Railways: Tracks, Trains, and Travellers

Abstract

AbstractThe Victorian railway network of technologies and associated practices was a prime site of secularization. A secular time independent of motion was the condition of possibility underpinning railway travellers’ ability to negotiate timetables formally locating all spaces within the same temporal grid, or to engage in conducts allowing their bodies to be relatively at rest while in transit. The electric telegraph helped towards expanding this temporal grid on a national scale, enveloping the entire national (eventually imperial) territory as an increasingly temporally synchronized whole. In this way, and to the degree that it succeeded in moving human bodies without deterioration, the Victorian railway network mediated secular time.