Trains of Terror, Part 1

going on, you know what's in store. But in case you're new to the show, the pitch is that every October on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we devote all of that month's core episodes two topics related to monsters, ghosts, demons, curses, and horror Halloween stuff, and also for our weird House cinema episodes. For the Fridays of this month, we're going to be looking at horror movies.

and technology. But I think the best best place to begin here is to look at some famous examples of trains in horror fiction and rob if you don't mind, I want to kick things off with an example of a story that I just read in full for the first time this weekend.

All the Year Round. And I'm going to briefly summarize the story, including the ending, so as a warning, if you want to read it without having the ending spoiled, you could pause and do that now. It's fairly short. It only takes like twenty minutes or so to read. The Signalman begins with an unnamed narrator who wanders to the edge of a huge trench in the earth around sunset one day. And at the bottom of this trench there is a railway line leading into a dark tunnel.

And at the edge of the tunnel, beside the tracks there is a tiny box like signal house and the signalman who works it. So a bit of historical context that helps you understand the story better. In the nineteenth century,

signal operators were a crucial part of railroads. These were workers who had to stay at little houses beside the tracks, and they would be equipped with lights and colored flags and usually a telegraph line to relay information to and about passing trains, which meant that signalers were pivotal to railroad safety. They gave the trains information, They passed the

information via flags or sometimes even shouted verbal signals. They passed information to oncoming in engine drivers, and this could be information about the conditions of the tracks ahead, like is there an obstruction, a flood, some of their kind of problem, or about the movements of other trains like was there a train stalled on the tracks ahead or

somewhere it shouldn't be. And they also kept information about when trains passed to make sure everything was running on schedule and alert other stations and trains if there was some kind of danger or delay. They were also sometimes responsible for operating track switches to divert the course of a train, like if there's a fork in the line.

But because of the nature of their work, signal operators were sometimes characterized as kind of pitiable people like it was stressful work because the lives of many people were in their hands. If they made a mistake, it could lead to disaster. But it was also isolated, lonely work because they would be spending long shifts by themselves in remote and sometimes unpleasant locations along the rail lines. So

anyway back to the story. The narrator comes to a deep cutting in the earth at the emergence of a rail tunnel, and he looks down into it and sees this tiny signal house and the man who works there standing at the door. Curious. The narrator calls out and says, Helloa, it's that one of those hellos that spelled halloa or how you say that? Do you say the oa? Or is that just oh hello, I die I'm not sure. It's like balbo helloa. Below there, He's trying to get

the man's attention. The man at first seems confused and even frightened, but then reluctantly invites the narrator down a hidden pathway to meet him. And here, I'm going to read a descriptive passage to communicate the atmosphere of the story. The narrator says his post was in as solitary and dismal a place as I ever saw. On either side, a dripping, wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view

but a strip of sky. The perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon, the shorter perspective in the other direction, terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot that it had an earthy, deadly smell, and so much cold wind rushed through it that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.

of the tunnel. The figure stands with one arm raised up, waving violently, and the other arm thrown over his eyes like a blindfold. And when the signallman sees the figure, he hears a voice calling out, saying, Helloa below there, look out, And then as suddenly as it appeared, the

figure vanishes into darkness. And twice before, at the time of the story, the signalman has seen this shadow man in the red light and heard the voice, and then immediately after those visions, disaster has fallen somewhere nearby on the tracks. A One time it was a terrible engine collision in which many people were killed. Another time it was the sudden and mysterious death of a young woman riding on board a passing train. And so now the signalman is not only haunted by this vision, but by

what it means. When he sees it and when he hears the voice, he knows there will soon be a disaster, and he wants to telegraph the station so he can perhaps avert it. But he has no idea what the disaster will be, and he can't explain the reason he knows it's coming, so he can't give a warning that anybody will heed. So he's tortured with this terrible knowledge that he can't use to help anyone. Now the narrator

is troubled by all this. He seems to believe that the man is suffering from a nervous condition, and the next day he plans to come back and find a way to convince the signalman to go see a doctor. But when the narrator arrives at the trench in the earth the next day, he instead finds a large gathering of railroad officials on site. Apparently the signalman was cut down by a train the night before. He was standing

in the tracks as if in a trance. The engine driver saw him as the train was approaching and tried to call out to him to get him to move out of the way. And he was calling out halloa below there look out and waved one arm violently to get the signalman's attention. But at the last moment the engine driver was terrified of what he was about to see, and so he threw his other arm over his face to cover his eyes.

the setting is kind of incidental. What it's really about is the ghost and the human interaction. But I don't know. I think the railway setting is not incidental here. I think the setting along the tracks is actually quite thematically central. It matters that the signalman is a signalman, like what his job is is core to the anguish that he's suffering with this terrible knowledge, and the fear and the dread and the gloomy atmosphere and the danger are all

centrally based on railroad technology. And you can tell well and even Dickens himself had strange, i'd say, at best, ambivalent feelings about rail travel and its effects on the world.

There's a different story in this same collection, Mugby Junction, where Dickens is writing about a character looking down at a railroad junction and says, but there were so many lines gazing down upon them from a bridge at the junction, it was as if the concentrating companies formed a great industrial exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spiders that spun iron.

Occasionally that occurs, and I get a kick out of that. But so suffice to say, trains are very every day to me, and I like them. I don't inherently think they are creepy. And yet at the same time, there is something about the train that fits so well, not only fits well within these stories, but serves as a great skeleton for these stories. And a lot of it comes down to ideas that the train itself there's something unnatural about it. There's something really almost a sense of

future shock that's never gone away, you know. And also the idea that the train is a location is inherently unnatural, and there's something about it that is sort of inherently haunted.

And there are different ways to approach this, and I was thinking about this, and I was looking up various short stories and works of horror and thinking about various movies as well that use train settings, and some of them are you know, you can find overt examples of like, Okay, this is a movie about a train with a killer on the train. You know, it's you know, it is

just a setting for murders. Plenty of examples of that, but one of the examples that I think came to my mind the most, and this is one that I remember watching an adaptation of it when I was younger. This comes from the works of Sarrothur Conan Doyle and a particular short story titled The Adventure of the Copper Beaches. This would have been an eighteen ninety two tale, and I vividly remember watching the Jeremy Brett Granada television adaptation

of this when I was a kid. You can find this streaming, and you can get this on disc as well. It's It's, It's. These were all really accurate adaptations of the shlock Home stories. But basically this does not involve a haunted train. There's not even a murder on the train or anything of that nature. It's just Holmes and Watson are taking the train into the countryside to look

into a particular crime. And at first Holmes is consumed by his newspaper much of the way, you know, if it were today, he'd be on his his iPhone or something. But he finally puts his newspaper way and he begins to survey the scenery outside the window and he makes a kind of terrifying observation. He goes on a bit of a ramt multiple paragraphs that I can't I can't read all of it here, but I'm gonna read essentially

an abridged version. Okay, So Holmes says the following to Watson, you look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there. They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling

and beautiful countryside. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child or the thud of a drunkard's blow does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbors. And then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going. And there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But

look at these lonely houses. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on year in, year out in such places, and none the wiser. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger.

know young Jeff Goblin. I don't remember how old he would have been at this point in his career, but anyway, so this is another story where the train itself is not creepy, but there's something about the way it connects people in places that takes on a very sinister air.

So in this story we follow a man from the city this is Jeff Goblum's character in the adaptation, who takes a train ride out into the country side to confirm according to him, his ideals about country living, and his of course curiosity with this particular stop where nobody ever gets off. You know, what is it with this town? And you know this also ties into some general fascination with train travel. You're like, well, what is this stop?

Who lives here? Who are these people? And he meets up and tags along with an old countryman during this journey. And there's a twist though, and I'm about to spoil it, so skip ahead, pause, and so forth if you don't want it to be spoiled. But the twist is that the city man has ventured out to the country to commit the perfect murder of a stranger, and the old man has lured him out to do the same, to commit the perfect murder of a city guy who has

wandered into the country. And I'm going to read it just a quick quote here from the original rapere Very short story. Now, the darkness that had brought us together stood between the old man, the station, the town, the forest were lost in the night. For an hour. I stood in the roaring blast, staring back at all that darkness.

So this is a story that works in a number of ways, exploring course just the darkness of human nature and you know, temptation to do evil and so forth our attitudes towards others, and perhaps as well a little commentary on the idea that you still see in modern objections to say, the expansion of city rail, that oh, well, if you do this, it's going to allow criminals to just move around super easily. They'll just they'll just go right into the into the really nice parts of town

and just start doing crimes. But uh, and then on top of all of this, I feel like this there is also this sense of the train as a technology that shortens the distance between individuals, so it brings us closer together. But does it maybe bring us two close? You know, does it just it just opens up the room for it breaks down barriers that should be in place, that sort of thing.

series the animated anthology series, and it's quite good. Involves a train sort of I forget if it breaks down or slows down, but it kind of gets into that area of like, oh, the train is something that connects point A to point B, but then what goes on in between and the idea that you know, you're you're often going through you know, very isolated countryside or you know,

so it seems to the observer. Yeah, let's see getting into the realm of not only train horror fiction, but subway horror fiction, which we already got into a little bit of midnight me Train. There's an excellent older weird fiction tale called Far Below by Robert Barbara Johnson, and this one is adapted into an okay episode of the anthology series Monsters, but the original short story is fabulous. It involves people becoming ghouls in the deep tunnels beneath New York City.

monster in part to a subway train. Okay, yeah, like there's not much you could compare it to, but to a train, which maybe reveals something about some of the attitudes one might, you know, have about trains or observe about them. I'm going to read a quick quote here,

but we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of fetid black herodescence, oozed tightly onward through its fifteen foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re thickening cloud of the palette abyss vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing. You just kind of described it, though, Yeah, vaster than any subway train.

with Subways and Blade on Weird House Cinema before. Who can forget the arrival of the Dementors on Hogwarts Express in Alfonso Quran's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which for my money, is the best film in that whole series, and a very creepy sequences these rates or creeping aboard the train and the ice is forming over the glass and so forth.

examples that I haven't even thought to mention here. So as always, we'd love to hear from folks out there if you have any examples that stand out in your mind and line up with some of the examples we're discussing here.

horror is fate. These stories very often focus on people who have some kind of foreknowledge or premonition of horrible events or outcomes, but have no way to prevent them from happening. This is a core idea of the Dickens story The Signalman. But it happens in a lot of train fiction that you know something is going to happen, and you usually don't want it to happen, but you

can't stop it. And I think this relates to unique features, especially in the nineteenth century, of trains as a transportation technology. When you're on a train, you are headed somewhere, and you've usually usually chosen to get on the train, but the travel is not occurring by your own physical power, and the train is not under your control to steer, and it is not within your practical power to get

off the train. So once you're on a moving train, you are being taken ineluctably to the train's destination, and no matter how much you may want to, you cannot change course.

endlessly around the world. There's like no destination left to go to because there's nothing left of human civilization except the journey of the train.

not steer the train yourself? You know, it's stuck to the tracks. It's going wherever the engine driver takes it. It would also be hopeless to personally resist the movement of the train. You know, you can't like push it or anything overwhelming physical power. Also, travel by train is fast.

You enter the belly of this great beast in one place, and then before you know it, you're just in another city, another part of the country, another part of the world, contributing to this sense of too quickness, like I have not had time to prepare for what's coming.

you can't interact with that world. You can only watch pieces of it quickly merge into and out of your view, And I think that creates this feeling of unreality and distance. This is sort of what I was getting at in response to that rant by Sherlock Holmes looking out at the world. I wonder if this feeling of unreality and alienation contributes to the malice that Home sees when looking

out it houses through a passing train window. If he would feel any different if he were just standing on the ground looking at the same scene.

in closed train compartments. In a lot of the non fiction writings about trains from the nineteenth century, and we're going to get into some of these as the series goes on, you see a particular concern about people being by themselves and vulnerable to attacks in the privacy compartments of passenger trains. Now, I think this is interesting because obviously the train was not the first time there were ever rooms with walls and small spaces where people could

become isolated and trapped, say with a dangerous person. But for some reason, compartments on trains seemed especially frightening to people in this regard. Like if you read newspaper articles from London in the eighteen sixties, people are writing about with terror about this idea of getting stock or cornered in a train car. But it's interesting to look at like why this environment in particular struck people as a place that was dangerous.

I think this is less true as time goes on, but in stories from the nineteenth century, when passenger trains were a more recent innovation, trains often are used as the singular symbol of the technological era. So in the same way that if you wanted to write a story today commenting on the digital age, you might have as an object in that story like a phone or a computer,

that's like the icon of the technological environment. I think in the same way, the locomotive was the core physical symbol of the steam age and everything that came with it. So the replacement of human labor with machine power changes to the physical landscape of the world, a pollution of the environment, the accelerating pace of human life, increasing power to both create and destroy. All these things I think

were symbolized in the physical object of the train. The train could key out to all of those technological ideas, and I think for that reason, it's not high purble to say that somebody, especially in the nineteenth century, could easily look on the steam engine and the steam engine powered locomotive as something demonic, something unholy. It is humanities packed with the devil that has given us great power at the cost of our souls.

who are inspired by Dickens. Or Yeah, you can add, however, many layers of transition or and play there, but you can't deny, at least in the English lange, which is the importance of these works. Likewise, when you look at film, like, trains have always been a part of the moving picture, and so you see cinema coming out of the late nineteenth century still you know, fascinated with trains and capturing trains, and we've never stopped being fascinated with trains in our

visual cinematic storytelling. Yeah, all right, so we've alluded to some of the history here. I thought it would be a good idea just to run through rather quickly some of the big moments in development of locomotive technology. This is not going to be a full blown invention episode, so we're not going to go through everything in detail. And ultimately it's not just a hey, one day, a

guy invented a locomotive and they went with it. You know, there are a number of different people involved, different technologies that end up being utilized and built upon. But you know, to start with the basic concept of a wheeled vehicle on a set track, sometimes called like a wagonway. This dates back as far as ancient Babylon wheeled carts affixed to some sort of rail, you know, to keep the cart on track, literally on track, like that's how how

do you refer to it? The language has already embedded concept. But wheeled carts affixed to rails or of course have long been used in mining operations pulled by human or animal labor, well in advance of any kind of steam technology or electric like electronic technology, which would and this would have all would would lay the groundwork for the

locomotive revolution that's to come. And it's honestly kind of interesting to think about the connection between trains and mine carts here because mines, of course, as we've discussed in the show before, are also places with their own deep seated myths and legends and definitely themes of traveling into the underworld.

ninety eight Thomas Savory's steam pump the Miner's Friend. This was invented as a way to use steam power to remove water from mines, sort.

to get into here. And then at the same time, there were plenty of other schemes to power a land vehicle with some sort of technology it steam or otherwise. So concepts and attempts at steam driven cars date back to the sixteen hundreds and French inventor Nicholas Joseph Kuno made the first steam powered vehicle in seventeen sixty nine.

But then Richard Trevithek, one of the mines behind the Cornish engine, took it to the next level with a steam powered engine designed to take advantage of the pre existing iron enforced wooden rails called tramways that were already used in industrial parts of England, on which you had horses pulling carts full of sa coal. Two decades after this, British engineer George Stevenson advanced the concept and locomotion number one carried cargo and I believest six hundred passengers in

a test run. And at this point there are various important figures in the UK, in the US and l elsewhere who end up pushing the technology and the industry of trains forward, because it's kind of like a push and pull there, like you need the technology, but you also need the industry, you need the business savvy, you need applications of the technology, and so it's a it's a fascinating but also kind of ever expanding history at

this point. But the way this ends up affecting the world is of course, train tracks steadily began to stitch together major centers of population within a given country, within a given nation, but then also between cities and neighboring nations, and they eventually seem to be encircling the earth kind of like that iron spider that was referenced the Dickens quote.

a matter of minutes. So like suddenly there is a necessity for exact measures of time that are you know, held throughout a place, and that sort of changes everything in a way. Lots of stuff follows downstream from that, and there are other things like that.

life within industrial societies. But with technological and cultural changes we know there often come anxieties. New technologies have not only a way of creating new fears and stresses, but also of exposing and tenderizing anxieties that existed before. So I wanted to talk briefly about what I think is a really interesting phenomenon which we could call the Victorian

railway madness panic. This was a particular journalistic and cultural obsession in Great Britain lasting between roughly eighteen sixty and eighteen eighty, in which it seems people were both fascinated with and horrified by the idea of being confined with violent, raving madmen on moving trains. So my main source on this subject is a historical article published in the Journal of Victorian Culture in twenty sixteen called Shattered Minds mad

Men on the Railways eighteen sixty to eighteen eighty. And this article is by a scholar named Amy Milne Smith, who is a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University. Overall, it's a fascinating read, and I regret that we don't have time to get into all of the interesting details and arguments that the author brings up here. I'm going to mention some of the major points that stood out to me as relevant for our discussion today, but it's possible we'll come back to this paper a bit more

in the next episode as well. So this article begins by highlighting another article, an article from eighteen sixty three, which is great because it's one of those social trend articles that we still get today. Like you know, five or ten years ago, it was like all the teens are reading tide pods. But this one is from eighteen sixty three and it's called A Madman on the Rail, published in the London Review. And so I looked this article up in full, actually, so I could see everything

it says. I found a full scan of it on archive dot org and it is packed with interesting claims. But I have to mention the opening lines because the editors of the London Review really know how to grab you. They say, we demand that a bishop or privy counselor be slaughtered in a railway carriage for the benefit of

his country. Sidney Smith long ago made a similar demand that a dignitary of the church be burnt alive in a railway carriage which had spontaneously caught fire, for this is the only means of impressing railway directors with the propriety of affording travelers some means of communicating with the guard. Okay, So if I'm grading this as a first year persuasive essay, that might be coming on a little strong, but not bad to begin by making it clear how serious you

think an issue is that? What's the problem that they say can only be solved by human sacrifice?

it on. So this article is not isolated. I think we could characterize this as part of a journalistic phenomenon of the eighteen sixties of newspaper and magazine articles really focusing on and highlighting the dangers of madmen on trains, and so this article by Amy Miln Smith explores a lot of that cultural obsession, and it concerns two different nightmare train ride scenarios that sort of gripped the minds

of the British public in these decades. So the first scenario is I think more plausible from our perspective today, and that scenario is violent madmen are getting on board trains and other passengers are trapped in the cars with them.

acting erratically and then becomes violent. That's a bad situation to be in. So you can't blame people for seeing that as a problem. But the issue seems to be that people came to believe, because of the reporting environment, that this was an extremely common problem, when in fact

it probably was not. The second scenario described in this article, however, is more strange and intriguing, certainly from our modern medical point of view, and that idea is that the act of riding on board a steam train could itself drive someone mad and send them shrieking and slashing at their

fellow passengers. The author writes about this as a common medical expert sentiment of the eighteen sixties, saying quote, doctors warned that intense vibrations of the railway carriage, the speed of travel, and the danger of traumatic accidents could unsettle both people's physical and mental health. So this led to not only the fear that you might be the victim of a railway madman, but that without any prior warning, you might become one yourself.

instead of as terrifying. She also says that railway madness in this cultural context really meets all of the key criteria to find to be defined as a moral panic in the way academics would normally understand the term. So there's sort of a topical consensus of fear and apprehension

about some apparent or alleged trend in society. Quote, drawing on latent fears and triggered by sensational events, and so she says that while the normal moral panic lasts maybe several months for a number of reasons, the railway madness panic lasted roughly two decades, again, from about eighteen sixty

to about eighteen eighty. And what made this especially potent was that it triggered at the same time anxieties about technological change, but also apparently some kind of gendered anxieties about failed masculinity, because she says in the eighteen sixties in Britain there was generally increasing public consciousness of mental illness. There was a lot of talk in the press about what was at the time often referred to as lunacy and lunatics, and about perceived failures of the asylum system.

And while this consciousness of mental illness, the author contends, was in general observed in both men and women with rough parody, for some reason, the railway travel induced madness was believed to be a distinctly male phenomenon. The railway mad men were, for some reason, specifically mad men. She also gets into some interesting things about the sensationalism demands

of the press at the time. In the eighteen sixties, there were a lot of newspapers that were at the same time that they might look down on and have scathing editorials about the idea of the so called sensation novels.

In fiction, they were very happy to really ramp up the gory details and exaggerate anything about violent crime or mad men in the papers, and so there was there was a hunger in the British press in the eighteen sixties for stories about violent mad men, and especially if the circumstances of the story were strange, and apparently for some reason people just really latched onto the setting of

the railway train for this kind of story. So it was like, this is what the eighteen sixty equivalent of, This is what people are clicking on.

was beaten and murdered inside of a locked train compartment. Eventually, a German tailor named Franz Mueller was convicted of the murder. I think it involved like a transatlantic pursuit of the suspect, but what he was eventually convicted. So that was an actual,

like terrifying violent crime on a train. But then you could spin that out into a lot of other scenarios where in many cases like nobody was actually even hurt, but they would just the press would put a lot of emphasis on something kind of weird and disturbing happened on a train and think of the danger that could have unfolded. So there's one example that the author cites in this paper of a story where there's an express train from King's Cross to Peterborough and a large sailor

gets on board. The journey begins, and then the sailor begins behaving erradically, accusing his fellow passengers of stealing from him, and then at one point he tries to leap out of one of the windows of the moving train. Several other passengers prevent him from getting out of the window. They're able to restrain him until the train comes to

a stop, and then authorities take over. And note how in the story there's no indication that anyone was actually badly hurt, but the press reporting just really emphasized the theme of madness and the threat that the sailor could have posed to the other passengers. There's another report she mentions that's in the Wrexham Advertiser in eighteen sixty nine. It's the story of an aristocratic man from Falkirk who got onto a train and then took off all his clothes,

leaned out the window and started talking nonsense. After the station master was alerted, they got him off the train, and then, strangely, after they got him off the train, it reports that he seemed to come back to his senses, and this ties into the idea I mentioned a minute ago.

The strange belief at the time that there was such a thing as sudden railway madness, so that essentially a man who was, by all outward indications previously healthy, could, by some mechanism of the movements and environment of the train, be rendered instantly violently insane. And this was not considered a fringe or quack theory at the time. From what I can tell, like, the idea was advanced by many physicians and in articles in some of the leading medical

journals of the eighteen sixties. One example that Miln Smith sites is in eighteen sixty two, the medical journal The Lancet published a series of articles about the threats to public health posed by railway travel. Uh and, as she summarizes as follows quote, the articles listed a number of potentially dangerous effects of railway travel on the unsuspecting passenger,

ranging from fatigue to hemorrhoids to paralysis. A man suffering hemorrhoids Okay, maybe I don't know, but it goes on, A man suffering from underlying mental anxieties or born with a predisposition to insanity could have his illness triggered by the railway trip itself.

And yet another interesting thing Melan Smith gets into is the kind of difficulty in enacting any of the proposed solutions to this alleged problem. So the solutions included things like changes in the design of rail cars, because some passenger cars at the time would have a situation where like you'd be in a compartment or a carriage and you'd be essentially locked in from the outside with no way of traveling to like other parts of the train.

If something bad was happening in your compartment or carriage and you wanted to go some where else, you couldn't really leave until the train came to a stop. So that's a possible solution. You could change the design of the train. You could add interior corridors and ways of

getting back and forth. You could also add in ways to communicate with the train guard, so people in compartments could you know, could have like a like a cord or some kind of thing they could pull, or way of communicating with some kind of authority figure on the train. Or another idea that would come about a good deal later was you could get emergency brake cords. People talked about adding in windows, interior windows to the train compartments, so that you know, you could signal for help, you

could look at somebody else. But apparently a lot of these solutions took a long time to implement because they faced opposition, often on the grounds that they were violations of the privacy of the individual carriage or compartment. But the author argues that the social panic about railway madness went on because, in her opinion, it wasn't actually about the true practical question of safety on a train car. I mean, that's an element, but that's not the main thing.

It was a way of expressing deeper anxieties that could not be fixed by a rail guard or a breake cord. She writes, quote the railway was a symbol of civilization, and yet it demonstrated how quickly civilization could fall away

from modern man. So the underlying anxiety has to do, in her opinion, with a perceived fragility of the body and the mind, a fear that was sort of in the air in Victorian culture in Great Britain in the eighteen sixties and seventies, related to consciousness of mental illness, but then also spurred on by these popular stories about madmen, and the fear was that someone could go mad at any moment, even by the jostling of a train car.

And so this sort of symbol of changes in the society around them, the technological environment, and of things happening faster than you can understand, and the pace of modern life changing and all this like stuff coming on so fast, and that colliding with this idea of the fragility of our minds and bodies, and that leading to this fear that people could be changed in an instant. They're they're moving too fast through the air, the loud train car, the jostling back and forth of the train car, it

sets them off. And now it could be someone in the train car with you, or it could be you yourself that now you are no longer in control.

hijinks and is borderline science fiction. But then there's the and there's the excellent case of the Devil's Foot, which involves on the outset some sort of unknown occurrence or substance. It's unknown what actually happens that drives an entire room full of people either kills them dead or drives them insane, and at the beginning. It seems like it could even

have a supernatural cause. We don't know, but you know both of these stories that there are stories that seemed to drive home this idea that was in the public consciousness that yeah, nobody is immune. Anybody can be affected by some sort of change in their mental state.

That came on so quick. I think that change in the world around them and in travel and infrastructure in human life probably created this feeling that one could change

internally very quickly as well. So, Rob, I think you said this earlier, but I think one could plausibly argue that there is a kind of Victorian era future shot going on, that all of this technological change coming on so fast and changing the character of human life so much, really does create in itself a kind of anxiety that people end up working out in these horror stories and in these sensational journalistic obsessions.

anywhere on most major train train rides. But there was a while where when you were underground on the train, you were, or at least I was completely cut off and there was nothing I could do on my phone. You know, I would just have to to read. I got to read, uh, you know, I got to be sort of cut off from everything in a good way. And in that could happen no matter what the other

conditions were. If there was like somebody loud on the train, if the train was hot, if the train was maybe empty and spooky, you know, all that could could could play play into it. But it's it's fascinating to look back on this time period where again there is something there's maybe a little bit of Victorian future shot going on. There is also, undeniably so many other things coming into play. We discussed, you know, awareness of sort of a growing

but unbalanced awareness of mental health. I can't help but think about how syphilis might have played into all this as well, you know, awareness of how that can affect one's mental state. Yeah, there is a fascinating topic, and then of course we see how it plays out, how it influences all of these various fictions and remains a part of say, railway fiction in general.

It is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, where, of course very much in the Halloween spirit of things this month, so most of our topics are going to be a little bit creepy as intended, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema, and this week it is going to be train oriented, so we're excited for the tie in here.