The mental tension of being so transported could bring on total physical collapse

From Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing by Kate Colquhoun. Page 11.

Trains, he wrote, had become the most indispensable agent in national life. Yet, to a society caught between conservatism and progress, the railways fostered ambiguous reactions. In the whistle and shriek of every approaching engine was evidence of rapid social and technological transformation. The stations, viaducts and embankments were conspicuously visible and new, signalling the investment of huge capital and the ascendancy of engineering achievement. They turned modest towns into sprawling cities and created startling new wealth. They were liberating, and they punctuated the map of Britain with possibilities, but they also devoured rural communities and displayed a perilous carelessness for human life – wheels ran off tracks, axles broke, boilers burst and there were countless collisions.

Woven into the excitement of railway travel, a corresponding nervousness had developed about the loss of individual control. The sense of being trapped in a box-like compartment, whirled along at speed and treated like just one in a stream of disposable, moveable goods was, at best, disorientating and, at worst, threatening. This vast force of industrial technology seeped into the language to spawn new metaphors – to ‘run out of steam’ or ‘off the tracks’ – and threw the fragility and helplessness of human life into relief. In 1862 the medical journal the Lancet published a paper noting that uneasiness … amounting to actual fear … pervades the generality of travellers by rail. It believed that, disasters aside, train journeys could easily make passengers very unwell: deafening noise confounded the ears, speed taxed the eyes and vibrations had an adverse effect both on the brain and the skeleton. The mental tension of being so transported could, the journal concluded, bring on total physical collapse.