From the Vault: Trains of Terror, Part 1

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore a host of scary, train-related topics, from the Victorian “railway madness” panic to ghost trains and more. (originally published 10/1/2024)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. We're off this week for fall break,
but we have some horror related content from last year
for you. This is going to be Trains of Terror
Part one, originally published October first, twenty twenty four. There's
all sorts of scary train related topics discussed within, So
let's grab a ticket and all aboard. Welcome to Stuff

(00:32):
to Blow your Mind production of iHeartRadio. Hey you welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today is a thrilling
occasion for us here on the podcast because this very
episode is publishing on Tuesday, October first, twenty twenty four,
which makes it the inaugural entry in our tradition month
long celebration of Halloween. So longtime fans, you know what's
going on, you know what's in store. But in case

(01:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
That's right. October is the month when you can turn
to stuff to blow your mind and find that we
were doing horror and monster stuff one hundred percent of
the time as opposed to our normal like, I don't know,
thirty five to forty percent of the time.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
That's right, people have pointed out before. I mean, we're
you know, we got monsters on the brain. That's kind
of how we are. So throughout the year you'll get
a smattering, but for October it's it's all we do.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
And I'm excited about the episode we're going to kick
off here today. The series rikicking off here today because
this is a topic we've been talking about doing for
years now. This is well when we get around planning
out our October episodes, this one's been on the list
for a while and we're finally hopping aboard.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah. I wonder why it took us this long. I
don't think there's a particular reason. Just shook out that way.
But today we're beginning a series on locomotive horror, the
mini Shades of Menace and supernatural fright that we have
projected onto trains. Now, this is a topic that's going
to take us into a bunch of different realms of folklore, history, science,

(02:26):
and technology. But I think the 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.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, let's have it, okay.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
So the story in question is a short tale of ghosts,
spectral visions, and premonitions by Charles Dickens, and it's called
The Signalman. This story was published in eighteen sixty six
as part of a set of short stories by Dickens
and a handful of other authors, with the collection as
a whole called Mugby Junction. So there's sort of a

(03:06):
locomotive and railroad theme running throughout. This collection was a
special Christmas edition of a magazine that Dickens founded called
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.

(03:29):
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

(03:49):
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

(04:10):
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 engine drivers, and this could be
information about the conditions of the tracks ahead, like is

(04:33):
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

(04:56):
operating track switches to divert the course of a train
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

(05:17):
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.

(05:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
It's like balbo helloa below there, He's trying to get
the man's attention. The man at first seemed 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

(06:15):
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

(06:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:55):
Ooh, that is nice.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Anyway, the narrator notices that the signal man is acting weird.
He's preoccupied, even a bit haunted, And they eventually get
to know one another and become familiar, and after some
time has passed between them, the signalman confesses what it
is that's troubling him. At several times past, the signalman

(07:18):
has had visions of a man in the night, posed
against the red light, the danger light at the mouth
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 signalman sees the figure,
he hears a voice calling out, saying Helloa below there,

(07:40):
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. One time it was a terrible engine collision

(08:02):
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

(08:24):
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

(08:46):
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

(09:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
Oh wow, I.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Think it's a wonderfully chilling ending. Even now just telling
it again, I got at a little bit of a
shiver a goosebump there. Now you might think, because a
lot of ghost stories, what they're really about is the ghost.
And actually you could say that it's arguable whether or
not this should be classified as a ghost story or
whether it's actually a premonition story that just has a

(09:50):
has a similar aesthetic reform to a ghost story. But
you could argue that, yeah, maybe 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

(10:11):
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 and even that
Dickens himself had strange, I would say, at best, ambivalent

(10:35):
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

(10:56):
industrial exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spiders that
spun iron.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Oh wow, that's nice anyway.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
All that to make the point that I think a
lot of these horror stories that are about trains are
not incidentally about trains. They're not just stories that could
be set anywhere that just happened to be a setting
the author liked. I think a lot of them really
are in serious ways about trains and what trains mean.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yeah, yeah, And this is a really fascinating subject to
get into, and I feel like I do have to
like mention at the top of all this that I
love trains. I enjoy riding on trains, subway or otherwise,
bullet trains everywhere, ever, and I've really enjoyed trains. I
live next to a train track, I've lived next to
it for over a decade, and I still find reasons

(11:46):
to enjoy watching the trains go by, or especially the
trucks on the tracks and various maintenance equipment or special loads.
Occasionally that occurs, and I get a kick out of that.
Suffice to say, trains are very every day to me,
and I like them. I don't inherently think they are creepy.

(12:08):
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

(12:28):
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
I was thinking about this, and I was looking up
various short stories and works of horror and thinking about

(12:48):
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

(13:08):
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

(13:32):
Granada television adaptation of this when I was a kid.
You can find this streaming, and you can get this
on disc as well. These were all really accurate adaptations
of the shlock Comb 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

(13:54):
look into particular crime. And at first Holmes is consumed
by his newspaper much of the way you know, or
today he'd be on 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
rant multiple paragraphs that I can't I can't read all

(14:14):
of it here, but I'm going to read essentially unabridged 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,

(14:38):
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

(15:01):
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

(15:23):
country which makes the danger.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
That's a very interesting paragraph because it strikes me as
both containing some wisdom and truth but also representing a
pathological way of thinking. You know, it's like, yeah, there
is some correct observation there, but also it's just it
reveals Holmes's way of looking at the world as just
like a place of dangers and miseries. And you can

(15:46):
sort of do an inventory of the potential for dangers
and miseries by looking at any place.

Speaker 1 (15:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it definitely reveals something of Holmes's nature.
And again it's the train itself is not creepy. Here
in the adaptation, and in the book you get the
very homes the insense of, oh, these are just gentlemen
on a train, But then when you get this morbid observation,
Ultimately it's about how the countryside is creepy and not

(16:13):
even the city is creepy. But there's something about the
train technology's role in this.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
Absolutely, yes, I would have no way of proving that
that Arthur Conan Doyle was actually trying to make this
particular point, but I would not be surprised if this
kind of observation was actually a statement about the way
a train changes the way you look at the world.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
Yeah. Yeah, it's about the vantage point that it provides,
the broadening human travel abilities. It permits Holmes a chance
to observe something terrifying about human nature and human civilization.
And it's a scene that I think just got stuck
in my head at an early age. So I literally
think about the scene almost any time I'm on a train,
certainly if it's a novel train and I get to

(16:56):
look out at the countryside.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
Which, by the way, I love doing. Robert, I'm like you,
I also very much love trains. I mostly have just
positive feelings about them, So I did not pick this
topic because I think trains are inherently creepy, but maybe
because they're sort of cuddly to me. I wonder I'm
interested in the way is that they might bring terrors

(17:19):
to mind for many people, especially people in say the
nineteenth century.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, yeah, but seriously, I'll be riding a train. Like
even more recently, a few months back, I had to
ride the Bullet train in Japan. Look out of the
beautiful countryside, and yet here's Sherlock Holmes whispering my ear.
They might be murdering in there, so thank you, Sherlock, but.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
They think of the horror is hidden beyond.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
Now, Another tale that comes to mind concerning trains is
the Ray Bradberry story The Town where No One Got Off,
And I'm mostly familiar with this one from a nineteen
eighty six adaptation on the Ray Bradberry Theater television show
starring a young Jeff Goblin. Oh or you know, this
was what the same year as The Fly, so you

(18:13):
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

(18:35):
a train ride out into the countryside 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

(18:59):
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

(19:20):
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 rape Bradbury 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. Oh so

(19:46):
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 gonna allow criminals to just move around super easily.

(20:07):
They'll just they'll just go right into the into the
really nice parts of town and just start doing crimes.
But and then on top of all of this, I
feel like this there is also this sense of the
train is a technology that shortens the distance between individuals.
So it brings us closer together. But does it maybe
bring us too close? You know? Is it does it

(20:30):
just it just opens up the room for it breaks
down barriers that should be in place, that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
Hmmm, I'm gonna have to think on that. But in
a minute, I do want to get into talking about
some of the most common themes I feel like I've
observed in train related horror stories, and so maybe this
will come back up then. But before we do that,
I know you wanted to mention a few more examples.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, so these are gonna be a little more in passing,
but I was just trying to list off a few
in my head that stood out. The Midnight Meat Train
by Clive Barker. If you're only familiar with the movie,
let me just remind you that the original Books of
Blood short story is quite good.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
It's one of those stories where, if this makes any sense,
I kept expecting it to turn out to be less
literal than it was, and like the literalness of the
payoff is actually kind of genius.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yeah, and I think your words better in short story format.
Another one is The Tall Grass by Joe R. Lansdale.
This one was adapted on the Love and Robots television
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

(21:40):
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

(22:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
Let's see, Oh, we would have to we have to
mention blame the monorail from King's The Dark Tower series,
a like a super intelligent computer train that goes crazy.
And I'd forgotten about this one, but a problematic horror master.
HP Lovecraft, in describing the Shogoth at the end of
nineteen thirty one's At the Mountains of Madness, compares this

(22:47):
indescribable monster, you know, it's like this blob 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

(23:10):
track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of fetid black
herodestance ooze tightly onward through its fifteen foot sinus, gathering
unholy speed, and driving before it a spiral re thickening
cloud of the palette of this vapor. It was a terrible,
indescribable thing. You just kind of described it, though, Yeah,

(23:30):
vaster than any subway train.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah, well, first of all, I do love that comparison. Yeah,
I can picture that the monsters moving like a subway train. Also, yeah,
this doesn't Lovecraft do this all the time. He says
it's impossible to describe this, and then he describes it.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yes, Yeah, yeah, I can't describe it, but I'm going
to go on for about a good page telling you
how impossible this is to describe.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
It's sort of like a way of saying, let me
describe this, but just know that it's worse than whatever
I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Yeah, yes, And of course, there are just great train
moments sprinkled throughout horror and even just horror flavored fiction.
For instance, I mean there's the We've talked about the
vampire action sequence with Subways and Blade on weird El
Cinema before. Who can forget the arrival of the Dementors
on Hogwarts Express in Alfonso Quran's Harry Potter and the

(24:21):
Prisoner of Azkaban, which for my money is the best
film in that that whole series, and a very creepy sequences.
These wraiths are, you know, creeping aboard the train and
the ice is forming over the glass and so forth.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
I only barely remember the moment you're talking about. Wait,
do the the Dementitors get on the train and arrive
by train or they're like surrounding a train.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
They're surrounding the train. Yeah, they didn't get it, they
didn't buy a ticket, things about it. So at any rate,
suffice to say, there are a lot of great horror
and horror flavored train scenes in film and television, in
fiction written fiction. So I'm sure there are some excellent
examples that I haven't even thought to mention here. So
as always, we'd love to hear from folks out there,

(25:05):
if you have any examples that stand out in your
mind and line up with some of the examples we're
discussing here.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, absolutely right in now, Rob, if you don't mind.
I thought it would be interesting to try to look
at what are some of the most common and distinctive
themes of locomotive horror. What do train horror stories often
get focused on as opposed to just the usual themes
of horror. Here's what I could think of so far.

(25:34):
First of all, I think a big theme of train
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

(25:54):
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

(26:15):
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

(26:36):
no matter how much you may want to, you cannot
change course.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, this is indeed a great observation of horror train fiction. Yeah,
and even science fiction. You know, you get into even
examples Like I keep thinking of snow Piercer, the TV series,
in the film, and like what are they doing with trains?
And they're doing a lot with trains thematically and with setting,
but one of them kind of turning this concept on

(27:02):
its head is that the train has no destination. It's
just going 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.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
But that has some metaphorical potency of its own, right,
The idea of just a movement that never ceases with
no endpoint or goal. Yeah, infinite games, right, Yeah. But
also I was thinking about how the physical characteristics of
locomotives and travel by rail feed into this theme of
fate and unavoidable outcomes because trains are enormous and enormously

(27:40):
powerful machines, which it would be you know, not only
while if you're a passenger on a train, can you
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. It's overwhelming physical power. Also, travel by train

(28:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah, this this theme instantly makes me think of this
particular reggae song I believe Bob Marley and the Whaler's
covered it at one point, called stop that Train, and
it's you know, the chorus is stop stop that train,
I want to get off, and so forth, And like
we instantly connect with this idea, like something is propelling

(28:40):
me toward a destination and I've changed my mind about it,
or I never wanted to go there to begin with.
I would like to get off the train.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
Or maybe you just now understand what it means to
go to this destination. You got on the train thinking
one thing, and then you learn something it changes your mind.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
Yeah. So it's like the technology becomes the excellent metaphor
for so many different aspects of human life, including life
itself in our linear experience of it.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah. So, okay. I think fate and fatalism, unavoidable outcomes,
that's a big theme. Second theme I would say is
very common in these stories is isolation and alienation. I
think because you cannot safely exit a train in motion.
Stories set on trains often emphasize themes of being cut

(29:27):
off and isolated from the rest of the world, the
world outside. So you can look out the windows of
the train at the world as it goes by, but
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.

(29:48):
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 at 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.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point.

Speaker 3 (30:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
Now beyond that more abstract feeling, the kind of uncanny
separation of the train and its passengers from the outside world,
there's a different type of isolation that often comes up
in these stories, and it's much more practical individual isolation
inclosed train compartments. In a lot of the nonfiction writings
about trains from the nineteenth century, and we're going to

(30:42):
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

(31:04):
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.

(31:27):
But it's interesting to look at like why this environment
in particular struck people as a place that was dangerous.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah, yeah, that is interesting to think about it. I mean,
I'm tempted to think of it as like the world
has been squished down and elongated, and so all of
those little confined spaces that you might encounter in the
world are just maybe a little more confined or seem
a little more confined because the world has been narrowed
down into these uniform bricks of habitation. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
Another theme, but I think pops up in these stories
is train tunnels as journeys to the underworld, so passing
through into darkness, literally traveling under the earth. This serves
as metaphorical in the same way that journeys to the
underworld often do in fiction, as a way of speaking
about death often or great transitions and changes, and then

(32:21):
speaking of change. One more theme. I think that is
quite prominent, especially in stories from the nineteenth century. 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

(32:42):
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.

(33:03):
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,

(33:26):
and I think for that reason, it's not hyperbole 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.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, yeah, And I think it's also worth keeping in
mind that Again, no matter how every day and new
and even old fashioned train transportation may seem to us today,
we also have to look at the fact that, you know,
a lot of our fiction that we read today has,

(34:06):
in one way or another, has sort of roots in
the storytelling of this time period. You know, like you
may not be setting around reading a bunch of Charles Dickens,
but inevitably you're reading people that were inspired by people
who are inspired by Dickens. Or Yeah, you can add, however,
many layers of transition or and play there, but you

(34:27):
can't deny, at least in the English language, 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 fascinated with trains and capturing trains, and
we've never stopped being fascinated with trains in our visual

(34:49):
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 and 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

(35:10):
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

(35:31):
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

(35:53):
animal labor, well in advance of any kind of steam
technology or electric like electronic technology, which would and this
would have all 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 cards
here because mines, of course, as we've discussed in the

(36:14):
show before, are also places with their own deep seated
myths and legends. And definitely themes of traveling into the underworld.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah, I was about to say, overlapping themes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
Now. Steam technology also runs pretty deep in its basic conception, theorized,
for instance, in the second half of the first century
CE by Greek mathematician Hero sometimes called Heros or Heron.
For centuries, however, steam technology was mostly the domain of
theories and concepts, followed by experiments and novelties, you know,

(36:46):
essentially little toys, leading up to a let's say, a
seventeenth century pressure cooker, and then in sixteen ninety eight
Thomas Savory's steam pump, the Miner's Friend. This was in
vented as a way to use steam power to remove
water from mines.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
To sort of pump them out.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah. Now, it actually wasn't that successful in pumping water
out of mines for a number of technological reasons and
technological limitations at the time, but it pushed the technology forward.
And there are various examples of this sort of thing
in the development of steam technology. Leading up to the
steam train, we get the newcoming engine, the Bolton and

(37:25):
Watt engine, we get the Cornish engine, and each of
these has its own story that we don't have time
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

(37:49):
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 design to take advantage of the pre
existing iron enforced wooden rails called tramways, who were already
used in industrial parts of England on which you had
horses pulling carts full of sa coal. Two decades after this,

(38:13):
British engineer George Stevenson advanced the concept and locomotion number
one carried cargo and I believe six hundred passengers in
a test run. And at this point there are various
important figures in the UK, in the US and elsewhere
who end up pushing the technology and the industry of
trains forward, because it's kind of like a push and

(38:35):
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

(38:56):
centers of population within a given country than 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 reference the Dickens.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Quote, the great ground spiders that spun only iron.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And they're also burrowing underneath the earth.
We have to remember that the London underground parts of it,
at any rate, the earliest parts of it began opening
in like eighteen sixty three.

Speaker 3 (39:26):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (39:27):
So basically train technology, you know, spinning off of these
other technologies. It ends up changing the way humans and
goods traverse the world, just changing so many things about
the shape of human life.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
And I think you can argue having ripple effects out
through culture that are much bigger than just making it
faster to get stuff and people from one place to another.
I mean, one example we've talked about on the show before.
Is the way that train scheduled affected the cultural concept
of time time. Yes, like trains, it's very important that

(40:03):
you are operating on schedule. There can be danger if
there are you know, miscommunications of time, even down to
the to 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 that sort
of changes everything in a way. Lots of stuff follows
downstream from that, and there are other things like that.

Speaker 3 (40:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
Yeah, it's almost like the continuity of the rail itself
stretching from from this big city to this small town
like they are one now in the is as far
as timing is concerned, I mean it always was, but
you can no longer have just sort of local time,
like yeah, it's you know here, it's like three thirty five. Now,
if you're saying it's three thirty five here, it has

(40:46):
to be three thirty five back in the city. These
times absolutely have to match.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Okay. So we've talked about the use of trains as
a setting or plot device in weird fiction. We've talked
about common themes attaching to locomotive horror themes like fate
and helplessness, isolation and alienation. We talked a bit about
the early steam locomotive models like George and Robert Stevenson's
Locomotion Number One in the eighteen twenties, and then the

(41:23):
emerging cultural impact of steam powered trains in the mid
nineteenth century as they became more incorporated into everyday 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

(41:44):
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

(42:05):
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

(42:26):
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,

(42:46):
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 as possible,
we'll come back to this page for a bit more
in the next episode as well. So this article begins
by highlighting another article, an article from eighteen sixty three,

(43:09):
which is great because it's one of those social trend
articles that we still get today, like a 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

(43:31):
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 councilor
be slaughtered in a railway carriage for the benefit of
his country. Sidney Smith long ago made a similar demand

(43:54):
that a dignitary of the church be burnt alive in
a railway carriage which had spontaneously hot 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,

(44:14):
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?

Speaker 3 (44:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (44:25):
Yeah, threatening the clergy with ritual death seems a little strong.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yes, So here's the problem quote. Traveling express with madmen
is unfortunately not an improbable circumstance of real life. And
if there be any tendency to mania, the excitement of
rapid transit through the air is the very thing to
bring it on. So this article is not isolated. I

(44:53):
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 Millan Smith explores a

(45:13):
lot of that 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

(45:34):
trains and other passengers are trapped in the cars with them.

Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, because this is an idea that has never completely
gone away and still makes the headlines, whether you're talking
about the trains, particularly say New York subway. I mean,
it's become it's a trope. It's a joke about the
individual's misbehaving or posing a danger on an un given
train car. And then likewise we see echoes of this

(45:58):
with in aviation as well. Well yeah, yeah, so it's
you know, to a certain extent or reality, but also
something that is easily easily built up in the imagination
as well.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
Well, yeah, exactly, so there is no doubt there were
cases in this time period where people were violently attacked
by a stranger on a train. Of course, this can
happen in pretty much any public place, and that the
train is one place it does happen. And while I
think a kind of vividness bias probably made this scenario
seem more common than it actually was, you can't blame

(46:31):
people for being alarmed. I mean, nobody would want to
be trapped in a confined space with a person who's
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

(46:53):
it probably was not. The second scenario described in this article, however,
is more strained, 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.

(47:17):
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

(47:38):
the fear that you might be the victim of a
railway madman, but that without any prior warning, you might
become one yourself.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
Yeah again, getting decided there's something about train travel that
is inherently abnormal, and it can make you abnormal as well,
or or enhance abnormal tendencies.

Speaker 2 (47:59):
Now. Milne Smith's charts the historical arc of this panic
about railway madmen, saying that it sort of begins as
a topic in the eighteen sixties, peaks in the eighteen seventies,
and then pretty much completely disappears by later in the
nineteenth century. It's sort of gone by the eighteen eighties,
or the same kind of phenomenon when reported on in

(48:22):
the later decades of the nineteenth century for some reason,
or treated as kind of quaint instead of as terrifying.
She also says that railway madness in this cultural context
really meets all of the key criteria to be defined
as a moral panic in the way academics would normally
understand the term. So there's sort of a topical consensus

(48:44):
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

(49:05):
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

(49:29):
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

(49:50):
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

(50:12):
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

(50:34):
eighteen sixties for stories about violent madmen, 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.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
Yeah, yeah, And you could basically take anything and spin
it out, because even if you a week goes by
you don't have an actual madman attack on a train,
perhaps you have something that could be played up as
they brush with a train madman. You know, like some
are amount of erratic behavior or reported erratic behavior or
reported shiftiness that can then be blown up into a story.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Yes, that's exactly right, very perceptive role because she does
get into exactly that that dynamic.

Speaker 4 (51:25):
I mean we're still doing it today, yes, yeah, And
so like the way it is is there there are
some initially very terrible events, like there was one very
famous case of an actual murder on a train in
Great Britain.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
It was in July eighteen sixty four. A London banker
named Thomas Briggs 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 of the suspect, but what he

(52:02):
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

(52:24):
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,

(52:45):
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,

(53:08):
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's the story
of an aristocratic man from Falkirk who got onto a
train and then took off all his clothes, leaned out

(53:29):
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

(53:54):
who was by all outward indications previously healthy could buy
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

(54:15):
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, and, as she summarizes
as follows quote, the articles listed a number of potentially

(54:37):
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

(54:59):
trip itself.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
Yeah, and I mean, this is one of those things
where on one hand it seems outrageous, but then also,
I mean there is some nugget of truth to the
fact that travel can be stressful, sure, and can aggravate
other you know, things going on in your your mental
life or you know, your mental health. So yeah, there's

(55:21):
there's a line though, between you know, actual concern and
something that just becomes a panic.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
Right, that's right. And then once again, as we said earlier,
like in the cases where somebody is actually acting violently
on a train, that's obviously a huge problem, but the
the social panic around this seemed to vastly exaggerate the
prevalence of the problem. There was this perception that it's
happening all the time and it's just a persistent danger

(55:50):
of riding the trains and something must be done about it.
And yet another interesting thing Milan 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

(56:13):
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 you know bad was happening in your compartment
or carriage and you wanted to go somewhere else, you
couldn't really leave until the train came to a stop.
So that's a possible solution. You could change the design

(56:34):
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

(56:55):
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 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

(57:18):
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.

(57:38):
It was a way of expressing deeper anxieties that could
not be fixed by a rail guard or a brake 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,

(57:59):
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

(58:20):
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 of things happening faster
than you can understand, and the pace of modern life
changing and all this stuff coming on so fast, and
that colliding with this idea of the fragility of our

(58:41):
minds and bodies, and that leading to this fear that
people could be changed in an instant. 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.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
Yeah, And what you mentioned about this increasing awareness of
or this view of one's mental state as being fragile,
you do you see this reflected, you know, in the
fiction of the time period as well. I can't help
but think of at least of a couple a couple
of cases, in the cases of Sherlock Holmes, where we

(59:24):
see madness play of an important role, often affecting people
of means, people of status.

Speaker 3 (59:32):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
There's of course the case of the Creeping Man, and
that one, of course involves some gorilla hijinks and his
you know, 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

(59:56):
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. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
And the prominence, the emerging prominence of railway travel in
human life in the eighteen sixties. I mean again, remember
how quickly railways became central to industrial societies in the
mid nineteenth century. There was just an explosion in the
number of railway lines and the number of passengers from
like eighteen fifty to eighteen sixty in Great Britain. That

(01:00:40):
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 few shot going on,

(01:01:01):
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 these horror stories and
and in these sensational journalistic obsessions.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
Again, this is so fascinating, given how you know, every
day train travel really is, and how at least from
my vantage point, how pleasant it can be. Like even
you know, I rode public transportation trains here in Atlanta
for a long time, and you know, sometimes it's weird,
sometimes it's startling, you know, but even in those cases,

(01:01:44):
often found it kind of peaceful, you know, you used to. Nowadays,
I guess you can probably get some sort of a
wireless connection just about anywhere on most major train rides.
But there was a while where when you were underground
on the train, you were really I was completely cut
off and there was nothing I could do on my phone,
you know, I would just have to read. I got

(01:02:06):
to read, uh, you know, I got to be sort
of cut off from everything in a good way. And
and that could happen no matter what the other conditions were,
if there was 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 to look back on this

(01:02:26):
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 how syphilis might have played into all this as well, Uh,
you know, awareness of how that can affect one's mental state.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:51):
There there is a fascinating topic. And then of course
we see how it plays out, how it influences all
of these various fictions h and a part of say
railway fiction in general.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot more to talk about,
and that's why we are not done with this topic.
This was part one. We will be back with part
two of our discussion of the locomotive Horror and Trains
of Terror on Thursday of this week.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Right, that's right, that's right. In the meantime, also recommend
do yourself a favorite do a Google image search for
some punch cartoons and throw train in there you'll see
various examples of alleged Victorian train madness. I really wanted
to see the one with the lady thinking she's looking
at her own reflection, but it's actually somebody's face. Oh,

(01:03:39):
I couldn't find out.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
I think this was a cartoon actually arguing against one
of the safety innovations that was proposed on trains. So
the idea was that you would put these windows in
the compartments so that it would be easier to communicate
back and forth or see what's going on. But then
the idea is, oh, a lady's like, you know, dressing
in front of the mirror and on the other side
there's some kind of creep looking at.

Speaker 3 (01:04:02):
All.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Right, well, we'll be back on Thursday. Then we'll get
into ghost trains a bit in that one, so it
should be a good time. But in the meantime we'll
remind you that stuff to blow your mind. It is
primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. We're 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.

(01:04:23):
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 we have trains.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Teleisivalis ooh boy, It's going to
be a good time.

Speaker 3 (01:04:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
Huge, Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production

(01:05:02):
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:05:04):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.