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.
11 comments:
The most transformative human invention ever isn't possible without iron and steel. Iron and steel, specifically their refinement, are responsible for far more transformations. Railroads, automobiles, modern buildings, bridges that cross once impassable spans, space exploration, shipping, flight -- the list could go on. (Yes, I know modern planes are mostly made from aluminum but their frames are steel.) Trains offer much more romance but they aren't possible without modern metals.
I might have phrased my point sloppily (no surprises there) -- but I think there's a difference between a raw material and a technology.
For sure, you can't have railways ("the iron way"!) without iron. But if you're going to compare lumps of raw material, what about leather (clothes, tools, shelter) or even wood (tools, implements, shelter, carts and transportation including ships, wheels, weapons, fuel...)?
While many technologies have had a profound impact on human society (the stirrup and spectacles among others have been suggested as inventions which have transformed human society), it is difficult to think of any other technology which has had such a transformative impact on the lives of humans living at that and subsequent times -- from the stuff they ate to the hours they observed; from the financial and corporate structures created to the mass movement of populations on a regular -- indeed, daily -- basis; from instantaneous communications through the telegraphs built by the companies for their own operations to enabling an affordable, national postal service to operate... That's before we get into the role of railways as employers (up to 1 million people employed directly when the population wasn't much more than 20m), offering life chances previously unimaginable to people from all walks of life; as economic development companies of vast influence (from the Metroland of London's suburbs to the development of Southampton as a port).
And all this happened within a single generation.
Nothing invented since has had such a profound impact -- indeed, it is arguable that other than micro-technology and possibly genetic engineering, everything invented since roughly 1903 is simply an incremental improvement on what has gone before. None of us has lived through a transformative change of the type brought about by railways.
Am I being pompous?
Well there's something I have never really thought about, the signal man's station underground. I have never seen an image of one those before. I know they must no longer be in use, but there must be quite a few of these hidden away under London, unless they've been filled in, or house modern equipment now?
i would say that the internet has tranformed our lifes even quicker than the railways, things that would take days now only take less then a second, also you make contact with people you never would normally meet up with.
i really wanted to say what a excellent site you have on railways and keep up the good work, comments and all.
take alook at Under the luggage rack a site about artists who pianted the pictures that appeared in old railway carriages, you may find this of interst.
"the internet has transformed our lives even quicker than the railways"... I'm not sure the internet *has* transformed our lives. It has certainly accelerated some things, and made other things easier. But it is not a fundamental transformation.
For example, I can buy DVDs and books faster than in the old days -- and I can search for them more easily, especially if I want 2nd-hand ones. But I used to buy DVDs and old books before.
I can get porn on the web. Er... like I used to before (although that on the web is largely free, which is nice).
I can write (electronic) mail on the web... like I used to before.
Hm... I am genuinely struggling to see how the internet has qualitatively "transformed" my life. Whereas it certainly has led to massive quantitative changes -- I write more emails than I used to write proper letters. I buy more obscure DVDs (and many more of them!) than I used to when I had to go to the High Street -- the only thing I can see that's *qualitatively* different is the ability I now have to share pornographic or train images with people I've never before met.
While I am not in any way trying to belittle what we all do here, is that really a "transformatory" activity?
Or have I got it wrong -- have I not understood how, exactly, our lives have been transformed?
Having much enjoyed the top hats and telegraph wires coexisting I'm trying to identify the Shipton bridge. Have you any idea where it is and when it was built?
bg
Found it - Shipton-on-Cherwell 1874!
I do hope we're going to be treated to some more gems soon - it's been a long wait!
bg
Always enjoy your railway and architecture articles!
Are you planning to keep this blog going or is everything to be posted on Normal for Norfolk in future? I hugely enjoyed yesterday's post about the Woodhead route - congratulations!
bg
Thanks for the nice comments. Steepecab Heaven was an experiment, to see if a space for longer, porn-free train posts would make a coherent blog. But it's not really worked for me. Somehow I lack the enthusiasm to update frequently -- and frequency is of critical importance to a functioning blog.
So I think I'm reverting to what I did before -- everything goes on Normal for Norfolk.
I'll leave this stuff up here for a while, and delete it when the visitor numbers drop to less than a handful a day.
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