Rails, Networks, and Novels: Historicizing Infrastructure Space

Abstract

n a recent essay eviscerating the current management, operation, and ownership structures of Britain’s train network, novelist James Meek pauses to observe that contrary to their now decrepit state, “[w]hen they first came along, the railways were more than new. They set the terms by which future new things would be deemed new” (23). It should be no surprise that a novelist would take an interest in the cultural significance of the fate of the railway. After all, trains were as constitutive of nineteenthand early twentieth-century fiction as they were of modernity itself. Augmenting Meek’s comments slightly, we might say that the railway was at once an instigator of historical change and the metaphor in which that change was couched. Novelists gravitated to the world of the railway not just as mere convenient narrative function―getting characters from A to B―but as a literary symbol that stood for the shock-inducing arrival of modernization and modernity onto the terrain of everyday life. Before the US highway system, before international air travel, there was rail transport. In the second half of the nineteenth century the railway was implicated in everything from urbanization and the birth of finance to the logistics of war and imperialist extraction. Its sum achievements, as Schivelbusch argued in his classic study of nineteenth-century railway capitalism, were the homogenization of time and the annihilation of space (40), phenomena we now take J A C O B S O U L E