In 1990, century-old paintings by the oncecelebrated English sporting artist George Earl reappeared on the market. Going North and Going South, showing wealthy Londoners thronging the King’s Cross and Perth railway stations at the beginning and the end of the season in Scotland, had followed the sad but common downward trajectory of Victorian society art: they were discovered in the disco lounge of a Liverpool pub.

In universities, railroads likewise have an equivocal reputation. For most academics outside the field of economic history, they are too important and too accessible to be theoretically interesting. Even economic historians have misgivings. In the 1960s, Robert Fogel argued that other transportation technologies, especially canals, could have promoted growth equally effectively. In cultural studies, one major book appears each decade or so, such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey (1979) and Jeffrey Richards and John M. McKenzie’s The Railway Station (1986).

Freeman’s book is the best blend of solid scholarship and sumptuous production yet. An Oxford University geographer, he portrays the railroad as one of the most radical and rapidly introduced discontinuities in the everyday life of the United Kingdom. The very establishment of a line was socially disruptive. Each road needed its own act of Parliament authorizing the surveying and forced sale of private property to the new company—a minor social revolution that initially mobilized landowners and tenants against the invaders. Cartoonists depicted railroads as voracious monsters swallowing the countryside (in contrast to the modern view of the train as the environmentally preferable alternative to the automobile). Some early surveyors had to work surreptitiously, using darkened lanterns at night, and one company hired a prizefighter to carry its surveying instruments.

Trauma soon yielded to fascination as landscapes little changed since the Middle Ages were transformed. Artists and poets found that railroads could blight nature, but they could also accentuate the picturesque. Lines afforded panoramic views of monuments such as Durham Cathedral. Viaducts added graceful rhythmic punctuation to landscapes, while tunnels evoked the darker side of Romantic sublimity. As Freeman observes, J. M. W. Turner’s stunning Rain, Steam, and Speed (1845) both celebrates the dynamism of the railroad and suggests its apocalyptic power.