Motion and Emotion: Learning to be a Railway Traveller

Abstract

The daily commute is often routinized into mindless transportation, which makes it hard to study. But how have commuters acquired the skills of rail travel? This paper looks at the materialities of motion and emotion, drawing on railway travel experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using a historical perspective to develop an ethnography of the mundane and seemingly eventless, the focus is on the interplay between material infrastructures of travel and emotional mindscapes. How did feelings of anxiety and security, boredom and euphoria surface in arrivals and departures, in situations of waiting or daydreaming? New social skills in handling crowds and strangers were developed, and ideas of class materialized in everything from the choice of decoration in train compartments to patterns of segregation in the new main stations.