ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the social dimension of long distance railway journeying in Britain and the ways that being-with-others on the move brings about particular experiences of sociality. Much recent research has looked at the ways in which the rise of automobility during the twentieth century has resulted in particular forms of sociality and the refiguring of public and private spaces. Many have lamented the erosion of public space by the private car (Habermas 1992; Lefebvre 1991) as the car is taken to be a separate sphere of personal freedom and movement (Sheller and Urry 2000). However, more recently, others have looked at how automobilities rather than being particularly private spaces are bound up in many different kinds of civility. Sheller and Urry (2003) question whether this division is indeed useful at all, arguing how automobilities serve to blur the idealized boundaries between the private and public. Since automobilities are connected into mobile fluid networks, the private is never entirely personal. Acknowledging this complex relation between public and private space, I follow Sheller and Urry by considering how people play with these blurred boundaries whilst on a train journey. Whilst Schivelbusch (1979) notes how the railway journey initially served to transform the experience of the private individual into a mass public, I consider how spaces of the railway journey, similar to systems of automobility, come to be “rolling private-in-public spaces” (Sheller and Urry 2000: 746).