![]() Americans were consumed with a passion for movement, and they could not stay in one place. The American love of mobility was not just a general commercial and technological phenomenon, but also an individual one. The train that then ran on it became a ship on dry land in a concrete sense. The American railroad’s original and fundamental task was to create transportation where no natural waterways existed. From 1859 on, Pullman built cars that openly allude to the model of the floating palace steamer in their name of palace cars. The similarity between the interiors of river steamers and railroad trains was only a figment of the imagination in 1840, but it became a reality twenty years later. The railroad became closely linked with the steamer in American transportation development and consciousness. The American transport situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century was under-developed traffic by land, but highly developed traffic on the inland waterways. The difficulty in reconstructing the genesis of the American railroad car is that there was no single model to be found among prior means of transportation, but two models that had to be synthesized to produce the final result. ![]() The American railroad car was designed based on the canal packet, a ship that had a similar form and dimensions. The French railroad engineers Lavoinne and Pontzen found that the opportunity to move around during the journey was analogous to what is possible on board a ship, instead of the immobility imposed on European travelers. The American train car was similar to European compartment cars in its spaciousness and ease of communication. It was designed to accommodate the needs of a democratic pioneer society, while the European compartment car was designed for the social conditions prevailing in Europe. The American railroad car was the simplest and cheapest type of passenger car. The obvious advantages of the American car did not seem to be enough reason to abandon the quiet and immobility of the European train compartment. The American car was very different from the European train compartment. The long car without compartments became the standard in America from the 1840s on. The American railroads were built using the English railroad technology, but the cars were designed to be devoid of compartments. The carriage was now capable of being extended in length, virtually ad infinitum. The American route required a carriage that could deal with the curves, and this was achieved through the use of double-axled bogies. In contrast, the English railroad lines were straight and technically efficient. The American railroad lines were curved rather than straight, and this was their main characteristic from the very beginning. The cost per mile of American lines was only a fraction of that of English lines, even though the rails were imported from England at considerable expense. It did not build tracks through natural obstacles, but around them like a river. The American railroad continued what the river steamboat began. It was not America’s first contribution to the technology of the Industrial Revolution, but it was in many ways the most notable achievement of its industrial infancy. The river steamboat was the first transport revolution, and it allowed water traffic to gain such prominence. The American landscape was shaped by water traffic, and the American consciousness was shaped by it as well. ![]() The American transportation system was based on the waterways, which were abundant and allowed for their dominance. ![]() The lack of capital and labor in America led to new forms of raw material production, and a virtually mimetic utilization of the existing natural routes. The American landscape was seen as closely linked to the machine in the nineteenth century, because the material foundation for that perception lay in the peculiarity of American economic life. The main instruments of American industry in the early nineteenth century were not machines in factories, but river steamboats, railroad trains, sawmills, and harvesting combines. The American industrial revolution was seen as a natural development because it occurred first in agriculture and transportation, and was thus related to nature. The American railroad was created to open up, for the first time, vast regions of previously unsettled wilderness. The history of the railroad in America differs from that of Europe in that the American railroad was not the industrial successor to a fully-fledged pre-industrial transportation system.
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