Benjamin Fraser - Trains, Culture, and Mobility: Riding the Rails

Trains, Culture, and Mobility

Trains, Culture, and Mobility

Riding the Rails

Benjamin Fraser

Steven Spalding

Lexington Books

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Copyright 2012 by Lexington Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fraser, Benjamin.

Trains, culture, and mobility : riding the rails / Benjamin Fraser and Steven D. Spalding.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7391-6749-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-6750-2 (electronic)

1. RailroadsSocial aspects. 2. Railroad travelSocial aspects. I. Spalding, Steven D., 1971- II. Title.

HE1031.F73 2012

306.4819--dc23 2011044695

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the College of Charleston for covering the publication costs of this volume: Mark Del Mastro (Chair of Hispanic Studies) and Dean David Cohen were instrumental in securing support for this project. Thanks also to the copyright holders of images included in this volume: in particular, the National Railway Museum/Science and Society Picture Library (and Ed Bartholomew) for the images in chapters 1 and 3; Agatha Morka for the pictures in chapter 7; and Csar Mohedas Garca and Miguel A. Sandoval for photos included in chapter 8.

Benjamin Fraser would particularly like to thank Megan and Doug for the gift of the train graffiti zines (mentioned briefly in chapter 2 of this volume), Steven for the lively conversations on trains and mobility, and Abby for fond memories of the journey to Whistler.

Steven D. Spalding would to thank like the former students from Oberlin College and Connecticut College who undertook early forays with him into the themes that brought him to this book project with indulgence, intelligence, generosity of spirit, and enthusiasm. Many thanks are owed Ben for his endless patience and wisdom, and Karine and Eva for lighting up the days.

Introduction

Riding the Rails

Cultures of Trains

Benjamin Fraser and Steven D. Spalding

More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity.

Tony Judt, The Glory of the Rails, NYRB (Dec. 23, 2010), 60.

This collection of essaysbuilding on its companion volume: Trains, Literature and Culture: Reading/Writing the Rails goes beyond textual representations of rail travel to engage an impressive range of political, sociological, and urban theory. Taken together, the ten contributions collected here highlight the complexity of the modern experience of train mobility, as well as its salient relation to a number of cultural discourses. Incorporating traditionally marginal areas of cultural production such as graffiti, museums, and architecture, or even plunging into the social experience of travel inside the train car itself, each chapter constitutes an attempt to work from the act of riding the train toward questions of much larger significance. Crisscrossing cultures from the New World and Old, from East and West, these essays share a common preoccupation with the way in which trains and railway networks have mapped and remapped the contours of both cities and states in the modern period. Bringing together individual and large-scale social practices, this volume traces out the cultural implications of Riding the Rails.

Readers may be relatively familiar with the fact that [t]he creation of the modern railway occurred almost simultaneously in the U.S.A. and Great Britain (Thorne 11) around 1830; but here we go beyond the Anglophone world, making multiple stops not only in Britain (chapters 1 and 3) but also in France (chapters 2, 5, and 7), Japan (chapters 9 and 10) and Spain (chapters 2 and 8), and travel also to Australia (chapter 4) and South Korea (chapter 6). The contribution of each chapter becomes more clear when properly contextualized within a growing discourse that remains captivated by the cultural and social import of train transportation. Throughout much of the twentieth centurytraditionally, and generally speakingbooks on trains have prioritized a structural or technological vision, yielding historical accounts that are important contributions, but that are not sufficiently conceived to account for the more-than-material discourses surrounding the iron horse. Even in a publication from 2005, for example, H. Roger Grant, titles his work The Railroad: The Life Story of a Technology and arranges his chapters in a historical progression. In the preface to the book, Grant takes care to document such material concerns as the shift from wood to iron to steel as employed in the construction of the railways themselves (xi), emphasizing the necessary complexity of railway infrastructures: The railroad is many things. It is track, motive power, rolling stock, signals, structures and much more (xii).

There currently exists, of course, an ample bibliography regarding the historical significance and technological development of the railway (e.g., Bobrick). Itself a product of the industrial revolution, the train was undeniably also a catalyst further stimulating the development of trade. Scholars have certainly been able to effectively link the train with broader social shifts. The best and most comprehensive (theoretical and practical/historical) example of this trend is The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century by Wolfgang Schivelbusch (cited in many of the contributions to this two-volume project), where the author highlights the trains importance in the making of industrial capitalism (xiiixiv). But there have been other worthwhile texts as well. In her recent work Reforming Urban Labor: Routes to the City, Roots in the Country (2010), for example, Janet L. Polasky traces how the train provided a way of mitigating the perceived social ills accompanying the industrial revolutions precipitation of a concentrated urban labor force, thus fostering the middle-class commute (see also John R. Stilgoes Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States , 2007). Maury Klein points to what have been quite common metaphorical invocations of the train as contradictory signifier: either as a benign symbol of freedom, adventure and new possibilities or the darker view of the train as a metaphor for the price of industrial progress (2021). Nonetheless, while the train is admittedly a powerful and multivalent signifierpointing at once toward progress and its priceit is also more than that.

As the essays in Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails point out, the train is not merely an indicator of industrial progress or a metaphor/symbol for the contradictions of modernity but also a subject worthy of cultural analysis of all types. The essays in the first section, titled Speed and Vision approach the mobile and insterstitial places associated with train travel by employing an equally mobile method. In chapter 1, Colin Divall and Hiroki Shin venture outside of the train car in order to explore the cultural construction of speed in their analysis of Britains railway publicity. At the center of their analysis is an engagement with a conservative modernism, theorized as a way of reconciling urban and rural realities in a rapidly changing modern world. In the contribution by Benjamin Fraser and Steven D. Spalding (chapter 2), train graffiti problematizes the question of identity, offering countercultural alternatives to prevailing images of train mobility and raising the question of authority over such images within the context of an inherently mobile urban reality.