The City and the Railway in the World from the Nineteenth Century to the Present

Ralf Roth, Paul Van Heesvelde, Ralf Roth, Paul Van Heesvelde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032069630
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000591224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This volume explores the relationship between cities and railways over three centuries. Despite their nearly 200-year existence, The City and the Railway in the World shows that urban railways are still politically and historically important to the modern world.

Since its inception, cities have played a significant role in the railway system; cities were among the main reasons for building such efficient but lavish and costly modes of transport for persons, goods, and information. They also influenced the technological appearance of railways as these have had to meet particular demands for transport in urban areas. In 25 essays, this volume demonstrates that the relationship between the city and the railway is one of the most publicly debated themes in the context of daily lives in growing urban settings, as well as in the second urbanisation of the global South with migration from rural to urban landscapes. The volume's broad geographical range includes discussions of railway networks, railway stations, and urban rails in countries such as India, Japan, England, Belgium, Romania, Nigeria, the USA, and Mexico.

The City and the Railway in the World will be a useful tool for scholars interested in the history of transport, travel, and urban change.

Part I Some General Assumptions on the Topic

1 The City and the Railway in the World Looking Back over Two Centuries

Ralf Roth

DOI: 10.4324/9781003204749-3

Let’s go back to the beginnings and have a look at the decades before and immediately after operation of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway started, not without wide attention and public debates all across the continents of Europe and the Americas. In the German debate on the construction of the first railway lines, which took place in the 1820s and 1830s, many memoranda included visionary outlooks and foresaw flourishing cities in a modern civic society. Surprisingly, they indeed envisaged very clearly many aspects of future developments.¹ A lot of projects promoted shrinking costs for transport and economic progress of trade cities or the role of labour migration in rapidly growing industrial towns.² Considering the vision of a European network, some anticipated gigantic market places based on networks of cities in different regions, as for example in southern Germany, where the routes from harbour cities on the shores of the North Sea to southern Italy or from France to Eastern Europe would cross, including flashbacks to the middle ages when these cities in effect were pearls on a string that reached via Venice out to the coast of the Levant and on to the silk road and to the empires and kingdoms of China, India, and Japan.³

It is remarkable that the central focus of these memoranda was above all on trade cities, which in particular were seen as main beneficiaries of a railway network. Indeed, most German committees for the establishment of railways flourished in trade cities. And it was there that they successfully acquired capital for investments in construction of the net. Some memoranda drew sketches of the growth of industrial cities in the Ruhr region and anticipated the rise of Germany’s heart of heavy industry, furnaces, and coal mines in the period of the German Empire and later on up to the 1890s (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).⁴

Figure 1.1 Wissower Klinken, Chalk Cliff on Rügen near Sassnitz. Painting by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.⁵

Photo: Creative Commons, Wikimedia.

But all in all, the visionary’s fantasy was more focused on cities that attracted tourists and on spas than on industrial towns, and in this context, some memoranda drew sketches of mass tourism directed to cultural attractions or beautiful landscapes to which middle-class citizens increasingly paid attention as an outcome of the Romantic movement. The Rhine valley, for example, became an early tourist attraction, followed a bit later by the coasts in the north and those of the Baltic Sea, with islands such as Sylt or Rügen, the latter one admired by the famous painter Casper David Friedrich, for example in his painting Kreidefelsen auf Rügen (Chalk Cliffs on Rügen). Another attraction was more of cultural or political interest. The Wartburg was seen as such a spot, in memory of the Reformation and Martin Luther’s stay there during his conflict with both the church and the Emperor. When the railway arrived in Sassnitz in 1890 and in Eisenach already in 1847, both connections with the network served indeed other purposes besides tourist travels and impacted therefore widely on the development of small villages into mid-sized cities based on the tourism industries and more. In the opinion of railway enthusiasts and in their visions about the future railway age, trade cities, industrial towns, tourist-oriented cities, and spas all would benefit from the construction of railway lines. This means that, right in the beginning, before the first line was built, the initiators of railways had relatively clear ideas about what they enthusiastically were voting for, and that one of the main components in their reasoning was the relation between city and railway.⁷

Figure 1.2 Wartburg with Monk and Nun. Sketch by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1807.⁶

Photo: Creative Commons, Wikimedia.

Beginnings and First Networks That Affected Cities

Construction of the first lines occurred in most cases not according to a master plan for the creation of a national net. Belgium is an exception in this respect. Independently and separately from each other, many dozens of committees in various cities developed single projects of lines which connected two cities or more with each other. This was characteristic for most countries in Europe. Every country had its own start: the Stockton–Darlington Railway of 1825 in the United Kingdom or the fully developed Liverpool–Manchester Railway of 1830. The positive experiences with the first lines in England encouraged many people in numerous cities on the European continent to follow the example of these four British cities. Speedy construction on the continent followed soon: the line from Antwerp to Brussels via Mechelen in Belgium, the one from Lyon to Saint-Étienne in France that started in a shorter part of the line to move coal in 1828, similarly to the case of the Stockton–Darlington line, and not to forget, the line from Nuremberg to Fürth in Germany, opened in 1835 with a length of only six kilometres. In many cases, citizens took the initiative to solve, above all, problems caused by the increasing transport of goods, and in most cases, it was these people who collected the necessary funds, rather than the state, which in most cases only guaranteed a certain percentage of interest for the shareholders (Figures 1.3 and 1.4).⁸

Figure 1.3 Development of the French Railway Network in 1842, 1850, and 1860.⁹

Source: Creative Commons, Wikimedia.

One can easily understand the importance of linking these single lines to national networks with cities as hubs when looking at the development of the French and German railway nets. The former was built by several powerful companies and received state support, and there were numerous exceptions from and additions to an imaginary national plan. In 1842, there were just three single lines in the surroundings of Paris, Strasbourg, and Lyon. It took nearly two decades until a dozen single lines formed a first network in northern France and around Paris, and then another decade before we can speak of a national railway network. In Germany, no national plan existed because of the lack of a central state. Germany at this time was a loose union of 37 independent states and four city-republics. All 41 entities followed their own railway policy. In states such as Bavaria or the Palatinate, the state was in charge of the financing, planning, and construction of the company, and afterwards of its operation. But most states could not afford railway construction because of high debts that had resulted from the period of the Napoleonic Wars in the aftermath of the French Revolution. This was the case in the most powerful state, Prussia. Therefore, private initiatives, organised in committees, substituted for the economically paralysed state. As was the case in France, there were in the beginning only single lines in the German case as well. It was only by the time of the revolution of 1848 that one could speak of a network for the northern parts of the German Union, which became connected with southern nets in the 1860s. However, both nets, like every railway network in the world, included the possibility of trans-border connections, which could turn national networks into international ones that were limited only by the coastlines of each continent. Europe and Asia, though, as well as both Americas were connected by land, which would even make transcontinental railway rides possible – a tempting perspective.¹⁰

Figure 1.4 Development of the German Railway Network in 1842, 1849, and 1864.

Source: Ernst Kühn, Die historische Entwicklung des Deutschen und Deutsch-Oesterreichischen Eisenbahn-Netzes vom Jahre 1838 bis einschließlich 1881 (Berlin 1882), maps 1842, 1850, and 1864.

The clear advantages that railways provided, such as less energy consumption, cheap transport of goods, and speedy travel for passengers, not to speak of their role in spreading news via rapid transport of letters, newspapers, and very early the use of telegraphs, provoked numerous public debates, but also made it a necessity for cities to become linked with these rapidly growing transport lines and regional nets. A few dates marking this ongoing transport revolution may contribute to a better understanding.¹¹ There was a radical shift in the efficiency of transport and travel in three parallel developments. First, there was a jump in the average speed from significantly less than 10 (on sandy trails only 2 or 3) kilometres per hour for freight and a maximum of 20 kilometres per hour for passenger travel to a speed of 40 kilometres per hour for both, right in the early 1830s. This speed increased in only four decades to 100 kilometres per hour. The second development was an additional jump in transport capacity. Right from the beginning, the six trains of the Liverpool–Manchester Railway were the equivalent of 2,400 freight carriages, and instead of 2,400 coach men only a dozen locomotive drivers were needed. The third development was energy consumption. Stephenson’s locomotive of 1829 was a substitute for 21 horses with steam power that was generated by a package of coal, a substitute which rapidly increased to several hundred horses per locomotive (feeding the animals would have required several hundred hectares of meadows). Thus, transport and travel costs dropped, while transport volumes and passenger numbers were skyrocketing. But above all, speed meant saving time for all transport processes or, vice versa, an enormous increase in distances that could be served in equal time with the additional result of shrinking time-space relations. From a particular location, i.e. a city, distances reachable in a given amount of time increased or, vice versa, space contracted. The graphical demonstration of all of this is still impressive.¹² Therefore, planning new routes was in many cases accompanied by fierce competition among cities to become connected. It was a matter of to be or not to be (Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5 Travel Times by Railways from Marseille to Regions in all of Europe in 1910, 1970, 1997, and 2010.¹³

Photo: Klaus Spiekermann.

Many who were engaged in establishing the new mode of transport, argued this way and debated the advantages of such a shift in the “geographical” position. All cities would become connected with the whole world, i.e. with the most important cities in Europe, and a big and general relativism of the geographical position would take place. And it was predicted that “the disadvantages of a certain geographical position would vanish”.¹⁴ But this was only one side of the medal. Cities were rapidly divided into two classes: those which failed to get the advantages and those which achieved the goal and became part of the net. Only the latter could fully realise the promises made for the mobility of citizens, the distribution of goods, and speedy communication (Figures 1.6 and 1.7).¹⁵

Another consequence of the net was that every city could consider itself as the centre of the web – or felt the need to become one.¹⁶ In most cases, it was not easy to become a hub. But when a city was successful in attracting several lines and becoming a railway hub, the advantages multiplied. In general, capitals had the best chances. That can be observed in the most impressive examples of the railway infrastructures of London, Paris, or Berlin (for the latter, see Figure 1.6), where a dozen or more lines crossed. But a smaller and not so important city could also be successful in its efforts to become a hub. For Germany, we can mention Frankfurt am Main as a crossing in the centre of the country and as a location where...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Some General Assumptions on the Topic
• Part II Cities in a Wider Context: The Role of National and Continental Railway Networks in the Development of Cities
• Part III The Railway station: New Entrance to the City and Its Multiple Meanings
• Part IV Urban Rails and How They Affected, and Still Affect, the City
• Part V Railways in Troubled Waters and Their Return at the End of the Twentieth Century
• Index