How The Late 19th Century Railway And How Does It Affect Our Life More Modern?

It should be maintained that the railway was far more than merely a new mode of transport, as Nicholas Daly argues that for Victorians ‘it stood as both an agent of the acceleration of the pace of everyday life’. The introduction of the railway had led to the construction of a new perception of motion. This suggests that the railways put pressure on travellers to adapt to this new speed of life to ensure they kept up with modernisation. In a way, the 19th Century railway was a means of ushering people in the 1800s to progress to a much more modern era. In his book, Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche commented on the fact that, ‘With the tremendous acceleration of life, mind and eye have become accustomed to judging only partially or inaccurately

Previously, people had governed exactly when and how they moved, but since the introduction of a railway timetable, time began to govern the people. For example, when it came to machines operating at certain times in a factory, as well as workers having to arrive at a certain time, strict timekeeping became an integral part of everyday life. Therefore, railways made life more modern by slowly destroying the older experience of time and proposing a completely new relationship with the concept. Similar to views of historians focussing on Britain, American historian Albert Churella notes that railways were an icon for modernity. By the time that Penn Station was built, a common belief was maintained that that railroads were ‘symbols of progress, symbols of modernity’ and thus symbols of what the United States could achieve. The introduction of universal time marked part of this progress whereby the clock (in itself a commodity invented a mere two centuries prior to the introduction of the railways) became the centrepiece of most train stations. Although time itself was already a long familiar concept, people were only just beginning to grow increasingly compliant to the logic of the industrial machine itself. As mentioned already, there was new emphasis on the need for timekeeping yet interestingly people were not even in charge of their own time – it simply became an abstract timetabled quality to which the people became submissive. By 1844, The Great Western Railway had led to the adaptation of Greenwich Mean Time more popularly referred to as ‘Railway Time’. Moreover, the building of railway across America is what put four continental time zones into operation, as these were required for effective performance and provided a solution to the chaos which came about due to the previous use of thousands of different local times in stations using several railway