How to pee on a train in the year 1900

It’s summer, travel in Europe is going ahead at full speed again now that the fear of CoViD-19 has lessened, and so, pleasure trips and long-distance train journeys are as accessible again as they always were: more accessible for some, less accessible for others. But even if you are not railing away romantically as we speak, you can always take a peek at this beautiful historical train kept by the German Museum for Technology:

Promotional photo for the online exhibitions of the German Museum for Technology, https://technikmuseum.berlin/ausstellungen/online-ausstellungen.

It is a miniature railway carriage from around 1900, part of a series of around fifty carriages and locomotives kept by the museum that were originally built by railway companies to show off their services. The museum has created a wonderful opportunity to walk through them so I encourage you to take a peek. Every little detail of these scale models of real trains can be seen: from the radiators to the little signs that prohibit the eager traveller from peeing while the train is at a station.

In fact, three loos have been recreated on this carriage. But what do we see there?

There are two cubicles for men, and only one for women. Of course, women did travel by train around 1900. Perhaps the logic of these train builders was that each gender should have an equal amount of space allotted to them, but that women had wider skirts and therefore needed a bigger cubicle, while the same space would offer room for two cubicles to serve men?

Yet it is a well-known fact that people with smaller bladders, who are pregnant, or who menstruate – usually women – need the toilet more often and for longer. This piece of unpractical design thinking that we often see nowadays – people who need less space get more space -was clearly already around more than a century ago.

Then again, another remarkable thing is that the cubicle containing the urinal offers no facilities to wash your hands. Another thing that men did not need?

Instead, as an extra service, they received: a horizontal bar to hold on to…

Dutch Rail loses gender

2020! And a new year, too, for the Dutch National Railways and their ever-exciting gender policy.

Several years back, the company already decided to address its customers as ‘passengers’ instead of ‘ladies and gentlemen’. Now, their identity documentation has also undergone a milestone transformation.

As a carrier of a railway discount card for the Netherlands, I have been subjected to various different genderings over the years. More specifically, the national railway company’s ideas about gender seem to have moved through three distinct phases within the past decade:

Phase 1 – c. 2010

This phase was characterised by the following notion, apparently held by the company: ‘As an independent traveller, especially one who is able to arrange their own fares, you must be male.’

That is, after registering with them as a client and paying my fees, but failing to mention my gender, I was Assigned Male at Boarding. This gender designation was printed prominently on my discount card.

Phase 2 – c. 2015

In this phase, a new attitude saw the light: ‘If you want to travel with us, we ask you to be either female or male for the next five years to come, and to let us know about these plans in advance.’

I decided that, if I had to choose, my five-year plan for this period could do with a little femininity after having lived my travelling life as a man for five years, and so my new discount card bore a capital ‘V’, Dutch for ‘woman’.

Phase 3 – c. 2020

The National Railways move with the times. Their new stance on gender: ‘Hm, now that you mention it: the letters “M” and “V” are perhaps not the most precise tools after all to identify the individuals we encounter on our trains. They offer even less information, in fact, than that photo which we also display on our ID cards. And perhaps this insistence on gender, if not annoying to all of our customers, is still a little, uhm, embarrassing.’

And so, the gender marks were removed from my card altogether.

Even travel historians like a little travel future.

If we live in a shrinking world, it is not because transport is becoming faster

Yes: I live a 5 minutes’ walk from the beach.

Yes: I live in the very heart of Britain; as far from the sea as anyone living on this cliff-encrusted island could possibly live.

Both statements are true. Here’s why.

I live in Sheffield, next to the train station, and if I get onto the right train a direct line will take me to Cleethorpes on the eastcoast. There, a station was built in 1863 which was located virtually on the beach itself.

And here’s what’s so remarkable: it does not matter to me whether this train moves at 50 miles or at 150 miles per hour (the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in fact). The beach will remain to feel close. This is something over which I completely agree with the long-dead travellers with whom I work. (Ours is a pleasant arrangement: I read their diaries. They take it easy.) We get on board, we stretch our legs, and… presto: we are on the beach.

The end of the line. Cleethorpes station, 26 August 1983. Photo by Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Now I can do a somewhat similar thing if I want to go to Ireland; to Dublin, for instance. There is hardly any distance my legs need to cross between home and Dublin city centre. Again, public transport takes me from door to door. Still, Dublin is quite a different story from Cleethorpes. I need to change trains three times (Stockport, Crewe, Chester), get on a boat (which departs from sea-tale Holy Island), and finally catch a bus that takes me from Dublin port to Dublin town (where, by the time I arrive, I am more than ready for a whiskey).

Undeniably, Dublin takes me a few extra hours, but the difference is more than that: the journey to Dublin is of an altogether different order from the ride to Cleethorpes. I believe that to a large extent, this is caused by the numerous changes, the getting off and onto trains, the more complex arrangements that I need to make, having to stay focused throughout the journey in case I miss a stop or a departure or a service announcement, the waiting in between, and all the different stations and places I get to see along the way.

Therefore, Cleethorpes does not only make for a journey that feels shorter, but also for a place that seems closer while I am still at home.

A single iron road stretches out all the way between me and the east coast. It almost erases the journey. And it holds the two places – home and seaside – in a single embrace.

These reflections on my own travels while still living in England were stirred by my reading of nineteenth-century experiences of distance.

Some of these experiences can be found in my article ‘Trains, Bodies, Landscapes: Experiencing Distance in the Long Nineteenth Century’, published in The Journal of Transport History (2019). Others can be found in an article I wrote about accessibility which is yet to be published.

These are academic articles, but I have also written about distance here on Historian at large and with the Hakluyt Society, and have written more posts about the history of travel generally.

Coming from afar (Or: watching trains go by)

Earlier, I wrote about the meanings of distance for travellers on the early railways. But what did distance mean for those who observed the new engines on wheels from the outside, as they came thundering past?

An important painting from the 1880s addresses precisely this question. ‘Il vient de loin’ – he/it comes from afar – by Dutch impressionist Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël has at least three things to say about distance.

P.J.C. Gabriël, ‘Il vient de loin’, Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, the Netherlands, no. KM 100.143.

1)

Most obviously, this painting problematizes progress. Many visual and literary artworks of the nineteenth century set up a dichotomy between tradition and progress, between nature and technology, between a supposedly static country-side and a dynamic industrial sector. Some artists were enthusiastic about technological developments, others critical, a third group ambiguous.

Gabriël, too, clearly referred to these contemporary concerns in his work. Not for nothing, Gabriël’s painting is reminiscent of J.M.W. Turner’s famous ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, which like many works of its time emphasised both the beauty and the threat of steam technology.

Take even just Gabriël’s title. It makes sense to read this from the perspective of the angler resting against the gate in this Dutch polder landscape: representing the local and the traditional, the angler sees the train ‘coming from afar’. Indeed, the technology of steam locomotion arrived in continental Europe from across the sea: developed in Britain, steam trains may initially have been considered an exotic technology in the rest of Europe. The steam engines used on the early Dutch railways even continued to be imported from Britain for quite some time, for lack of a local industry.

Of course, ‘afar’ may refer to the individual train in the picture, too. The angler looks like he has just come sauntering into the scene from a nearby farmstead. Within his frame of reference, it might be argued, the train has already travelled a lot of track before entering into view – although we are probably talking about a few tens or hundreds of kilometres at most. Trains cross vast distances; farmers and fisher-people stay put, the painting seems to say.

In all these cases, the new technology can be read as an alien presence in this landscape, and if this was indeed the predominant perception in the 1880s, we should not be too surprised if the railways occasionally met with a hostile reception.

J.M.W. Turner, ‘Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway’, National Gallery UK, no. NG538. Available on Wikimedia Commons.

2)

What makes this painting interesting, however, is its ambiguity: who exactly is coming from afar? Rather than the train, the title could refer to the angler.

This interpretation makes a lot of sense if we follow the painter’s cue to look at the angler: an Everyman. It is he who comes from afar. That is: humankind has got far: from humbly hunting for food, through shaping the land to make it suitable for farming, to the modern industrial economy. This second interpretation sits equally comfortably with prevalent nineteenth-century views. And so, when looking at the steam engine, the angler is really looking at his own achievements, perhaps pondering whether they please him.

3)

But possibly the most interesting view this painting offers on distances has little to do with nineteenth-century debates. Instead, it has everything to do with a sensation that cannot have been unique to the nineteenth century.

We see: a polder landscape. A canal in the middle. On the right: anglers, some ducks. On the left: a telegraph line, the approaching train still in the distance. And two thirds of the painting: sky. A single vanishing point, a simple composition.

What’s more, the entire picture is permeated by the single element of water. The sky is filled with clouds, the air with steam; the land is bisected by a canal and the earth saturated with groundwater. The anglers find their food in the water; the travellers power their movement with the help of water turned into steam. This is a thoroughly wet scene, a scene with much less contrast or conflict than for instance Turner’s ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’.

And so, everything about this balanced picture speaks quiet. (Apart perhaps from the already restlessly vertical telegraph poles.)

Yet we know the train is coming. Its approaching cloud of steam seems to progressively envelop the land. Not just that, but it moves from the central vanishing point to the front of the scene. It gets all the attention, that of the angler as well as ours.

It will enter the landscape and for a brief moment be at its very foreground, dominating the scene with its noise and its steam, its hard wheels on the track, its smells and its black body towering on the embankment; for a few seconds the angler resting against the gate will hear or see nothing but the train… and then it’ll be gone.

It is this ephemerality, the fleeting quality of this sensation of a train passing by, that Gabriël pictures. He pictures not just the brief moment of the train’s overwhelming presence, but also its absence on either side of that moment.

‘Coming from afar’ then means: being there for an instance only, and soon belonging to another place again.

It is a sensation we know all too well, and one that overlaps with some of the sensations had by people on a train.

And so, in the same decade of 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson published his memorable ‘From a Railway Carriage’:

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Robert Louis Stevenson in 1887. Wikimedia Commons.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

 

This post grew from my article ‘Trains, Bodies, Landscapes: Experiencing Distance in the Long Nineteenth Century’, published in The Journal of Transport History (2019).

It was also published on the website of the Hakluyt Society.

Cycle for freedom

I spend much of my time debunking technological myths.

What is a technological myth? ‘The railways have democratised travel.’ You come across that one a lot.

But the social and administrative structure around the technology may well be at least as important as the technology itself. The way the business of the railways is run, matters a lot. The Trans-Siberian Express, for example, can hardly be called democratic. Those who want to approach the picture they know from the movies to any degree, have to spend many thousands of pounds; and a simple fare costs hardly less.

Photo of the similar repro-Pullman Orient Express by Simon Pielow. CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Rather, it is the government-regulated administration of a reliable, simple-to-use and relatively cheap system of rail transport that has made trains such a success in some countries (and not in others). And even there, it took about half a century from the introduction of passenger trains in the 1830s, to get to that point.

A technology exists, however, of which I am convinced that it is largely the technology itself that makes it so great. That is cycling.

Admittedly, effective cycling depends on surfaced roads (all-terrain biking excepted), people’s ability to cycle and to buy a bike, and some shared sense of traffic rules when the roads get very busy. But then again, it is inherently

1. cheap. Bicycles (and monocycles, tricycles and, I hope, hand-cycles) are cheap vehicles, and cheap to repair or have repaired. Of course, it depends on where you are in the world whether they are easy to get by, but at least they are cheaper than most other means of wheeled transport (motorcycles, active wheelchairs, cars, trucks…; excepting, I suppose, roller skates).
2. easy. Cycling is much easier to learn than driving a car.
3. versatile, global. Although you need surfaced roads for effective cycling, which are hard to get by in many parts of the world, bikes need less room than cars, less ice than skates, less water than rowing boats… Many places around where humans live, are potentially accessible to cyclists. Of course, the good old pedestrian trumps them all…
4. useful. Bikes do not only carry you: they carry the goods you sell, your groceries, your children…
5. empowering. Most important of all, cyclists are independent. You don’t need anyone to ride a bike. The most common repairs you can do yourself – even though they cost some time, they require little expertise. You do not have to rely on sheikhs and oil barons getting along to hit the road.You are the one doing the moving. The bicycle is truly an auto-mobile.

This Mountaintrike, designed by Thies Timmermans, does not even need a road surface to roll. Found on http://commons.wikimedia.org. CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.

Not for nothing, bikes have been much-contested: people have been explicitly forbidden to ride a bicycle (servants!), and many others have been strongly discouraged, either by fears for their decency (women!) or by prohibitive parameters set by governments (obligatory helmets!). Employers, patriarchs and wealthy technological industries (such as the car industry) are no big fans of the independence cycles bring.

Jean Béraud, ‘Le Chalet du Cycle au Bois de Boulogne’, probably from the 1890s, found on http://french-painters.blogspot.com. Free of copyright.