Trains and Time

In the modern imaginary, trains have always been a symbol of forward motion. The question now is whether our trains take us into a future of power and speed, or rust and decay.

Illustration from the January 1928 issue of Popular Mechanics | Wikimedia

The following is the introduction to our sixth print issue on the theme of “Trains.” The issue will be mailing out very soon. Pre-order your copy here if you haven’t already!

Beyond the physical infrastructure of engines, carriages, and tracks, trains are one of the most famous and inspiring symbols of modernity. The modern age is of the machine, and there are few machines that have such a direct connection to the ideas of time and progress as the train. Trains represent directed movement, speed, and power. In the paintings of Turner and Manet, the steam produced by the trains of the nineteenth century billow out and cloak the train itself, adding even more majesty and mystery to the machine.

For Marxists such as Marshall Berman and David Harvey, modernity is understood as a particular experience of space and time. In Berman’s reading, modern subjects find themselves at home in an ever-changing maelstrom in which “all that is solid melts into air,” while the characteristic modern experience for Harvey is one in which technologies of mass communication and travel compress both time and space. Trains represent the possibility of mass access to the sort of speed that can shrink the nation and the world.

Over and above the moving of goods—initially around the rapidly industrializing north of England—trains have long represented the fast movement of people. Early train passengers felt the exhilaration of this speed while also worrying about asphyxiation due to the compressed air they would be forced to breathe. Medical experts expressed concern that train travel would lead to “cerebral lesions” and other naysayers likened railway travel not to transport but to the delivery of packages. If the motorcar came to stand in for individual freedom and movement around the expressway world, the train was a symbol of collective, industrialized power—a heavier, more brutal way for humans to conquer their geographical surroundings.

Alongside this new aspect of consumer travel experience, trains have long stood as a metaphor for the more abstract ideas of historical movement and progress itself. If for the optimistic liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, progress was a river flowing in one direction, it was also a train running along the tracks of history. Edmund Wilson’s influential 1940 account of revolutionary socialism, To The Finland Station, sets Lenin’s return by train to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station as the culmination of the tradition. Today the square in front of the station still contains a statue of Lenin that avoided being torn down after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding Lenin’s own ambivalence towards statues (“for pigeons to shit on”), it remains a powerful symbol, with Lenin in classic directing pose, making his 1917 speech atop a constructivist armored car. For Wilson, it was Finland Station that symbolized the terminus for revolutionary socialism and the location for the rendezvous with destiny for the Bolsheviks, and by extension the revolutionary hopes of the century.

For Marxists, trains have also been handy historical metaphors because they embody the idea that a locomotive force is needed—and is on hand—to drive history forward along the rails of progress. Marx saw revolutions, and Trotsky wars, as the “locomotives of history.” Ninety years after Marx, Walter Benjamin wrote that revolutions were not the locomotive of world history but rather “an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.” Benjamin had previously written about a railway disaster in Scotland in December 1879 where a train travelling from Edinburgh to Dundee was crossing a bridge over the Tay estuary when it collapsed, leading to the deaths of all 75 passengers and crew. For a Marxist like Benjamin, historical progress and forward motion requires interruption, not acceleration. If humanity allows the train of history to follow the path already laid out by rails, then it will be a disastrous derailing and a crash into the water below. It is much less Marx’s vision than Benjamin’s that seems dominant now, as we look to interrupt the runaway train rather than putting our faith in a locomotive to drive history forward.

Today our experience of trains and time is unlikely to invoke any conceptions of historical time and far more liable to be connected to the anxieties of everyday clock time. The anxiety of missing a train or the reality of unreliable trains being late or cancelled have replaced any thoughts of historical progress when we arrive at a railway station today. E. P. Thompson’s famous 1967 essay on “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” talks about the rise of a new conception of time mirroring industrial production replacing an older one grounded in agricultural labor; today trains, like all standardized and timetabled methods of transport, instead enforce a travel-discipline in the context of a mass-consumer capitalism. As social life continues to accelerate, this anxiety only intensifies.

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But as the locomotive of history has accelerated out of control, actual locomotives have fallen into disrepair. In “The Railroading of a Steel Town,” Ryan Zickgraf tells the story of Steelton, PA, and with it the rise and fall of the steel and rail industries in the United States. In “Foaming for Breakdown,” Courtney Rawlings dives into the world of modern train enthusiasts (“foamers”) on Youtube, who promise scenic cross-country views but who deliver documentation of America’s decline—crumbling infrastructure, economic decay, institutional failures. And Aaron Wells tackles the re-nationalization of British railways in “Slumping Toward Nationalization,” an effort bearing none of the political promise of previous waves of nationalization and one forced by operational dysfunction rather than ideological commitment. Together these three articles all speak to the way in which trains have become a symbol of the broken promises of modernity.

Something similar holds for Alex Hochuli’s “Brazil Off the Rails,” but there he notes a general underdevelopment of rail that has Brazilians today in the grip of a curious “nostalgia for nostalgia.” Having never been an agent of national integration as it was elsewhere, rail improvements today can, for Hochuli, only be one component of a broader developmental vision. For many, the one country with such a vision is China, and our interview with Dan Wang on “China’s Rail Revolution” situates China’s high-speed rail build out and pursuit of other “gleaming infrastructure” within the country’s broader political project.

The Chinese example illustrates that massive rail improvements are still not only greatly desired but also of sufficient romance to capture the public imaginary. For many, trains connote a previous industrial era; they make us nostalgic for a form of progress that was and is no longer. But if it is nostalgia, it is one for industrial improvement of the built environment and for technologies that bind together a national community. In this sense, and again with the Chinese experience in mind, what we take to be “nostalgic” is only framed as such within the coordinates of our present decline and decay.

As Dustin Guastella contends in “Men at Work,” the demand for investment in industries that require muscle-power is no nostalgic fantasy but the key to finding a social cure for the present crisis of “male malaise.” In “Everybody’s Doin’ a Brand New Dance Now,” Amber A’Lee Frost similarly champions “People’s Dances” like Little Eva’s “Locomotion,” which have declined with the rise of a competitive and individualistic dance culture that spurns mass participation. And Nate Fisher holds up the train movie as a barometer of health for the film industry as a whole in “Not Another Train Movie,” lamenting the genre’s decline as representing that of Hollywood itself.

One prominent piece of “nostalgia” associated with trains is the intense class conflict that once manifested in the efforts of rail unionists, a history recounted in Paul Prescod’s “Struggle on the Iron Highway.” There are plenty of people, even on the putative “Left,” who think the era of labor upsurges is over. But if we are to make our way out of the present political and social crisis, we once again need a massive labor conflagration in the key industries of the day. There is no way around the central conflict at the heart of capitalist society.

Perhaps then it is best to think of the train as conjuring up a nostalgia for the “future of the past,” a past when the train was the symbol of forward-facing and ever accelerating modernity. In this reading, the train was the image of the future (unlike flying cars) that we actually had; it was designed to supersede itself by becoming ever more high-speed, ever more reliable, and ever more comfortable. Without a great deal of confidence that we can replace our antiquated rolling stock, decaying tracks, or take collective control of the transport infrastructure that ought to connect us, we have still not gotten past the train horizon and the future it used to represent.

A final note: this will be Damage’s last print issue for a while. We are not closing the door on print and will continue to pursue book projects like Rustin’s Challenge (out now, order your copy!). But the print issues will be on hiatus while we build some regularity into our publishing schedule and professionalize our operation a bit. We are tremendously thankful to everyone who’s supported the print operation and to everyone who continues to support the magazine. Print is dead; long live print!

George Hoare is Associate Director of the Palm Springs School for Social Research (psssr.org) and co-host of Bungacast.

Benjamin Y. Fong keeps a Substack on labor and logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.