We observed in our post of 22 July 2009 that one of the most widely collected types of travel narrative is that which has to do with particular forms of transportation. And we saw some of this focus on a particular form of transportation in our series about sea literature. We now turn our attention to travel on land, where one of the most popular and collectible types of travel narrative revolves around trains:
Train travel was a fairly late development in the history of transportation, the first steam railroad engine not invented until 1804. Although coal was transported by wooden waggonway as early as 1758, the first passenger train was not put into service until 1807 (the first regular revenue-earning train commenced operations five years later, in 1812).
Almost from the start, train travel was hailed as a great advance in human transport:
The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another, almost as fast as birds can fly, 15 or 20 miles an hour.... A carriage will start from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup in New York the same day....--Oliver Evans (1800)
Books and train travel have, in many respects, grown up together. The long travel times that early train trips required gave passengers leisure to indulge in quite a bit of reading, a fact that was recognized early on by the development of cheap books like the yellowback and Routledge's Railway Library series that were designed specifically for sale at railway bookstalls:
These early forms of cheap reading designed especially for train travelers were, as one might imagine, somewhat fragile and it is rare to find copies in Fine condition. Anyone collecting such titles will want to have handy resources like Chester Topp's 9-volume Victorian Yellowbacks & Paperbacks, 1849-1905 and, for context, books like Stephen Colclough's Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695-1870:
Closely related collectibles from this period are the early railroad timetables, rates of fare, maps and similar ephemera that many book collectors often collect alongside yellowbacks and related reading for early train travel:
But none of these are what most folks building a private library about train travel usually begin with....
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