ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the cultural history of the development of locomotive power and its relationship to animals and the natural world that the 'engine' traverses. It examines the role of the hand in the production of technics and then moves on to try and understand the contribution of Leroi-Gourhan to the history of the machine. The chapter then addresses the dual nature of the steam-engine and the locomotive as both dream and nightmare before addressing what Paul Virilio has called 'metabolic vehicles'. It also examines those rail routes that transported other species into the slaughterhouses of modernity. Railways have been, in their various representations, synonymous with liberation, domination, catastrophe and accumulation. However, the fundamental feature of their material manifestation is their mobility. They also signify a profound relationship between the individual human hand and the vast systems of transportation that are prosthetic extensions of that hand.
