'The lost idea of a train': Looking for Britain's railway novel

Journal of Transport History, The,  Sep 2000  by Carter, Ian

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Notes

1 M. Robbins, `What kind of railway history do we want?' Journal of Transport History, first series, 3 (1957), p. 66.

2 T. Gourvish, `What kind of railway history did we get?' Journal of ransport History, third series, 14 (1993), p. 112.

3 J. Simmons and M. Robbins, `Forty years on: a message from the founding editors', Journal of Transport History, third series, 14 (1993), p. v.

4 M. Robbins, `The progress of transport history', Journal of Transport History, third series, 12 (1991), p. 83; J. Simmons, `Literature of railways', in J. Simmons and G. Biddle (eds), The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (Oxford, 1997), pp. 268-70.

5 At least since train-spotting's massive upsurge at the end of the Second World War serious workers have entertained fears about this pollution. Hence P. Ransome-Wallis's (On Railways at Home and Abroad, n.d., pp. 15-19) railway enthusiasm pyramid. At the bottom lies a huge mass of despised juvenile number 'snatchers', then older folk who know more about a locomotive than simply where to find its number. Third come railway photographers, technical and pictorial. Only at the peak of this heap, firmly holding their noses, does one find men like Philip Ransome-Wallis: professional men with profound knowledge of railway operation, able to talk to senior railwaymen on equal terms in the Railway Club (admission by election).

6 Simmons and Robbins, `Forty years on', p. vi.

7 J. Simmons, The Victorian Railway (1991), p. 195.

8 J. Simmons, `Literature, railways in English', in Simmons and Biddle, Oxford Companion, p. 267.

9 W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: trains and travel in the nineteenth century (New York, 1979), pp. 19-40. The other books in Schivelbusch's trilogy are Disenchanted Night: the industrialisation of light in the nineteenth century (Berkeley CA, 1988) and Tastes of Paradise: a social history of spices, stimulants and intoxicants (New York, 1993).

10 J. B. Snell, Early Railways (1972), p. 5. 11 M. Robbins, The Railway Age (1962), p. 3, lists six elements defining the modern railway: a special track, accommodating public traffic, conveying passengers, conveying goods, mechanical traction, some measure of public control. That only two

of these elements are mechanical should remind us that social technology is as fundamental to modernity as physical machinery. Stephen Hughes, The Brecon Forest Tramroads: the archaeology of an early railway system (Aberystwyth, 1990), pp. 104-5, elaborates this typology from six categories to fifty-one. That, surely, is sufficient for any purpose.

12 I. Carter, `Train music', Music Review, 54 (1993), pp. 279-90.

13 I. Carter, `Rain, steam and what?' Oxford Art Journal, 20 (1997), pp. 3-12. 14 By concentrating on Dickens I do not

imply that no other Victorian author wrote anything about railways. Jack Simmons (Victorian Railway, pp. 201-5; `Literature, railways in English') records railway glimpses provided by other novelists, from Trollope to Henry James. But for Simmons, as for other commentators, Dombey stands peerless.