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.Away from the newspaper headlines, railway workers suffered in far greater numbers than passengers, with thousands losing their lives every year in accidents that were drearily similar and attracting none of the attention of the passenger train disasters.Because of the absence of interest and publicity, only very gradual improvements were made to the working conditions on the railway and consequently the job was as dangerous as far more obviously perilous professions such as fishing or construction.To take one example, Russian statistics for 1874 show 184 employee deaths and just nine passenger fatalities, in a year in which 25 million journeys were made on the 11,000 miles of track.43The most dangerous job on the railway was that of shunter, who worked in railway yards surrounded by moving locomotives and wagons.His job was to uncouple wagons, usually when they were in motion, and quickly change manual points so that the wagons went onto different tracks.He ran beside the wagons with a shunting pole the hook of which he used to lift the three-link couplings, and he could only stop a wagon by forcing down the handbrake.One false step and he was dead! All large stations had shunters who would stand at the head of a train between the buffers as a locomotive bore down on them, reliant on the skill of the driver and fireman to avoid being crushed.Minor accidents were commonplace and rare was the shunter who retained all his fingers for the whole course of his career.The death toll from tragedies was not the only negative effect of the railways.While they spread prosperity, they also led to massive movements of people and in heavily populated countries this increased the speed at which diseases spread.Therefore, while the railways may have staved off starvation, they undoubtedly intensified epidemics, especially in India where huge pilgrimages involving hundreds of thousands of people were a regular event.There were, too, far more devastating consequences to the environment than merely bringing too many people to disturb Wordsworth’s favourite views.Their environmental impact caused numerous others to protest, though it was not so much the introduction of the railways themselves, which used up far less land than roads and blended easily into the countryside, but the economic development that ensued.Virgin forests could be cleared in months and the timber transported economically, mines could be dug in previously inaccessible places and industrial towns would spring up where barely hamlets existed before.The railways themselves caused the most damage not in unspoilt rural areas but in towns and cities where the multi-track lines cut huge swathes through built-up areas inhabited, invariably, by the poor.By dividing towns into two distinct sections with a ribbon of railway that was difficult to cross, they would often create an undesirable part of town that was ‘the wrong side of the tracks’.But the advantages so outweighed the negatives that much of this was forgotten as the railways spread their tentacles ever further around the world.For most journeys, train travel had become the only method of getting around, the first choice for rich and poor alike and moreover, as the next chapter shows, with the networks largely complete, the railways hoped that by improving services and facilities they would win over the public.GETTING BETTERALL THE TIMEThe spread of the railways across the globe meant that rail travel became routine for a significant proportion of the world’s population.By the early years of the twentieth century, millions were travelling by train daily and the numbers were growing annually but it took a long time before the experience could be described as comfortable, let alone pleasurable.The literature of the railway tends to focus on the top end of the market, the expresses and the luxury trains enjoyed by the rich and the profligate, and there are plenty of books detailing these prestigious services, but few explaining what it was like for the poor ordinary Joes and Juanitas to travel by rail.For the most part, the experience of railway travel was far more banal than described in these books and, certainly for the first few decades, mostly downright uncomfortable
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Tematy
IndexChristine Amsden [Cassie Scot Cassie Scot ParaNormal Detecti
Christine Wood [Life Plan 01] A Life Plan Without You (epub)
Christie Craig [Divorced, Des Divorced, Desperate
Moore Christopher Ssij, mała, ssij (II)
Christine Cody [Bloodlands 01 Bloodlands (epub)
Christina Ross [Unleash Me, A Unleash Me, Vol 3 (epub)
Christian Fletcher [The Left Left on the Brink (epub)
Stasheff, Christopher Wizard in Rhyme 6 Haunted Wizard
Christopher G Nuttall [Royal The Royal Sorceress (epub)
Christine Feehan Mroczna Seri Mroczny Demon