment of man fromnature and his perception of nature is finalized in the construction of therailways (20). Since the ideal railway is hard, level and straight, they werenot laid out sympathetically to the landscape but instead cut and carve theirway through in a straight line. Nothing gets in their way, not river mountain orcanyon.
The riders of these straight speeding bullets see nothing but adisorienting sight of the landscape shooting past to quickly for them to focuson. The train creates a barrier between themselves and the landscape making themdetached viewers of an untouchable scene. This barrier is later enhanced by thetelegraph poles that began to be widely used to regulate railway traffic. Now”the traveler perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machineensemble (24)” The use of railways to transport goods began to be felt in thevery architecture of the time. With the use of availability of previously hardto acquire items, such as glass and steel, the “railroad reorganized space(45)”. These new materials bent the contrast between light and shadow makingit uniform and absent of contrast, a disorienting combination to people used torock and wood.
In the very beginning of the book, culture is described as havingan organic quality, if so it is now an inorganic culture. This culture is nowdetached from the organic. As the railways expanded their reach they began toaffect the “special presence (40)”of various commodities and towns whichwere once associated with a certain region. This desensualization of the regionsis described as losing their ?auras’ and so no longer have the specialqualities that it once has.
No longer do people have to travel long and ruggeddistances for a certain fruit or to visit a certain town, now they only have tohop on a train then hop off. Thus the perception of individuality is lost. Thechanges of perception that the railway caused are precursor of thedenaturalization and desensualization that is abundant is modern industrialsociety. Schivelbusch’s book gives interesting evidence to this thesis.
By itsmanipulation of the world by the railways which altered the old world views oftravel and nature it changes the definition of man’s world view and the placeman sees himself as being in the landscape around him.
