Chapter 3: Railroad Space and Railroad Time
36-37: “Transport technology is the ... material base of the traveler’s space-time perception. If an essential element of a given sociocultural space-time continuum undergoes change, this will affect the entire structure; our perception of space-time will also lose its accustomed orientation. Sorokin, following Durkheim, distinguishes between sociocultural and physico-mathematical notions of space-time, and has described the hypothetical effects of a sudden replacement of customary sociocultural time measures with purely mathematical ones: ‘If we try to replace sociocultural time by a purely quantitative time, time becomes devitalized. It loses its reality, and we find ourselves in an exceedingly difficult position in our efforts to orient ourselves in the time process, to find out “where we are” and where are the other social phenomena on “the bridge of time.”’ (Italics in original.)”
37
Thus, the idea that the railroad annihilated space and time must be seen as the reaction of perceptive powers that, formed by a certain transport technology, find suddenly that technology has been replaced by an entirely new one.
Chapter 6: The American Railroad
91: “The mechanized transportation system became, as it were, a producer of territories, in the same way that mechanized agriculture became a producer of goods.”
92:
In nineteenth-century American thought, the machine appeared to be closely linked to nature and simultaneously, the American landscape was seen as closely linked to the machine. The material foundations for those perceptions lay in the peculiarity of American economic life in the nineteenth century; Habakkuk has formulated this as the “substitution of natural resources for capital.” The shortage of capital and labor in the United States led to new forms of raw material production, to an uninhibited exploitation of seemingly inexhaustible natural resources; the lack of restraint was merely a form and expression of the low investment of capital and shortage of labor. The application of the same principle to transportation led to entirely different results: here, there was no unrestrained exploitation of nature, but a practically mimetic utilization of the existing natural routes, i.e., the waterways. [...] In both cases, however, nature was experienced at a closer range and with greater immediacy than in Europe. The history of American transportation in general and of its railroads in particular can only be understood in terms of an immediate relationship to nature which is not aesthetic but economic.
93-94: “We can still note to what extent water traffic has shaped the American consciousness of transportation in the common American usage of the verb ‘to ship’ for all forms of transport, whether on dry land or across water.”
95-96:
The American railroad continued what the river steamboat began. This applies, as we shall see, even to the design of its carriages and, in equal degree, to the design of the railroad lines themselves. In England such a line was built to be as straight as possible, partly because railroad technology favored this, partly for economic reasons. Labor was cheap and land expensive. Thus it paid to construct tunnels, embankments and cuttings in order to make the rails proceed in a straight line, at a minimum of land cost. The diametrically opposed American conditions produced opposite results. Labor was expensive, land practically worthless. In accordance with the principle of “substitution of natural resources for capital,” the American railroad did not proceed in a straight line through natural obstacles, but ran around them like a river.
102-03:
The explanation for the American railroad car’s particular interior form is not as uncomplicated as the compartment’s derivation from the coach chamber. There is, in fact, a whole series of explanations, all of which apply. We have mentioned the invention of the undercarriage (bogie, truck) that permitted the construction of virtually endless cars. The American car can also be described as the simplest and cheapest type of passenger car: just as the lack of capital in the United States during the early- and mid-nineteenth century had led to the cheapest mode of railroad construction, it also resulted in the least expensive kind of passenger car. That purely economic state of affairs was, however, closely related to the indigenous American democracy of the nineteenth century as described by Tocqueville and Chevalier. The classless open car was economically, politically, psychologically and culturally the appropriate travel container for a democratic pioneer society, while the compartment car, on the other hand, expressed the social conditions prevailing in Europe.
These general explanations are not entirely satisfactory.
[...]
The steamship, mentioned by Couch as a convenient analogy, does indeed upon closer scrutiny yield many clues to the rise of a certain type of car on American railroads.
104-05: “...the riverboat became for the American railroad train what the stagecoach had been for the European: a means and form of travel that was representative of the period before the introduction of the railroads, and thus one upon which the railroad modeled itself.”
107:
The characteristics of the American transport situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century were under-developed traffic by land, but highly developed traffic on the inland waterways. In American travel, the river steamer was a far more important factor than the stagecoach. [...]
Being the second mechanized means of transportation, the railroad became closely linked with the steamer in American transportation development and consciousness. These links were reinforced, on the one hand by the American notion of steam power as the force that joined the parts of the country into a living nation and, on the other, by the reality of an under-developed highway system; highway building continued to be neglected after the arrival of the railroads, until the beginning of the twentieth century and the arrival of the automobile.
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