The railways were, of course, invented before photography, and it took most artists a while before they could depict with a reasonable degree of accuracy what it was they were seeing. One of the earliest exceptions was John Bourne.
His delightful watercolours of the construction of many of the great early railway lines are one of the most accurate and comprehensive records we have of the ways they were built and what they did to the landscapes and settlements through which they passed. They also convey well the sheer scale of the transformations.
The railways continued to be depicted by artists (including such famous figures as Turner), although none of them conveyed so easily the levels of technical data caught by Bourne. The emergence of the Illustrated London News and its contemporaries provided a hungry new medium which generated many more prints of railway subjects. But since the media of yesterday was no less sensational or sleazy than today's, the focus was often on hideous accidents.
Railway construction continued to be a prominent theme, though.
And the technology was often celebrated.
But there's something about this style of depiction which makes this world seem almost naive; it underplays the scale and disruptive nature of the technology. There was scarcely a facet of life which was not deeply affected -- if not utterly transformed -- by the arrival of the railways. It would take the development of photography to convey better the sheer magnitude of their impact.
