The Immersion of the Early Railroad

Image: First Railroad Train on the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad; Wikimedia Commons

A major instance of technological immersion occurred due to the implementation of the locomotive system. Prior to the locomotive system, transportation had been reserved for wealthy patrons and was a communal experience, with most people almost constantly communicating with one another. These carriages were operating using animal power, which resulted in the carriage engaging in vertical movement. The passengers of these animal-powered carriages felt surrounded by their environment, with many instances of them exiting the vehicle and absorbing their surroundings. The locomotive system changed all of this behavior, and through examination of the wealthy’s experience on locomotives one can determine what differences arose between it and animal-powered carriages. In his The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbush claims that the locomotive system “interjected itself between the traveler and the landscape” (24). The locomotive removed its passengers from their environment and presented it as a landscape that appeared to be in constant motion, which changed the previous notions on the experience of movement and space between distances. As Woflgang Schivelbush states, “the railroad opened up new spaces that were not easily accessible before; on the other, it did so by destroying space, namely the space between points” (The Railway Journey, 37). The locomotive system not only transformed the passenger’s visual perception of travel, but it also gave rise to new standards for determining the relative space and distance between locations. This influenced large swaths of society by simultaneously connecting and isolating different locations through the conscious choice of where railroads would run through. One of the most important impacts of locomotive immersion was that it led to the distrust of other passengers with the wealthy content to spend their time on trains with no interaction. This distrust was an undesired side effect of the locomotive system, which supports the belief that upon the implementation of technology, its effects are outside of human control.