Trains, culture, and mobility

de Benjamin Fraser

Trains, Culture, and Mobility: Riding the Rails goes beyond textual representations of rail travel to engage an impressive range of political, sociological, and urban theories. Taken together, these essays highlight the complexity of the modern experience of train mobility and its salient relation to a number of cultural discourses. Incorporating traditionally marginal areas of cultural production such as graffiti, museums, and architecture, or even plunging into the social experience of travel inside the train car itself, each essay works from the act of riding the train toward questions of much larger significance. Crisscrossing cultures from the Old and New Worlds, from East and West, these essays share a common preoccupation with the ways in which trains and railway networks have mapped and remapped the contours of both cities and states in the modern period. Bringing together individual and large-scale social practices, this volume traces out the cultural implications of "riding the rails."