Air and Rail Travel

Air and rail travel matter deeply to the development of consumer culture. Often forgotten as engines of social change, air and rail travel—together with marine and road transportation—play a key role in the system of distribution of commodities. Moreover, air and rail travel—together with other forms of mobility—serve as media through which personal travel for work, leisure, and shopping takes place. And perhaps more insightfully, air and rail travel work not only as transportation conduits, or in other words as means for getting from point A to point B, but also as important places in and of themselves. Rail travel, for example, is often promoted as a more comfortable way to travel—compared to air and automobile transportation—and even as a destination in itself.

As historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has noted, the history of rail travel runs in parallel tracks with the history of Western modernity. Not only was the train a driving engine of modernization—by allowing for the quick distribution of raw and manufactured goods, by allowing workers to commute to industrial centers, and by providing for an enormous amount of jobs—but it was also a potent symbol of the new way of life it brought forth. Traveling by train allowed for an individual's sphere of interests to expand significantly from one's hometown outward to both neighboring and distant hamlets and cities. It also allowed for ways of life, different groups of people, and traditions to come into closer contact. And perhaps more significantly, as Schivelbusch captures, it allowed for a new pace of life to characterize modern existence. The transition to the higher speeds afforded by rail travel did not come easy, however. The first few rail travelers made their fears and anxieties well known, and this created a wave of panic about the health and psychological side effects of traveling at the then-warp speed of thirty to forty miles per hour. Traveling by rail also opened up the train compartment as a new space for consumption practices (such as reading) and production (such as doing work on the move).

If rail travel epitomizes modernization, air travel is clearly symbolic of the transition of modern societies and cultures to a postmodern period characterized by speed, as Paul Virilio and Marc Augé have noted. Few icons symbolize postmodernity better than the international airport—with its endless flow of travelers from the four corners of the world, with its limitless possibilities for leisure and experimentation, with its uniform architecture and hybridized opportunities for consumption, with its preoccupation for panoptic social control, and with its fearful regulation of the migratory movements of passengers originating from underprivileged countries, as Peter Frank Peters has argued. International air travel, however, was not always marked by ultrasonic speeds, luxurious duty-free merchandise, customer service with a smile, and the feeling of placelessness shared with urban shopping malls and department stores. Early air travel was extremely demanding of passengers, though perhaps also more rewarding.

For instance, as Lucy Budd writes, the famous Batavia service operated by Dutch Airlines from Holland to Indonesia would take anywhere from one to two weeks, if all proceeded smoothly. But even possibilities for much shorter flights, such as flight-seeing trips, began to appeal to Western consumers as fears of flight slowly faded.

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