Railway Journey Research Articles

Laura Marcus and the train to Freud

ABSTRACT This essay examines Laura Marcus’s chapter ‘Oedipus Express: Psychoanalysis and the Railways’ in her book Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014), which argues that the train and the railway journey are implicated in many of the fundamental principles of Freudian thought, including the Oedipus Complex. Extending Marcus’s insights, Ellmann shows how this motif of train-travel resurfaces in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his case history of the Rat Man, as well as in Melanie Klein’s case history of ‘Dick’, a four-year-old boy obsessed with trains and stations.

Windowscapes, dreamscapes and screen texts: train travel as performative practice in experimental film

ABSTRACT Echoing the current research on mobilities, performative practice and the performative documentary, railway journey in screen texts is increasingly seen as a complex embodied, experiential and performative practice. However, although train films have received some attention in film criticism, little is known about the performative potential of train travel in experimental film. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on railway journeying to demonstrate how several stylistically distinct and rarely screened experimental films stage passengering through the display of window views or larger sections of trainspace, turning it into productive site of contemplation, creative activity and artistic expression.

Braking distance prediction for vehicle consist in low-speed on-sight operation: a Monte Carlo approach

The first and last mile of a railway journey, in both freight and transit applications, constitutes a high effort and is either non-productive (e.g. in the case of depot operations) or highly inefficient (e.g. in industrial railways). These parts are typically managed on-sight, i.e. with no signalling and train protection systems ensuring the freedom of movement. This is possible due to the rather short braking distances of individual vehicles and shunting consists. The present article analyses the braking behaviour of such shunting units. For this purpose, a dedicated model is developed. It is calibrated on published results of brake tests and validated against a high-definition model for low-speed applications. Based on this model, multiple simulations are executed to obtain a Monte Carlo simulation of the resulting braking distances. Based on the distribution properties and established safety levels, the risk of exceeding certain braking distances is evaluated and maximum braking distances are derived. Together with certain parameters of the system, these can serve in the design and safety assessment of driver assistance systems and automation of these processes.

Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train by Jessamyn R. Abel

Reviewed by: Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train by Jessamyn R. Abel Morris Low (bio) Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train By Jessamyn R. Abel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 289. Brad Pitt's latest film, Bullet Train (Sony, 2022), reinforces what Jessamyn Abel contends are the contradictory images of Japanese high-speed rail: futuristic but also hiding some of the social problems, power plays, and politics at work in the larger society. Pitt's film is based on Bullet Train: A Novel (2021) by Japanese author Kōtarō Isaka, who portrays the train as the thrilling site of intersecting stories. Abel in her [End Page 269] own way also examines how the idea of the bullet train was used by various actors to promote their own agendas and the affective power of the train in helping the Japanese to reimagine their sense of identity as individuals, as well as at the level of city and nation. Readers of this journal will likely know Takashi Nishiyama's Engineering War and Peace in Modern Japan, 1868–1964 (2014) and Christopher Hood's Shinkansen: From Bullet Train to Symbol of Modern Japan (2006) before it. Abel builds on these studies. Steering largely clear of the technical matters that Nishiyama and others have written about and going beyond the chronological history that Hood helps provide, she regards the bullet train not as representing a major technological leap; her interests lie elsewhere. While readers may be familiar with Abel's recent articles on the topic, versions of which are included in the book, the total is greater than the sum. Each chapter provides insights combined with thoughtful analysis and offers a range of perspectives backed up by careful archival research that provides us with some sense of official narratives and disputes. We are also introduced to the scholarly literature in both Japanese and English, as well as to relevant magazine and newspaper articles, films, novels, and art. The latter sources allow us to gain some insight into the popular imagination surrounding the train and all its social and political baggage. Those who are interested in the history of railways and know Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey (1986) will be familiar with some aspects of what Abel covers: the ways in which trains transform the landscape, changing ideas of time and space, and regional identity (ch. 2). But Abel goes beyond this. While cultural representations of the bullet train for both domestic and international audiences are part of what she examines, we also are privy to the policy-making process surrounding the bullet train in the planning stages, the fraught decision-making and politicking around the location of stations, and the displacement of residents to make way for the train (ch. 1). The train was linked to the future in terms of Japanese aspirations to become an information society (ch. 3). It also created a moment of nostalgia for Japan's former empire during the 1930s, when the Asia Express ran through Manchuria and there were hopes for a bullet train to be built in Japan itself (ch. 4). These hopes would later be realized, just in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, changing perceptions of trains and providing the Japanese government with a symbol of Japanese technological prowess that could be showcased at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair (ch. 5). While the prospect of a superconducting maglev train running between Tokyo and Osaka has been relegated to the distant future (conclusion), the Japanese people continue to embrace high-speed rail for the many reasons that Abel outlines. She makes the simple but profound statement that "people used physical infrastructures to build conceptual ones that would help them make sense of their world and reshape it in ways they hoped would make it better" (p. 19). I [End Page 270] recommend the book to all readers interested in the history of technology. It provides a useful framework for scholars to employ when considering other technologies. We need to pay close attention to how they emerged and were contested, while acknowledging the many meanings that can...

Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art ed. by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding

Reviewed by: Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art ed. by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding Hugo Silveira Pereira (bio) Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art Edited by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Pp. viii + 244. Transnational Railway Cultures analyzes representations of railways and the experience of traveling by train across borders (in both the strict and broad sense of the term) in several arts (literature, cinema, music, painting), timeframes, and geographies, spanning five continents. It encompasses different topics associated with railway traveling, such as progress/backwardness, the persistence of colonial depictions, and the construction of memories, among others. Railways are one of the most debated technologies in the community of historians of technology. Therefore, it is not easy to come up with something new. Transnational Railway Cultures offers a fresh approach to the subject by exploring how railway travel is represented in different movies, books, or artistic productions from a transnational perspective. I welcomed both the return to the classics, namely Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden and Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey, and the engagement with more recent studies (especially those on mobility studies). Often, the use of classical works tends to be looked down upon as dated literature, but I believe that books such as those by Marx and Schivelbusch are still useful for historians today. The chapters fit well together, although there is no clear train of thought between them, which makes drawing comparisons difficult. This justifies the want of an overarching thesis that glues the chapters together. The editors clarify in the final remarks that the book was never meant to be comprehensive and that its gaps should be regarded as opportunities for further studies, but I believe that an attempt at finding common ground, even if at the cost of some speculation, would be useful for readers and for future iterations. [End Page 271] My main concern about the book is that readers may not always see the "border crossing" promised by the transnational approach. On some occasions, this is due to the texts being too hermetic (ch. 4) or too descriptive and heavily reliant on quotations from the work that was analyzed (ch. 7). In other instances, the transnationalism seems forced and supported by speculative reflections or personal opinions. For example, it is claimed that music or poetry replicate the sound of trains, thus evoking the travels of commuters to work or Jews toward concentration camps (chs. 1 and 2). In chapter 4, "gothic" is used to describe conflict between races (nationalities, at best). Other assertions are made that capitalism will violently undo itself (ch. 3) or that today's traveling is pedantic tourism (ch. 8). This becomes more visible when the authors do not engage with the theoretical framework of those fields (e.g., cartoons in chapter 5 or travel writing in chapter 8). I was left wondering how much one can draw from a movie or a poem, or if any conclusion could be considered valid. On a similar note, in some chapters I wondered whether the main conclusions would be drastically different had the authors chosen a different piece of literature, cinema, or art. Regardless, the edited volume will be of interest to historians of technology as it engages with concepts usually analyzed by the discipline. The notion of techno-scientific progress (and its persistence) is the most visible (with trains assuming the role of icon of modernity, contrasting with the backwardness embodied in characters and landscapes surrounding them). But the notion of borders (chs. 6 and 9), postcolonial policies and stereotypes (chs. 5 and 8), critical infrastructure (ch. 3), and deconstruction of geographical dimensions (ch. 5) are also addressed. Chapter 2 clearly resonates with Kranzberg's First Law, reflecting on how railways are not good nor bad nor neutral. While perusing the volume (especially chs. 2, 3, 8, and 10), I frequently thought of Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann's "portals of globalisation"—those sites that are centers of international trade and communications and promote cultural transfer and the development of global connectedness. I think that this concept may foster a productive dialogue...

The path from customer experience to customer citizenship: new adventure is a touristic railway journey

PurposeIn this study, the author aimed to measure the effect of customer loyalty on customer citizenship behavior as well as the effect of experience value perceptions of tourist railway journey customers on customer loyalty within the scope of social exchange theory.Design/methodology/approachThe author obtained data from 126 participants who had experienced the tourist railway adventure through random sampling. In the next stage, the author extracted the data obtained with the bootstrapping sample technique to 5,000 samples. The author analyzed these obtained data with the PLS-SEM model with the Smart PLS 3 software.FindingsThe results of the research show that the most important experience value dimension that creates loyalty in the touristic railway journey is the emotional value dimension; the second important dimension is the hedonic value dimension and other experience value dimensions did not have any effect on customer loyalty intention levels. In addition, an important result of the study is that loyal customers mostly intend to advise other customers, and relatively less of them intend to give feedback to the firm.Research limitations/implicationsThe fact that the concepts of touristic railway journeys are different due to the nature of tourism is an important limitation of the study, which is only for individuals who have experienced the Touristic Eastern Express. The fact that the Touristic Eastern Express is a long journey and stops at many destinations on its arrival and departure route can affect customers' perceptions of the experience value.Practical implicationsThe values that create customer loyalty in the touristic railway journey are mostly emotional and hedonic values. In addition, customers who are loyal as a result of this journey are more intent on advising other customers than giving feedback to the firm.Originality/valueThe study was carried out on the customers of the touristic eastern express, which started its activities in 2019. Ensuring customer loyalty for the sustainability of this trend has significant tourism potential; Afterwards, the transformation of customer loyalty into customer citizenship has a very important place. In addition, as far as we have examined the literature, the absence of similar studies in the tourism sector is an indicator of the study's originality. Considering these data, it is expected that the study will fill an important gap in terms of both sectoral and academic.

Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War by Kathleen Riley

Reviewed by: Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War by Kathleen Riley Marina Mackay (bio) IMAGINING ITHACA: NOSTOS AND NOSTALGIA SINCE THE GREAT WAR, by Kathleen Riley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xiii + 331 pp. £30.00 cloth. Imagining Ithaca is not primarily a book about literary responses to the Odyssey, and thus it is not much concerned with Ulysses, the subject of a paragraph in the introduction and a few passing mentions thereafter. Rather, Kathleen Riley's declared theme is "the contemplation of Home from a distance" (21), and her book consists of readings of a wide range of films, novels, plays, poems, and memoirs that appeared between 1918 and 2017. Aside from the introduction and epilogue, the book is arranged in six parts, incorporating nineteen numbered chapters. The text's first part is about homecoming in the context of the world wars, and it consists of separate accounts of Great War novels by Rebecca West and Erich Maria Remarque,1 of William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives,2 and of David Malouf's historical novel Fly Away Peter.3 The shorter second section addresses three works that incorporate explicitly Odyssean allusions: John Ford's The Long Voyage Home, Njabulo S. Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela, and English writer Tamar Yellin's short story "Return to Zion."4 There follows a section on exile and nostalgia consisting of chapters on memoirs by Vladimir Nabokov and Doris Lessing and on two Alan Bennett plays. The fourth part is on ideas of spiritual displacement and discusses work by Carson McCullers, Woody Allen, and Doris Pilkington Garimara; the fifth part addresses nostalgia for childhood in works by George Orwell, John Van Druten, and John Logan. The Telemachus figures of the book's final section, "Voyages Round the Father," are Seamus Heaney, Daniel Mendelsohn, and politician-turned-television-presenter Michael Portillo, whose work on the life of his late father Luis Portillo, a poet, center-left intellectual, and Spanish Civil War refugee, is credited early in Riley's acknowledgments as among the inspirations for her book (vii). It would be difficult to make any programmatic argument from so heterogeneous a body of work—so many differences of medium, genre, and form, and of historical, cultural, and national context—and Imagining Ithaca does not attempt one. Rather, Riley's interest is in the sheer pervasiveness of yearning for real or imaginary homes, and if the book has a general orientation, as distinct from a specific argument, it is that nostalgia is more usefully understood as a feature rather than a failing of modern literature, theater, and film. She proposes that, contrary to the new set of pejorative associations that nostalgia has accrued from recent exploitation by right-wing opportunists—promising various impossibilities about the recovery of American greatness or British sovereignty—nostalgia implies no [End Page 549] particular politics. Side by side sit chapters on Speak, Memory and the then-Communist Lessing's Going Home, a reflection on expatriation almost contemporary with Nabokov's.5 Because the chapters are almost entirely self-contained, such juxtapositions go unremarked. The book's chapters range in length from just over four pages, in the case of the one on Yellin, to over thirty deeply researched and absorbing pages centered on the episode of the BBC's Great Railway Journeys that Portillo wrote and presented about a journey from Granada to his father's beloved Salamanca. The book's usual allowance is approximately ten or eleven pages per chapter, and much space is necessarily given to the exposition of plot and situation for the benefit of new or forgetful audiences of each work. The range of material surveyed is compelling in its own way, but the short chapters mean that the local analysis, which is invariably astute and well informed, sometimes feels squeezed by the need to contextualize and summarize the text under consideration. For example, the section titled "John Van Druten's The Widening Circle (1957)" spends much more space on the nineteenth-century transformation of West Hampstead from a literally Keatsian rural idyll into a bourgeois NW6 suburb than on Van Druten's actual book, a volume of autobiography...

Assessing Railway Landscape by AHP Process with GIS: A Study of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway

Landscape quality is a crucial factor for the heritage attractiveness of tourism, allowing tourists to experience both natural and cultural aspects along railway journeys. Moreover, railway landscape is a comprehensive system that defines the landscape observed and perceived by passengers and is characterized by the diversity and continuity of the train’s movement. Yunnan-Vietnam railway (YVR) heritage is the research object of this research, whose area encompasses various landscape types and heritage sites, providing great landscape enjoyment. Currently, the assessment methods specifically for railway landscape have been discussed less than for other landscape types, especially for a series of large linear sites like the YVR. To evaluate the value of railway heritage landscape along the railway, this paper proposes a methodology combining the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Delphi method, and GIS as an integrated spatial assessment. Creatively, this paper seeks to: (1) discuss the relationship between railway and landscape; (2) build a comprehensive evaluation system for the railway heritage landscape, covering the topics of history, tourism, ecology, heritage, social-culture, and visual quality; (3) quantify the landscape value of the YVR areas. Thus, the results of this research can be useful to future urban planning, development, and policymaking.

From Tory Boy to #sadmanonatrain: Great British Railway Journeys and the hard and soft masculinities of Michael Portillo

Before 2005, Michael Portillo was a reviled populist, right-wing British Conservative politician. Seemingly, he is a now a mellowed national treasure due largely to his approachable, friendly, prolific series of travelogues, Great British Railway Journeys (2010–present). This multi-series documentary has been a remarkable BBC success: delivering upbeat music, dynamic camera work, a repetitive format, rosy-tinted Victoriana and celebratory subject matter, the programme makers ensure that the programme is feel-good, cosy, nostalgic and soothing. But Portillo’s political inclinations are apparent: Portillo, sometimes quite subtly, expresses consistently his passion for free enterprise, for the supposed benefits of historical colonialism, for the monarchy, for the military and for social liberalism. A believer in an enterprise-encouraging small state and in personal liberty and social mobility, Portillo’s politics chime in directly with the current thinking of the Conservative Party leadership. In short, the apparently benign travelogue series promotes Portillo’s mainstream post-Thatcherite British Conservatism: an analysis of the ubiquitous programme’s understated but clear Conservatism counters right-wing accusations about the BBC’s alleged leftist bias.

Time

Time

Takotsubo syndrome with pulmonary embolism: a case report and literature review

BackgroundTakotsubo syndrome (TTS) is an acute cardiac condition with reversible heart failure which is often triggered by psychological and physical stressful events. Although pulmonary embolism (PE) was reported as a trigger for TTS, the concurrence of TTS and PE has been rarely reported, let alone that triggered by PE. Here we describe a case of a postmenopausal female presenting with symptoms similar to myocardial ischemia, which may be caused by PE, and review the available literature that may help clinicians with their practice to similar situations since no published guidelines are available.Case presentationAn 86-year-old female was referred to the emergency department for unrelieved chest tightness, shortness of breath and back pain. Cardiac biomarkers were mildly elevated and electrocardiogram displayed pathologic Q-waves, ST-segment elevation and inverted T-waves. Unexpectedly, coronary angiography was in absence of obstructed coronary atherosclerosis or acute plaque rupture. Chest computed tomography illustrated multiple pulmonary emboli in bilateral pulmonary arteries. She had suffered from long-term right lower extremity pain and experienced a long railway journey with less activity. Both echocardiogram and cardiac magnetic resonance demonstrated regional hypokinesia of left ventricle. She received anticoagulant and diuretic therapies, three-month follow up after discharge revealed uneventful recovery without any pulmonary emboli or regional motion abnormalities, thus she was retrospectively diagnosed with TTS caused by PE.ConclusionTTS and PE are scarcely concurrent and PE can exert as a potential trigger for TTS. TTS is easily misdiagnosed, actively seeking possible risk factors of TTS is in favor of early diagnosis and timely intervention. TTS with PE is reversible, timely and effective treatments ensure the best possible outcome.

Sardonic Attitude of the Roux in the Great Railway Bazar

This study examines Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar (1977) so as to trace his perception on the Asian states, peoples and cultures during his railway journey across Asia in 1973. The study primarily seeks an answer to the question: does Theroux adopt cosmopolitan vision of the contemporary globalized era or follow the colonial vision of the colonial era? The study borrows theoretical concepts of colonial and cosmopolitan visions from Debbie Lisle. In the process of textual analysis, the study also brings theoretical concepts in travel writing theory and criticisms of various critics on the primary text. The study, finally, comes up with a conclusion that Theroux has implicated the colonial vision as it locates numerous evidences of his condescending and sardonic attitude on the Asian states, peoples and cultures.

Gespräche wie bei Auftritten im Theater Eisenbahnen als Bühne in den Romanen Emine Sevgi Özdamars

<p class="ql-align-justify">In Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s literary texts, her protagonists typically perform like actors on a stage. Not much attention has been paid to the stage settings of Özdamar’s novels where her actors perform their roles. This article addresses the following questions: first, where are the stages on which Özdamar places her novel’s characters; and second, what is the historical and societal relevance being expressed by these particular stage settings? The role of trains in Özdamar’s novels is of special interest. As Foucault says, “A train is an extraordinary bundle of relations,” and this is true for her novels, where many diverse plays are performed using a railway compartment as the stage setting. In addition, the discussions of the motif of her use of German as her novels’ language are played out on trains. It is repeatedly evident that her narratives of solidarity are told in these railway compartments. Though the panoramic view from the railway window, and the changeover to imaginary literary landscapes constitute illusionary spaces, where for once the ‘actually existing socialism’ seems to be apparent, Özdamar’s protagonists are nevertheless aware of the problems German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) socialism. The continuous traveling between East and West Berlin on the urban commuter train transforms the contradictory and coinciding fragments of the protagonist’s identity into a horizontal coexistence. That is, although every railway journey must come to an end, one can always start a new, so that in spite of the protagonist’s disillusionment, a utopian moment of solidarity shines forth.&nbsp;

Application of Sidra 4.0 Software Traffic Flow in Intersection in Kuala Lumpur

Traffic signals are one of the most effective Traffic Flow and flexible active traffic control utilized extensively in a number of global cities. The traffic signal benefits include an organized traffic movement, an increased intersection capacity and needs only modest geometric design. Furthermore, there are numerous significant methods in improving network performance by directing the traffic lights’ flow at the intersection. This study showed, together with the capability of improving the level of service (LOS), the intersection light signal volume, fuel consumption (FUC), average delay (AVD), operating costs (OPC), Carbon dioxide emissions (CO2E) and travel speed (TS). The Jalan Kampung Pandan intersection light signal capacity is 1985.3, Jalan Imbi – Raja Chulan 1793.2 and Jalan Imbi 3238.1. The FUC present condition is approximately 58,881.3 lit/s from Jalan Raja Imbi- Chulan, in addition to 34,687.6 lit/s Jalan Kampung Pandan on the trip, along with 55,173.6 lit/s to Jalan Imbi railway journey. Additionally, the results displays that the quantity of OPC acquired was 1138847.2 RM/hr for Jalan Raja Imbi- Chulan, 659235.5 RM/hr for Jalan Kampung Pandan and 1054115.7 RM/hr for Jalan Imbi. The CO2E results amount of CO2E attained were 147203.3 to Jalan Raja Imbi- Chulan, in addition to 86719.1 Jalan Kampung Pandan and 137934. To Jalan Imbi. Peak Travel speed at TS intersection current status is approximately 0.5 km/h from Jalan Imbi- Raja Chulan, along with 0.8 km/h for Jalan Kampung Pandan in the trip, together with 1.2 km/h to Jalan Imbi on a trip.

Between Progress and Nostalgia: Technology, Geopolitics, and James Bond's Railway Journeys

This article discusses the train journey in the James Bond film series as a narrative and aesthetic device which produces specifically modern forms of mobility. Bond's trains transport imaginary geographies and identities, and we contend that they function within the Bond franchise as figures of both techno-cultural development and imperial nostalgia, as well as a means by which the mobility of the cinematic machinery itself is dramatised. The article addresses a gap in James Bond scholarship and argues that a close examination of the poetics of the railroad in the Bond films reveals that the train is central to the geopolitical imagination of the series.

Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation, by Charlotte Mathieson

Reviewed by: Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation by Charlotte Mathieson Ruth Livesey (bio) Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation, by Charlotte Mathieson; pp. viii + 217. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, £58.00, $99.00. When I heard of the death last year of the geographer Doreen Massey, I thought of a passage in her work that encapsulated for me her wit and brilliance as a theoretician of place and space. Massey was adept at teasing out the significance of postmodern scholarship on place and mobility, and rooting it down into a politics of materiality and [End Page 139] experience. Amid "the Ridley Scott images of world cities, the writing about skyscraper fortresses, the Baudrillard visions of hyperspace," she argued, "most people still live in" inner suburbs crowded with old housing stock, "like Harlesden or West Brom," and "much of life for many people, even in the heart of the first world, still consists of waiting in a bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes" (Space, Place and Gender [Polity Press, 1994], 163). Charlotte Mathieson's welcome study of mobility and Victorian fiction—Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation—is, in its own way, a similar riposte to recent theorizations of nineteenth-century place and mobility. While influential studies by Jonathan Grossman and Jo Guldi, among others, have emphasized the agency of transport infrastructure in systematizing and speeding up networked ways of being in nineteenth-century Britain, Mathieson's careful illuminations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Wilkie Collins, places embodied subjects at the center of her account regarding the ways in which the Victorian novel thinks and writes about mobility. Drawing on the work of Massey, Tim Cresswell, and other cultural geographers, Mathieson traces mobility in the Victorian novel as a form of "socially produced motion" (13). The wider social structures that determine who is able to travel, when, where, and how, come to the fore in her analyses as a result of this materialization. A passenger, in Mathieson's study, is always an embodied subject whose relation to movement is defined by expectations around gender, class, and national identity. In this book, such instances of "embodied mobility" also become "lens[es] through which to re-perceive the negotiation between national and global concerns as they unfold in the structures of the novel" (17). Mathieson's departure from the actor network theory model that has influenced many recent accounts of nineteenth-century communications results in some significant rereadings of novels already well traveled by critics in this field. Her first chapter, on the figure of the pedestrian, for instance, is an attentive account of the alternative communities of place and nation that emerge through women walking in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), Adam Bede (1859), and Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847). For Grossman, Little Nell's walk from London to the Midlands represents a severing from a community connected by networks of public mobility. In a guarded critique of that analysis, Mathieson highlights the reality of pedestrian journeying for the poor in this period and Dickens's construction of "alternative forms of national understanding" through the act of walking through a landscape (27). Mathieson draws attention to the emphasis given to the physical strain of walking by Brontë and Eliot as Jane and Hetty drag their weary outcast limbs across the nation. In Adam Bede, Mathieson concludes, this foregrounding of Hetty's tramp makes the female body "a privileged site through which an exploration of the connection between the body and nation-space becomes acutely focused" (40). The later chapters of the book focus on railway journeys across Britain, the Continent, and a globalized Victorian modernity. So much has been written on these aspects of mobility in nineteenth-century fiction that Mathieson sets herself a hard task to craft an original contribution. Yet Mathieson alights on the glorious self-description of Robert Audley, in Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), a character for whom to become a railway passenger involves transforming into a "perambulating mass of woollen goods" (Braddon qtd. in Mathieson 85). Out of this bundle of...

TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY: A TRAVEL INTO THE TIME

[For the English abstract and full text of the article please see the attached PDF-File (English version follows Russian version)].ABSTRACT The Organization for Cooperation between Railways (OSJD) in every possible way promotes the exchange of experience and study tours for representatives of participating countries and affiliated enterprises. Broad international contacts allow developing mutual understanding, strengthening business ties, transferring knowledge, maintaining historical continuity in the field of railway traffic. At the end of July last year a group of Polish railway workers returned from the Trans-Siberian Railway journey. Judging by the published notes, they had the opportunity to satisfy not only professional interest, but also got acquainted with the history of the Trans-Baikal Territory, the past of the Buryat and Mongolian people. The modern locomotive, unwillingly, became a «time machine» for travelers. Keywords: Trans-Siberian Railway, TransSib, Trans-Baikal, retrospective, OSJD.

Урал из окна вагона: средства коммуникации и травелог

The article considers the railway discourse of Ural travelogues of the late 19 th – early 20 th centuries. The main theoretical and methodological justification for this phenomenon was the understanding of the means of communication, in this case of the railway, as a message whose main content is “changing of the scale, speed or shape” (M. McLuhan) of human activity. One of the most important sociocultural changes caused by the railway was a new visuality, mediated by the high speed of movement. The train allowed contemporaries to see the world in a new way, becoming a sort of “а view”. A new configuration of space in which movement develops takes place under this view. Particularly, a rapid change of visual impressions triggers semiotization mechanisms, which allow one to regulate the kaleidoscope of the visual flow. As a result, the role of associative thinking, linked with the general poetic context, on the one hand, and the literary tradition of describing the Urals, on the other hand, increases. Another factor that influenced the perception of the Ural space during a railway journey is the intense kinesthetic sensations associated with the dynamics of mechanical motion. It can be said that railway travelogues formed for the Urals an organic style of description that suits the dynamic nature of the mountainous terrain. Moreover, railway travelogues re-structured the Ural landscape in a new way. The large mining centers of the Urals, connecting which was the main mission of the Ural railway, become the key points of the trip. The railway route, which presupposed the movement from one city-plant to another one, returned to the Urals the features of the mining power, having dimmed by the middle of the 19 th century.

Railways as a potential bird census tool in citizen-science projects: a preliminary study

ABSTRACTCapsule: Bird surveys carried out during a railway journey capture a significant proportion of the species and individuals recorded through line transects (LT).Aims: To explore the suitability of railways as a bird census tool in a scenario where bird data massively recorded by passengers of the railway network could be collected through appropriate web portals and cell phone technologies.Methods: Railway and walked transects were conducted along the 40 km rail line connecting the towns of Valencia and Buñol, Spain. From June 2012 to May 2016, I carried out a weekly survey of birds from the railway line looking through the train window. Additionally, to assess the efficacy of train surveys, a railway section 11 km long was surveyed monthly on foot from December 2014 to November 2015.Results: Train surveys were unsuitable to detect many woodland birds but were relatively efficient in detecting raptors, open-field and aquatic bird species. About 75% of non-woodland species were detected from the train, and there was a positive correlation between counts obtained through train and LT; mean detection rate per species was between 50% and 80% depending on the season. Overall, larger and numerically more important species were better quantified. Further, detection rates of several medium-large species were greater than one, indicating a superior efficiency of train over LT. Only for nine species were data sufficient to calculate population trends, which in several cases were similar to those obtained through monitoring programmes operating at coarser spatial scales.Conclusions: The relatively high performance of the method and the fact that broad geographical areas could be easily surveyed (even on a daily basis) by many people in a relatively short time make railway-based bird surveys a candidate to be used in citizen science programmes.

Douglas R. Burgess Jr. Engines of Empire: Steamships and the Victorian Imagination.

When Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s massive iron-hulled, five-funneled Great Eastern steamship was launched in 1858, with thousands of spectators looking on, the ship traveled a mere one hundred feet before grinding to a halt, not to move again for over a year. It was the largest vessel ever built, a technological triumph, and an engineering marvel. It was also “more spectacle than ship” (118), a phrase that succinctly encapsulates one of the themes of this insightful, richly textured transnational history of the cultural meanings of steamships and steamship travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following in the footsteps of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1977), Douglas R. Burgess Jr.’s Engines of Empire: Steamships and the Victorian Imagination excavates the complex relationship between Victorians—not only in Britain, but also in the U.S. and Germany—and their steamships. Drawing on the observations of famous travelers such as Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, and Mark Twain, as well as ordinary voyagers, both male and female, Burgess explores the many and varied meanings of steamships and steamship travel for “spectators,” “tourists,” and “imperials.” This is not a history of steamships, but of how they were experienced and understood as “spectacles,” “solipsistic void[s]” (12), “avatars of statehood” (14), “bastions of Britishness” (16), “simulacrum[s] of rage” (23), “harbinger[s] of civilization” (224), “imperial avatar[s]” (250), and above all, “floating allegories” that represented “national pride, international amity, technological superiority . . . the march of civilization, or all of the above” (119).