Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities

This project, RAILIMAGE, develops an urgently needed humanization of transport studies. It does so by writing the global qualitative and imaginative history of the long-distance railway journey and its spaces in the twentieth century, reaffirming the role of the railway in twenty-first-century imaginations of more sustainable mobility. The research advances an interdisciplinary approach to mobility and infrastructures, combining techniques and insights from the humanities, especially spatial literary studies, with critical realist philosophy, human geography, and regional studies.

In contrast to existing technocratic and economistic transport history, RAILIMAGE works with geo-historical pasts of earlier journeys, experiences and representations of these, focusing on the era in which railways were at once pervasive on every continent as a mode of long-distance transport, and under threat from emergent air and powered road transport: the twentieth century. It will reshape mobility studies by fully situating railway studies in a field which the humanities reading of automobilities and airborne mobilities has so far dominated. This act, in turn, will renew transport history by rewriting it via the encounter with mobility humanities. As well as with mobilities, RAILIMAGE conceptually reinterrogates the definition of infrastructure via a reciprocal relationship between the material and the figural.

Rejecting more monolithic and insular conceptualizations of the railway, we read it as a constitutive site that nurtures collective experiences, uniquely enables an engagement with political and geographical peripheries, and concretely offers modes of public care and resilience. As mapped out by RAILIMAGE, a qualitative geo-history of railway travel worldwide in the twentieth century takes in a vast number of feelings and responses, many of them radically transformative of people's sense of themselves and their surroundings. Understanding the details of these railway imaginations calls for nuanced attention to the detail of particular historical moments and temporal ranges. The case studies of the project, with their specific focus on staff and passenger experience and varied representations of these in Asia, Europe and the Americas, engage with the specificities of global regions and of power imbalances including those marked in imperial, colonial and postcolonial histories, detectable in the funding, construction and varied use of long-distance railways.

While transport research has long been technocratic and economistic, this project explores historical human experience of train travel, aiding knowledge of transport and infrastructure. We investigate how railways make people feel and how people feel about railways. In the 2020s, more sustainable travel is an urgent need. What insights come from studying the twentieth century, when long-distance travel in many places was chiefly by train? In twentieth-century train travel, people discovered more about themselves and about the world. We will read the stories that grew around railways in different regions and so gain a bottom-up perspective on trains: the perspective of people. Technological change happened unevenly from place to place, and our research reflects that fact through its geographical structuring, covering staff experiences in the USA, the planning and imagining of railways in Turkey and India, and the experiences worldwide of travellers from Scandinavia.