Trains of Terror, Part 1

In this 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
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 traditional month
long celebration of Halloween. So longtime fans, you know what's
going on, you know what's in store. But in case

(00:38):
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 2 (00:59):
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 3 (01:10):
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 2 (01:20):
And I'm excited about the episode we're going to kick
off here today, the series we're kicking off here today
because this is a topic we've been talking about doing
for years now. This is well when we get around
to planning out our October episodes, this one's been on
the list for a while and we're finally hopping aboard.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
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,

(01:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah, let's have it, okay.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
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

(02:37):
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.

(03:00):
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

(03:20):
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

(03:41):
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

(04:04):
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

(04:27):
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

(04:50):
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,

(05:14):
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

(05:36):
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

(05:57):
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

(06:19):
cold wind rushed through it that it struck chill to me,
as if I had left the natural world.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Ooh, that is nice.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
Anyway, The narrator notices that the signalman 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

(06:49):
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 signallman sees the figure,
he hears a voice calling out, saying, Helloa below there,

(07:11):
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

(07:32):
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,

(07:52):
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

(08:14):
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

(08:35):
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

(08:57):
to cover his eyes.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Oh wow, I.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
Think it's a wonderfully chilling ending. Even now just telling
it again, I got a little bit of 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

(09:21):
just has a has a similar aesthetic reform to a
ghost story. But 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 that the signalman is a signalman, like what

(09:44):
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,

(10:05):
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

(10:27):
industrial exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spiders that
spun iron.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Oh wow, that's nice anyway.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
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 2 (10:54):
Yeah, yeah, And this is a really fascinating subject to
get into, and I feel like I 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 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 to

(11:18):
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.
But so suffice to say, trains are very every day
to me, and I like them. I don't inherently think

(11:38):
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

(12:02):
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

(12:24):
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.

(12:47):
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.

(13:09):
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

(13:30):
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,

(13:52):
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

(14:13):
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

(14:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
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

(15:17):
sort of do an inventory of the potential for dangers
and miseries by looking at any place.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
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 you know, Holmes 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 even the city is creepy. But there's

(15:46):
something about the train technology's role in this.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
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 state. And about the
way a train changes the way you look at the world.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, yeah, it's about the vantage point that it provides
the broadening human travel abilities, It permits homes 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 anytime I'm on a train,
certainly if it's a novel train and I get to

(16:27):
look out at the countryside.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
Which, by the way, I love doing rob 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

(16:50):
to mind for many people, especially people in say the
nineteenth century.

Speaker 2 (16:53):
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 Japan. Look out of the beautiful
countryside and yet here Sherlock Holmes whispering my ear. They
might be murdering in there.

Speaker 3 (17:08):
So thank you, Sherlock, but they think of the horror
is hidden beyond.

Speaker 4 (17:12):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
Now, another tale that comes to mind concerning trains is
the Ray Bradbury 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 Bradbury Theater television show
starring a young Jeff Goldblin Oh or you know. This
was what the same year as The Fly, so you

(17:44):
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

(18:06):
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

(18:29):
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

(18:51):
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.

(19:16):
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

(19:36):
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?

(20:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
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 2 (20:23):
Yeah, some of 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.

Speaker 4 (20:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
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 3 (20:37):
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 2 (20:51):
Yeah, and I think it works 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

(21:11):
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

(21:33):
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 3 (21:53):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
Let's see, oh, we we would have to we have
to mention blame the monorail from Kings The Dark Tower
series is 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 Shoguth at
the end of nineteen thirty one's At the Mountains of Madness,

(22:17):
compares this 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,

(22:38):
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,

(23:01):
vaster than any subway train.

Speaker 3 (23:03):
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 2 (23:17):
Yes, Yeah, yeah, I can't describe it, but I'm gonna
go on for about a good page. They alling you
how impossible this is to describe.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
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 2 (23:30):
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 We've talked about the Vampire action sequence
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,

(23:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
I only barely remember the moment you're talking about. Wait,
do the Dementtors get on the train and arrive by train?
Or they're like surrounding a train.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
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

(24:36):
if you have any examples that stand out in your
mind and line up with some of the examples we're
discussing here.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
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.

(25:05):
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

(25:25):
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

(25:46):
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

(26:07):
no matter how much you may want to, you cannot
change course.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
Yeah, yeah, this is this is indeed a great, 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 its head,

(26:34):
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 3 (26:45):
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

(27:11):
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 overwhelming physical power. Also, travel by train is fast.

(27:33):
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 2 (27:48):
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 that train, I
want to get off, and so forth, And like we
instantly connect with this idea, like something is propelling me

(28:11):
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 3 (28:19):
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 2 (28:27):
Yeah, So It's like the technology becomes this excellent metaphor
for so many different aspects of human life, including life
itself in our linear experience of it.

Speaker 3 (28:38):
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

(28:58):
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.

(29:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
Yeah, Yeah, that's a great point.

Speaker 4 (29:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:51):
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
in closed train compartments. In a lot of the non
fiction writings about trains from the nineteenth century, and we're

(30:13):
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

(30:33):
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

(30:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
Yeah. Another theme that 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

(31:52):
then 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

(32:13):
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.

(32:34):
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,

(32:57):
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.

Speaker 4 (33:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
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,
in one way or another, has sort of roots in

(33:40):
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
can't deny, at least in the English lange, which is
the importance of these works. Likewise, when you look at film, like,

(34:04):
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

(34:24):
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,

(34:45):
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

(35:06):
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

(35:27):
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

(35:52):
the underworld.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
Yeah I was about to say, overlapping themes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
Now, steam technology also runs pretty deep in its basic
conception and 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,

(36:17):
you know, essentially little toys, leading up to a let's
see a seventeenth century pressure cooker, and then in sixteen
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.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
Of pump them out.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
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 Newcomen engine, the Bolton and

(36:56):
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

(37:20):
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,

(37:44):
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

(38:06):
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

(38:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:44):
The great ground spiders that spun only iron.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
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, So base trained technology, you know,
spinning off of these other technologies, it ends up changing
the way humans and goods traverse the world, just changing

(39:09):
so many things about the shape of human life.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
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. Yes, like trains, it's very important that

(39:34):
you are operating on schedule. There can be danger if there,
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 sort of changes everything
in a way. Lots of stuff follows downstream from that,
and there are other things like that.

Speaker 4 (39:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
Yeah, it's almost like the continuity of the rail itself
stretching from this big city to this small town, like
they are one now in the is as far as
time 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

(40:17):
to be three thirty five back in the city. These
times absolutely have to match.

Speaker 3 (40:31):
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

(40:54):
emerging cultural impact of steam powered trains in the mid
nineteenth century as they became more or 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

(41:15):
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

(41:35):
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

(41:56):
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,

(42:17):
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,

(42:40):
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

(43:02):
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

(43:25):
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,

(43:45):
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 2 (43:56):
Yeah? Yeah, threatening the clergy with ritual death seems a
little Styes.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
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 think

(44:24):
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

(44:44):
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

(45:05):
trains and other passengers are trapped in the cars with them.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
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

(45:29):
with in aviation as well.

Speaker 4 (45:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
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 3 (45:40):
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 calm than it actually was, you can't blame

(46:02):
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

(46:24):
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

(46:46):
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

(47:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah again, getting decided there's something about train travel that
is inherently abnormal, and it can make you abnormal as
well or enhance abnormal tendencies.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
Now, Milne Smith sort of charts the historical arc of
this panic about railway mad men, 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

(47:52):
when reported on in 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 find to be defined as a moral panic
in the way academics would normally understand the term. So

(48:13):
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

(48:34):
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

(48:56):
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

(49:18):
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,

(49:40):
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

(50:03):
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,

(50:25):
This is what people are clicking on.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
Yeah, yeah, And you could basically take anything and spin
it out, right, 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 3 (50:51):
Yes, that's exactly right, very perceptive roll because she does
get into exactly that that dynamic. I mean we're still
doing it today, yes, yeah. And so like the way
it is is there are some initially very terrible events,
Like there was one very famous case of an actual
murder on a train in Great Britain. It was in

(51:12):
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 the suspect,

(51:33):
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

(51:55):
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,

(52:19):
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

(52:42):
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

(53:04):
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

(53:25):
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

(53:46):
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

(54:07):
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

(54:29):
the railway trip itself.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
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

(54:52):
there's a line though, between you know, actual concern and
something that just becomes a panic.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
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
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 of

(55:21):
riding the trains and something must be done about it.
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

(55:44):
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

(56:05):
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

(56:26):
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

(56:49):
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.

(57:09):
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,

(57:30):
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

(57:51):
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

(58:12):
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.

Speaker 4 (58:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Yeah, And what you mentioned about this increasing awareness of
or this view of one's mental state as being fragile.
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 see

(58:56):
madness play an important role, often affecting people of means,
people of status. There's, of course, the case of the
Creeping Man, and that one, of course involves some gorilla
hijinks and is borderline science fiction. But then there's the
and there's the excellent case of the Devil's Foot, which

(59:17):
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

(59:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:50):
Yes. And the prominence, the emerging prominence of railway travel
in human life in the eighteen sixties. I mean again,
remember how 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.

(01:00:11):
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

(01:00:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
Again, this is so fascinating, given how 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,

(01:01:14):
but even in those cases, 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 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.

(01:01:34):
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

(01:01:57):
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

(01:02:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
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 2 (01:02:47):
Right, that's right, that's right. In the meantime, also recommend
do yourself a favor. 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,

(01:03:10):
I couldn't find out.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):
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 her.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
All right, well, we'll be back on Thursday. Then we'll
get into ghost trains a bit in that one, and
so it should be a good time. But in the
meantime we'll remind you that's stuff to blow your mind.
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

(01:03:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:04:04):
We're gonna have trains. Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Telly Savalas
ooh boy, it's going to be a good time.

Speaker 4 (01:04:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.