“What role did the railway networks play and continue to play for the cities? What side-effects do the infrastructure and points of access to this system have inside the city? Beyond their influence on topography, what part in the evolution of the city do railways determine? What can be said about the economic, social, political and cultural consequences of railways in cities and what role do they play in the preservation of this heritage?”(1) The book was a successful comparison between cities in Europe and the role of railways for their development. But many aspects were underrepresented or were not taken into consideration. Moreover, the relationship was geographical limited on Europe. This is why we look for a broader access to the problem and would like to include a wider range of tropics and a wider range of geographical space. We are looking for political and cultural side effects of the relationship between cities and railways and we are looking for examples not only in Europe but also in North-America, Asia and Africa.
For such a project we need clear and well developed thesis which could serve as orientation and inner cohesion of the book. This asks the question: What are the main lines of development concerning the relationship of cities and railways in all urban agglomerations of the world that were growing as consequence of increasing industrialisation and migration from rural areas into cities? It has to include the vision at the beginning of the railway age, the role of the cities in the railway network and vice versa the role of railways inside the city. Authors should outline the metamorphosis of railways for urban purposes. Moreover we must pay attention to the rise and decline of this relationship under the condition of motorisation and individual mobility by motor cars, and the role of urban railways in present urban agglomerations or mega cities of the world, i. e. in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Some experiences with the German model may shed a bit more light on the problem.

In the German debate on the construction of the first lines which took place in the 1820s and 1830s many memoranda included visionary outlooks and foresaw flourishing cities in a modern civic society. Astonishingly enough, they envisaged and foresaw many aspects of the future development. Many projects promoted shrinking costs for transport and economic progress of trade cities.(2) Others debated the consequences of the increase in the mobility of the workers which might lead to a boom of industrial towns. Considering the vision of an European network, Ludwig Newhouse who anglicised his name Neuhaus to Newhouse) anticipated a gigantic market place formed by the cities of the Baden region in the South of Germany where the routs from harbour cities at the shore of the North Sea to Southern Italy or from France to the East of Europe would cross.(3) This idea looks modest compared with the planning of other railway committees. With the construction of an only six kilometres long line the committees of Nuremberg and Fürth regarded themselves as a main hub of the continental trade routes between the rivers Rhein, Main and Danube and as one of the main transition places between the West and the East of Europe.(4) It is remarkable that the central focus of these memoranda stressed above all trade cities. Especially these cities were envisaged as main beneficiaries of a railway network. Indeed, most German committees flourished in trade cities (beside these which were as administrative cities and capitals supported by the state). And it was there where they successfully acquired the investment capital for the construction of the net. Compared with them commentaries and argues on industrial towns were rare and colourless. Probably the reason was that this type of cities was lesser developed in Germany as in England at this time. However, some memoranda drew sketches on the increase of industrial cities in the Ruhr region and anticipated the rise of Germany’s heart of heavy industry, furnaces and coal mines in the Empire and later on up to the 1980s.(5) All in all the visionary fantasy was more focussed on touristic cities and spas and in this context some memoranda drew sketches on mass tourism directed to cultural attractions or beautiful landscapes. This means: trade cities, industrial towns, touristic cities and spas – all would win by the construction of railway lines.
The memoranda foresaw further aspects of the relationship of cities and railways. Railways would allow more people to migrate from the countryside into cities and cities therefore would grow. It was consequent discussing the structural changes of such a development. One part of the memoranda predicted metropolises while others envisaged the main lines of the so called “suburbanisation”.(6) ‘Alongside the railway lines’, they wrote, ‘cities would stretching out long arms of new suburbs.’(7) Many railway enthusiasts took over these argues and advocated for a far reaching decentralisation of cities that would be enabled and that should be supported by railways. Railways would make possible the escape from noisy and densely populated city centres to quiet and healthy rural environments with fresh air and clear water.(8) These visions became reality within the historical short duration of only two or three decades.
The positive experiences made by the first lines in England and speedy construction of the network on the continent encouraged many citizens in many German cities to follow the example of Liverpool, Manchester, Mechelen as well as Nuremberg, Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main or Berlin. Because of the structure of a network in principle every town or city could consider themselves as centre of the European railway net. Many argued that way and debated the advantages of such a shift in the “geographical” position. All cities would become connected with the whole world, i. e. the most important cities in Europe, and a big and general relativisation of the geographical position would take place. And it was interpreted that ‘the disadvantages of a certain geographical position would vanish’, explained Newhouse together with a committee located in the city of Darmstadt.(9) The consequence was: every city considered itself as the centre of the web – or felt the necessity to become one.(10) But it was in most cases not easy to become a knot or a hub and that is why railways divided the landscape of cities into two classes, those which failed(11) and those which achieved the goal and became part of the net and could make use of its advantages for the mobility of citizens, the distribution of goods and speedy communication and spreading of news. We must pay further attention to the dynamic the railways introduced on society and especially on urban environments. Because of the increase of railways on mobility and migration for a wider public they contributed fundamentally to the process of urbanisation in many developed countries in Europe. The rapid increase of the number of inhabitants shifted cities in Europe and North America on a large scale from the size of typical cities for pedestrians with a diameter of two or three kilometres to bigger ones of five and more kilometres. The new dimension enforced the introduction of facilities for public transport in growing city spaces.

This was why the relationship between cities and railways was not only stimulated by the continental network, it was also its regional and local structures that contributed to urban development. We can call it the railway inside the city or urban rail. The demand on means for public transport firstly developed in European metropolises. In fast growing big cities as London, Paris or Berlin the distances between housing areas and working places, shopping quarters, public or cultural institutions and recreation areas speedily increased.(12) As an inaugurator of public transport facilities acted often world fairs.(13) Together with the world fairs in London and Paris the systems for public transport was not only remarkable enlarged but also continued to develop. After the mid of the century London possessed a multitude of different transport systems which included coaches and horse buses and railways which run on large viaducts deep into the city centre.
London had numerous head stations and gigantic rail yards and other Workshop equipment (Betriebseinrichtungen) which covered no less than five per cent of the whole city area. The railways widened their service for commuter transport to the suburbs and invested therefore especially in new lines at the Western periphery.(14) But the density of buildings in many city quarters hindered railway construction. This was why three railway companies felt encouraged to develop underground railways. For that reason they founded the Metropolitan Railway Company in 1863 and built the first Underground line of the world which went from Farrington to the main stations Kings Cross and Paddington. This was the beginning of the Circle Line which connected many suburbs in the West with the city centre.(15)
But despite of its immense increases the London railway network did not offer sufficient and comfortable transport services for all areas because the distances between the railway stations were not very short and since 1846 the city centre was closed for railways. Other metropolises faced similar problems and this offered enough chances for increasing market of alternative transport means as horse omnibuses. In London they served around one fifth of all transports inside the city around 1900.(16) As London Paris possessed several railway lines since the 1830s. But these lines – twelve up to 1870 – did not offer special services for suburbs. Even the circle line built in the 1850s was used more or less only for goods transport. The service inside the city or to the suburbs was done by the Compagnie Generalé des Omnibus which had a monopole on all transport inside the city walls. The Compagnie developed a highly efficient system of public services which transported as double as many commuters as the London omnibus companies nevertheless Paris had only half of the inhabitants as London.(17)
Even in Berlin several omnibus companies crew up in the 1860s. Among them was the biggest of all the Allgemeine Berliner Omnibus AG. As in Paris and London the Berlin magistrate supported horse trams which developed services from the city centre to the periphery.(18) But these new systems did not offer sufficient transport capacities for the rapidly increase of demand as result of the great migration to Berlin. Especially not enough transport capacity from the city centre to the outskirts where would have been enough land for the city’s expansion. This was one reason why social problems evolved from lack of housing.(19) That was why housing reformers and philanthropists called not only for public engagement and a path-breaking housing reform, but also for a communication structure from the heart of the city to the periphery. They developed numerous detailed proposals that should have solved the alarming situation. The member of the magistrate Hermann Schwabe who was also member of the board of the Niederschlesisch-Märkischen Eisenbahn had not only had experiences in the business of a railway line but also had intensively studied the English city railways, especially the Metropolitan Railway in London. He complained in drastic words the growing abnormity of big cities.(20) In fear of social and political consequences of unlimited migration into the city and bad supply of poor people with living spaces he demanded the development of vast areas for housing at the periphery of the city of Berlin.(21) This resulted in a petition of the magistrate to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Public Work which included the idea of a railway ring around Berlin on the diameter of ten kilometres and a connection to the city centre.(22) The goal was to realise demand of housing reformers of healthy and cheap housing for all social classes and for the minimum of 200,000 households or one million people. Moreover the magistrate demanded housing areas for workers which were connected with “with all amenities of rural living and all pleasure of mother nature”.(23)
Although this project did not become reality another Ring and City Railway was built and set into business. It was only half the size than the magistrate petition had demanded but highly efficient. As consequence the Wilhelminian ring of settlement between the old city quarters and the tracks of the new railways crew up in the 1880s and 1890s.(24) Although the Ring Railway contributed only in some respect to the solution of the social problems it introduced a very successful urban transport media that developed to the backbone of the internal Berlin traffic. Already in the first years no less than ten millions passengers made use of this railway, a figure that increased to 383 millions in 1914.(25) This was all in all one third of the public transport in total. The Ring and City Railway contributed to the development of industrial sites and indirect to land developing for housing at the periphery of the city, because together with manufactures workers moved to certain suburbs in the Northwest, North, East and Southeast of the city. The urban railways contributed to a tremendous structural change of Berlin with numerous construction and reconstruction areas.(26)
City transformation was the topic of several papers at the conference which asks the question how railways affected the city’s development. One got insights how extraordinary visions failed and nevertheless railways contributed to economic and urban growth or how railways contributed to the connection to the hinterlands or wider regions as for example the whole American Middle West in the case of Chicago or of Bombay.(27)
However, the Ring and City Railway was the starting point for further railway lines to suburbs in greater distance from Berlin. These trains to suburbia were the third element of the urban railway system in Berlin. The developing of little villages at the outskirts did in many cases not serve the purpose of tenement housing for the masses of people but for comfortable and expensive housing for the well to do and was called residential suburbs (Villenvororte).(28) This topic opens the door to the subject of commuter transport from city centres to suburbs. The question of commuter transport was discussed in the first section as a problem of quantity and how to measure it and how to figure out the outcome and effects of certain amounts of commuters. In this section the approach to the question of commuters was different and reached from the role of political and ideological identity over migration streams that formed special kinds of suburbia and therefore the necessity of suburban commuter transport and social causes in consequence of rapid industrialisation that forced city planers or railway companies to introduce particular workingmen’s trains.(29)

But cities and railways did not only open chances and perspectives they also became a burden. Numerous conflicts between citizens and the railway speak for themselves and at the end of the nineteenth century the problems could not longer be ignored. Most German cities for example developed more rapid than most cities in Europe and expanded into wide areas of their former surrounding. This was why railway stations that had been build at the periphery or at the outskirts became enclosed by the city inclusive the railway infrastructure, rail yards, workshops and other railway facilities. One must take into consideration that this infrastructure developed together with the city to a multiple of its original size. Railways formed a very spacious infrastructure that often covered five or ten per cent of the whole city area. Railways cut off the city landscape, separated neighbourhoods and city quarters. They crossed streets and hindered road traffic. One must not forget the emissions as smoke and noise which caused conflicts with the affected citizens.(30)
The critique fired by numerous conflicts touched upon fundamental questions about living conditions in such cities at this time. For example the already mentioned railway director Schwabe who knew what about he was speaking from complained: “One called our century the industrial one. Where ever you listen peoples praise the achievement and progress of industry. In ever increasing speed one organises international fairs and let even the sparrows on the roofs praise how humans brought it so miraculous far. But it is time to confess that almost all the pathological aspects of our life are mainly products of the industrial character of our time.”(31) He especially complained about the noise of railways and opposed projects which foresaw the construction of particular industrial railways to the city centre of Berlin.
But more than noise the public debated the hindrances that railways caused on street traffic. The rails especially the rail yards in the neighbourhood of main stations and stations for goods transport would cut off the networks of streets. All proposals that should avoid exactly this situation vanished in conflicting debates between state departments, magistrate, public and railway companies and did not get the chance to solve or diminish the problem in a convincing way. It were these contra-productive facets of railway transport that brought chancellor Bismarck in a meeting with the architect of the new Anhalter station Franz Heinrich Schwechten to the confession: “These railways they only hinder traffic!”(32)
But, it was not only noise and not only conflicts with other transport systems inside the city. Also the rails cut off neighbouring city quarters and they formed hindrances for the expansion of cities. We find many accounts on this in many cities.(33) The conflicting nature of the railway in city spaces was particular visible in industrial towns. For the industrial town Oberhausen for example a poet was the opinion this is a hell region (Höllengegend): “Here is the man and his housing sacrificed to the illusion of profit. In sad wilderness between factories and coal mines concentrated stretches out black streets between black houses. The wretched brick building with grimy (rußig) cement tarnished seems to be the only type of housing. Everywhere rails! One cannot imagine what all these tracks should be good for.”(34) He was right. The area of Oberhausen was covered by railway lines. There came together the rails of no less than four big competing railway companies. All together established a spacious infrastructure for goods traffic including large rail yards and numerous rail lines intertwined with many narrow and company railways. This pattern of rails imposed the city structure and cut off the space in a variety of populated pieces.(35) Oberhausen had been a good example for the necessity of a fundamental reform of living conditions in the industrial age. But the most important suggestions for reforms did not sprang up in cities were the problems could not be overlooked but from the United Kingdom with ideas of new types of cities as for example Howard’s Garden Cities and from North America with new ideas of railways that should be integrated in the city space in a more elegant way.(36)

The core of the problem was the increase of urban agglomerations in modern societies. Together with the increase of cities grew the distances in big agglomerations and together with growing distances came to light the weaknesses of the old rail-road transport systems. Horse buses and horse tramways did not allow a speedy crossing of the new city landscape and limited themselves to a service inside the city centre or to connections between certain city quarters. The railway itself, in principle predestined for large distances, did not meet the necessity of stops in short intervals inside the densely populated areas. The railway was too slow in its start up and required large distances to slow down, its infrastructure was spacious and there were a lot of complaints about smoke, grime and noise. On the background of increasing critique about noisy and densely living in big urban environments and growing dissatisfaction with smoky and slow railways or less capacity of horse railways started an intense search for alternative urban transport means of urban environment.
Railways were very present in cities and this caused debates and discussion how they should be integrated in the urban fabric in the best way. The papers picked up these debates in an impressive way and discusses further aspects of the railways inside the cities, how the affected the cities and how they were used from citizens inclusive their European wide renaissance in the last decade.(37)
However, at the end of the nineteenth century many were looking for possibilities of a metamorphosis of railways making them compatible with the new territorial dimensions. We know about very early experiments on electric trains in the dawn of the railway age.(38) But the question of energy supply was not convincingly solved before the 1860s when Werner Siemens invented the dynamo (Dynamomaschine) and the 1890s when cities built their first electrical power plants. Siemens himself, inspired by the London underground railway of 1863, proposed a first planning of an elevated train driven by electric power at the late 1860s and experimented with model trains in the 1870s. These experiments led to the first tramway line in Germany in 1881.(39) In effect, tramways were rapidly introduced in many cities as soon as the question of the supply of electricity was solved by transport of AC current over long distances in the 1890s.
Tramways were the first form of a metamorphosis of railways in urban environments. They were successfully distributed in European and North-American cities by making use of existing networks of horse railways which had been established since the 1860s. Tramways achieved measurable progress in speed and transport capacity and they avoided a lot of other disadvantages of the old steam railways. They had no emission of smoke and were pretty much quieter than steam engines. They could accelerate very fast and even slow down quickly which was important for short intervals of stations inside the city centre and they were lighter than the old trains and could therefore be integrated into the street system with less affords than the old railways. In relative short time they substituted the systems of horse tramways.(40)

Many cities could solve their transport problems caused by increasing population.(41) But what in medium sized cities worked very well were not sufficient for metropolises as London, Paris or Berlin not to speak from American cities or from giant cities of today in Asia or elsewhere in the world. In the far reaches of the urban landscape the disadvantages of tramways came to light. With the spreading of tramways reappeared the conflict between streets and rails.(42) Moreover, they were too slow for large distances and it was clear: For metropolises as London and Paris or Chicago and New York or Berlin and Vienna it was necessary to develop speed and capacity of electrical railways and “separate their tracks from street level and built them below or above the streets. This was why electrical speed railways were constructed as elevated trains or undergrounds.”(43) This form of railway was developed in an exchange of scientific and engineering knowledge between several global centres to a functional system. During the World fair of 1867 Siemens first mentioned a new type of railways that should run electrical powered on columns above the street level of Berlin. But instead of such a railway he realised prototypes for a tramway system. However, Siemens did not forget his idea of an elevated train. In the 1880s he repeatedly offered proposals to the Prussian state and city magistrate and created a project of such a train that should have crossed Berlin from East to West. But all his initiatives failed. He did not get a concession from the state.(44)
These hindrances were unknown in the United States. The cities’ administration of growing metropolises there pragmatic managed the problems of urban transport and built elevated train systems in the grit patterns of streets and ignored aesthetic reservations as well as noise emissions for all the citizens living in the direct neighbourhood of the new lines. A milestone for the breaking through of this system of elevated trains was the World faire of 1893 in Chicago. The first time a huge international audience were practically faced with the concept of electric speed trains for urban use.(45)
But what had been enthusiastic welcomed by the Berlin delegation did not meet much approval in big metropolises of Europe. Instead of leading electric speed railways above the twisty roads of European city centres the planners escaped into the underground in densely settled city quarters. The model had London delivered which already had developed an underground train in the 1860s. But intense molestation by smoke and dirt hindered the distribution of the system.46 The first electric underground line, the City and South London line, was finished in 1890. But the expansion of this line into a network of lines that covered important parts of London areas was because of the tremendous cost not finished before 1900.(47) However, London railway companies and the city administration impacted on the discussion of the reorganisation of the internal transport system of Paris in the advance of the world fair of 1900.(48)
Also Berlin did not finish its elevated train network but shifted to underground trains after a serious citizen protest against the ugliness and noisy speed trains in their neighbourhood. The electric underground railways did not only solve the passage of large distances in the urban landscape of metropolises and city agglomerations, they did not conflict with street traffic and they did not separate city quarters and they also contributed to the solution of aesthetic and environmental problem railways caused in the fabric of the modern city. “Separated from the disruption to road transport, more convincing in speed than tramways and more flexible and more integrated as steam railways the electric speed railway developed speedily to an indispensable transport system for big cities.”(49) The Berlin city planers testified: Undergrounds are “compatible with the relations in cities and form with them an interwoven element of the modern age.”(50) It was a serious attempt to minimise the conflicting relationship between cities and railways. This was why they were seen as the transport medium of the new century.

Together with speed trains a totally new dimension of city seems to be in close distance of realisation. Because they enabled cities with a diameter of 25 kilometres and an area for settlement and house building of 500 square kilometres and this was 25 times larger than a city for pedestrians. These were exciting news for terrain companies, banks and construction- as well as transport companies.(51) On the fundament of speed railways there flourished visions of even bigger cities. In 1912 Gustav Schimpff summarised all main characteristics of such a giant city and created the concept of an ideal city with a dense transport system of urban speed railways.(52) Schimpff’s article on an ideal city published in the Archiv für Eisenbahnwesen (Journal of Railway Matters) included a radial system of s-train lines that connected all kind of city quarters and institutions at the periphery with the city centre. The number of stops increased in the densely populated areas and the lines formed the pattern of a grit of a total of ten lines in the city centre, i. e. the business district. In this way he managed to distract the dense traffic in the city centre to the edge of the city.(53)
All in all, his proposal touched on real problems of the urban transport system in Berlin. Very similar to the discussion about the Ring and City Railway in the 1870s again the search for cheap land for house building in a healthy environment stimulated strategic considerations on the transport system of a rapidly growing metropolis. To quote an example from the debate at this time: “Our concerning problems forced us to develop cheap land for a healthy and spacious house building. But this one can find now more or less only in the outer suburban areas, outside the area of influence (Bannkreis) of the existing building code (…) and outside the region of high prized land.”(54)
However, on the fundament of the metamorphosis of the railway to electric urban speed railways were growing even more gigantic visions of reconstruction of Berlin than in the 1870s. The initiators of these visions were not the magistrate or reformers of housing as before but entrepreneurs as Siemens or Rathenau, banks as the Deutsche Bank, the Dresdner Bank or the Berlin Handelsgesellschaft as well as terrain companies. It was especially the latter ones that projected a radial system of speed train lines on the model of American cities that would enable to travel from a diameter of 30 to 40 kilometres within half an hour to the city centre. The realisation of these plans would have turned the whole region upside down and would have developed house and living areas for no less than ten or twelve millions people.(55) One could say the planners faced courageous the problems of the time – and they failed grandiose, because the vision essentially based on statistical projections of a demographic tendency of the decades before. But the immigration figures to Berlin dramatically dropped in the years before World War One and the vision of a Berlin with ten million inhabitants finally vanished during the War and its aftermath. More or less all German cities stagnated since then, while the American ones continued to grow because of the ongoing immigration and were developing often to metropolises with several millions inhabitants. This was why they were considered as of particular dynamism and modernity for a long time.(56)

However, the metamorphosis of the railway took place at the beginning of a new century. The electrified means of mass-traffic as tramways, undergrounds and S-trains helped to free up the streets and created space for a new, noisy and smellier piece of equipment, the motor car. The new century developed and brought with it a tremendous increase in motor-traffic and the reduction of railway networks all over the world. Moreover, there was not only the replacement of the railway as a key transport facility but also a diminishing role of public transport and again a totally reconstructions of the cities. The triumphant of motorisation after World War Two was caused by many factors and had many consequences. The urban sphere spread out into the region with enormous side effects upon our social and cultural lifestyle.(57) It is due to the proliferation of millions of commuters that the volume of traffic has increased so tremendously in recent years. Therefore, it can be safely said that car traffic is the main perpetrator responsible for the more negative phenomena occurring in our modern day cities.
Roth and Polino wrote about their introduction on the City and Railways in Europe volume: “Although personal mobility does have clear advantages, there is a growing feeling that its advantages are quickly being outweighed by its disadvantages. One disadvantage is that when cars are not being driven they take up valuable public urban space. This means that a vast amount of public space is not available for other uses. Secondly, the permanent stream of motor cars cuts cities and towns up into a thousand little pieces that block the routes of pedestrians. As a result of the increasing devastation of public space, people have been forced back into smaller pedestrian precincts. This growing emphasis on improving and enlarging the traffic system has meant a serious reduction of the space available for pedestrians. The motor car pollutes the air one breathes. It causes noise. It diminishes the quality of life for every resident.”(58)
Indeed, while in the past several decades the advantages have always more or less balanced the disadvantages, nowadays the number of complaints about noise and motor-car emissions in all major cities is on the rise. This is why the next logical question to be asked is: Will the so-called ‘motor car society’ (Automobilgesellschaft) probably only survive for a relatively short period of time? Will these problems give birth to a renaissance in rail construction of cities? All in all, the motor car society stretches now over four or five decades which is a brief period in the history of urbanisation. Although motor traffic is currently the predominant mode of transport throughout the world, it has become a growing burden in the densely populated metropolises or city agglomerations in Europe. Unrestricted private vehicle traffic collides more and more with the limited capacity of streets. The motorisation and the immense increase in mobility by the motorcar came to an end or in a crisis because of the limited capacities of the road system. The older terms of traffic jam, Stau, or embouteillage of the nineteenth century have being used once again as this phenomenon has become widespread throughout societies in the modern world.
But the problems are even bigger than that they did not only touch upon European and North-American metropolises the indeed affect all urban agglomerations of the world. In the last four decades mankind has doubled. Within every continent people have been migrating to big cities and metropolises. Another striking development is that of people making their way by air from anywhere in the world to the centres of the global economy. These gigantic streams of migration are extremely mobile and transcontinental.(59) Growing city agglomerations, metropolises, or megalopolises seem to be the most likely form that urban living will take throughout the entire world. If we follow projections on the future of cities, one can imagine that what we are experiencing at the moment is only the beginning of a second phase of urbanisation.(60)
Indeed, the account State of world population published 2007 by the UN carefully examines the demographic consequences and the progress of urbanisation worldwide. There, researches compares similarities and differences of the first stage of urbanisation with the second one that current took place. The authors wrote: “The first urbanization wave took place in North America and Europe over two centuries, from 1750 to 1950: an increase from 10 to 52 per cent urban and from 15 to 423 million urbanites. In the second wave of urbanization, in the less developed regions, the number of urbanites will go from 309 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2030. In those 80 years, these countries will change from 18 per cent to some 56 per cent urban. At the beginning of the 20th century, the now developed regions had more than twice as many urban dwellers as the less developed (150 million to 70 million). Despite much lower levels of urbanization, the developing countries now have 2.6 times as many urban dwellers as the developed regions (2.3 billion to 0.9 billion). This gap will widen quickly in the next few decades. At the world level, the 20th century saw an increase from 220 million urbanites in 1900 to 2.84 billion in 2000. The present century will match this absolute.”(61)
Moreover they are the opinion that “the huge increases in urban population in poorer countries are part of a “second wave” of demographic, economic and urban transitions, much bigger and much faster than the first. The first wave of modern transitions began in Europe and North America in the early 18th century. In the course of two centuries (1750–1950), these regions experienced the first demographic transition, the first industrialization and the first wave of urbanization. This produced the new urban industrial societies that now dominate the world. The process was comparatively gradual and involved a few hundred million people. In the past half-century, the less developed regions have begun the same transition. Mortality has fallen rapidly and dramatically in most regions, achieving in one or two decades what developed countries accomplished in one or two centuries, and the demographic impacts of these mortality changes have been drastically greater. Fertility declines are following – quite rapidly in East and South-East Asia and Latin America and more slowly in Africa. In both waves, population growth has combined with economic changes to fuel the urban transition. Again, however, the speed and scale of urbanization today are far greater than in the past. This implies a variety of new problems for cities in poorer countries. They will need to build new urban infrastructure – houses, power, water, sanitation, roads, commercial and productive facilities – more rapidly than cities anywhere during the first wave of urbanization. Two further conditions accentuate the second wave. In the past, overseas migrations relieved pressure on European cities. Many of those migrants, especially to the Americas, settled in new agricultural lands that fed the new cities. Restrictions on international migration today make it a minor factor in world urbanization. Finally, the speed and size of the second wave are enhanced by improvements in medical and public health technology, which quickly reduce mortality and enable people to manage their own fertility. Developing and adapting forms of political, social and economic organization to meet the needs of the new urban world is a much greater challenge.”(62)
But the account did not only refer to the current situation. The authors attempt to describe the ongoing development up to the future of 2030 and they resume: “In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost 5 billion.”(63) Then the towns and cities of the developing world will make up 80 per cent of urban humanity.(64) At the end of the account, in the chapter “Preparing the Urban Transition. A Last Word” they took conclusions for some wishful reforms in global perspective. There they do not envisage an ease of the burden of growing megalopolises by decentralisation but demand more efficiency in urban structures. They emphasise the consequent use of methods of city planning and investments in mobility in these extreme dense populated city landscapes. There demand did not only refer to investment in streets but also in all types of rail systems. “The anti-urban policies common in the developing world during the last quarter-century misapprehend both the challenges and the opportunities of urban growth. (…). For humankind to benefit from the urban transition, its leaders must first accept it as both inevitable and important for development. They must recognize the right of the poor to what the city has to offer and the city’s potential to benefit from what the poor have to bring. Rather than attempting in vain to prevent urban expansion, planners must objectively examine the available policy options for addressing it and building on its possibilities. (…) Cities must look urgently to the future. The projected expansion of the urban population in Asia and Africa, from 1.7 to 3.4 billion over a period of only 30 years, and the reduced level of available resources, stress the need for a more imaginative but pragmatic response. (…). Decisions taken today in cities across the developing world will shape not only their own destinies but the social and environmental future of humankind.”(65) Meanwhile investors have caught the ball on and are planning investments in infrastructure of no less than 80.000 billion Dollars for the next two decade or 6.000 billion dollars in the next three years. Infrastructure means “electricity and water supply, modern streets and modern railway systems up to undergrounds” as a current article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has put it.(66)
What is the consequence of all of this? The consequences of this could either be an extremely high density of living space, or a further spreading outward into the surrounding region, or both. In either case this new dynamic in urbanisation in the near future will require new means of efficient and rational traffic systems for cities. The capacity of these new systems of transport has to be high and in addition, quieter and almost emission free. They must also be so well constructed as to minimally encroach upon the already limited city space in which 80 per cent of the World’s population will live. It is precisely because of this current situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century that the question of efficient traffic systems in such densely populated living spheres and the role of railways as linking networks in and between cities re-appears. The requirement for the urban future demands that we re-examine the urban past with its nineteenth century densely constructed cities in a new light. It is from there that fruitful theoretical discussions can harvest a richness of practical experiences about the current problem of how to solve traffic problems in a more and more crowded world.

“City and Railway” means interdependencies between both sides. It also means a metamorphosis of the city as well as of the technical system. As we witness the different types of railway networks spreading out from city centres to suburbs, from metropolises into the region and from city to city, it is clear that the repercussions are many. Railways speeded up dynamic processes; they divided prosperous cities from those that were forced into stagnation, they stimulated competition between cities and as a result, a new hierarchy of the city-system evolved, they were also used as symbols for modernity and the modernisation of cities and especially for capitals. Because of their importance, we find discussions on railway construction in many cases overlapped by general political debates.
Cities benefit from railways in economic and social way and railway lines structure cities. Railways brought in new culture, new identities and new representations. Railway stations were new buildings in the city’s environment. A new territory was born, a place of exchanges that brought cities within a network of national and international connections. With a railway station a city became part of a greater chain of production and consumption in a network without borders. If the railway station became a kind of territorial marker for the cities, it stressed not only the hierarchic relation within the town, but also the position and role of the city in that new network. But a railway station was also constructed within the rationale of a network, built up by others. In the 19th century inhabitants and the town council had a lot of questions about that new place of commerce and travel. The need to accommodate the railway companies posed new questions to city councils, not only about the level of urbanism, but also about network building, the geography of transport and city architecture. Detailed research into the complex relations between cities and their rapidly growing hinterlands and into the transformation of cities by the early railway lines would help to understand the potential of railway locations for our near future. But railway stations also affect people’s behaviour in other ways. The station not only helps to transport the masses; it brought in new elements in policing the traveller, the user of train transport.

• Cities in a network of railway lines and how they made use of them
  
• Railways inside the city: How citizens made use of them and how they effected to the transformation of cities and Protest against cutting lines, industrial infrastructure sites, but also as symbols for the image of the city, for representation and architectural monuments
• Railways as the connections for the landscape of large metropolises and for the integration of suburbia in past, present and future
  

Beside river and canal shipping, the network of rails existed before modern road construction started, and it had to be taken into consideration in all decisions about large investments on road modernisation in the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Europeans and North Americans believed that they lived in a century of railways, and that investments had to be made into the railway system. This conviction lasted only two or three decades. In that time, the number of cars in the United States increased from 1.3 million in 1913 to 26.5 million in 1930, and in Europe from 1.1 million in 1922 to 5.1 million in 1930. Before the First World War, one of every 81 inhabitants in the United States owned a car. Twenty years later it was one in six. In Europe the development was less dramatic. Before the First World War, in France, one in 437, and in Germany, only one in 1567 citizens owned a car, whereas during the 1930s it was one in 40 in France and one in 131 in Germany. (1) It became evident that investments in the road system could be profitable and could greatly increase the mobility of the society as a whole.
After the Second World War, there was a shift in the transport policies of more or less all developed industrial societies to motorisation and modern road construction. Transport historians have reflected on this shift and drawn the conclusion that the period from the 1920s to the 1950s was characterised by sharp competition between rails and road – Straße und Schiene – chemines de fer et routes. In the journal of the Association of German Railway Administrations (Verein Deutschern Eisenbahnverwaltungen), railway officials complained about increasing competition from motor cars: “Today, the situation of public transport presents to the observer the image of a struggle of all against all, in which the governmental authorities are helpless and in which the law of the jungle is ruthlessly applied.” (2) The director of the Deutsche Reichsbahn Gesellschaft, Julius Dorpmüller, calculated that the losses to the railway from competition from trucks in goods transport in 1930 were 250 million Reichsmarks. He envisioned that further losses in the next year would amount to 500 million Reichsmarks. He demanded protection from the state and laws for regulation of the tariff system, and he decided to take over the largest road haulage company, Schenker, foreseen for all transport to and from railway stations. (3) The answer of the motor car lobby was harsh. (4) In other European countries where there were state-run railways, and also in the US and the UK where there were strong private railway companies, similar debates took place.
Sometimes observers interpreted the conflict as an insurmountable contradiction that would end with the defeat of one of these systems. Most believed that the railway – a child of the 19th century – would lose the contest. Indeed, nowadays statistics show impressive shifts in the relationship between rail and road transport during the 20th century, and, at first, supported such beliefs. From a dominant transport system for passengers and goods traffic, railways have now declined to become a niche business of the worldwide transport market. Nearly 83 per cent of personal transportation is done by automobile and only 7.3 per cent by railways worldwide. (5) Does this mean the railway has gone from being a monopoly to near-nonexistence – from being a provider for all to a quantité negligeable? No. There is a downward trend, but one must pay attention to several details that affect the data. First, the statistics are relative, expressing a relationship. In absolute figures, rail transport increased in most countries of the world during the 20th century. The background is the tremendous increase in global mobility. Second, the idea that the railway had a monopoly on transportation at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century is incorrect. (6) Even in the time of the so-called Railway Age, most transportation took place on roads. The vehicles included carts, coaches, horse- and motorbuses, bicycles, and, indeed, the first motor cars. The problem is, these forms of transport appeared in statistics only in exceptional cases. In fact, we have no reliable statistics on short distance transportation within villages and cities, or between villages and cities that were not part of the rail network. In Germany, only 9000 out of a total of 24,000 villages and cities had a railway station. (7) This means that 15,000 population centres were not directly connected with the railway network, even in a country with one of the densest railway networks in the world. Moreover, many parts of the world had no railway lines at all. To sum up, railways were far from having a transportation monopoly. Third, there has been a change in the relationship between rails and roads in the last two decades, a slight increase in the proportion of rail transport vis-a-vis road transport. This is why some feel encouraged to speak of a “renaissance” of railways. (8)
In some countries we find three areas of positive development in rail transport in comparison with its competitors, airplanes and automobiles.

• Over long distances, high-speed trains successfully compete with airplanes. Railways might make further inroads into the business travel market if airlines have to raise their prices as a result of additional taxes, increase in fuel prices and political decisions to protect the environment. Extra time for security is another disadvantage of air transport. Meanwhile, the high-speed rail networks are becoming denser, more transnational and more efficient. And they’re not only in Europe and Japan anymore: they’re spreading to North America, Russia and China.(9)
  
• Rail transport increases in urban agglomerations when the capacity of the road network reaches its limits. In many countries, local and regional public rail transport has increased in the last 30 years. Large cities in the USA and in Asia have made large-scale investments in urban rail systems.
• Special services in goods transport are flourishing, for example container transportation from harbour to hinterland, bringing national railway companies into global transportation networks.(10) The consequences are far-reaching. Whereas in the 1990s, many transport experts would not bet a penny on the future of railways in goods transport, today many European railway companies are forming strategic alliances and taking over companies in neighbouring countries to compete more efficiently on the European goods transport market. (11)
  

All in all, experts predict an increase in rail-transport in the near future: in exact figures, from 7.3 to 8.3 per cent by 2025. (12) Can we therefore speak about a shift from road to rail at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a reversal of what happened at the beginning of the twentieth century? This is not very likely. Most transportation experts see a continuation of car mobility into the foreseeable future. But probably the question is the wrong one, and we pose it because we are looking too closely at the aspect of competition and underestimating the fact of the interdependence of the two networks. The facts are very clear: The rail network developed successfully as answer to the limited capacity of road services in the nineteenth century, but it only broadened the transport market and did not generally replace road transport. The increase in the importance of road transportation in the twentieth century was the answer to the limitations of rail transport, for example its unsuitability for cargo freight or door-to-door service. But rail transport did not vanish in the twentieth century any more than road transport vanished in the nineteenth century when railways revolutionised goods transportation and human mobility with far-reaching consequences. (13) Obviously there is room for both transport networks, and it is not controversial to speak of them as interdependent. That interdependence is about a major vuwg of this book, which presents seventeen papers that focus on the question of mobility on rails and roads, and on the innovations that had to be made to transform the two systems into modern and interconnected networks for all kinds of mobility in the 20th century. The papers are based on the latest research on the history of rails and roads. Some of them were presented at the Seventh International Conference on the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M): Energy and Innovation in Lucerne, Switzerland, November 2009.

First, they were characterised by wider and less dense populated territories. This was one of the main reasons for a less dense network. Second, this network had been constructed with a delay of two or three decades compared with the Western parts of Europe.
All in all Eastern Europe and its railway networks belonged to the so called “periphery” of Europe which formed a ring surrounding the centre with states as France, Great Britain, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany. This ring includes besides Eestern Europe also parts of Southern and Northern Europe. Eastern Europe, that was the landscape between Russia’s Asian parts and Greek (which is seen as a Southern European country belonging to the Mediterranean world). The railways there were created and developed under the rule of four Empires: The German, Habsburg, Ottoman and the tsarist Russian Empire.
You can describe it also as a network between two important lines of the World’s railway net: The Transsiberian Railway and the Orient Railway (later lengthened by the Bagdad Railway) which both connect Europe with Asia’s Far and Middle East. This network developed the wide space of Middle and Eastern Europe and formed the structure of settlement alongside the lines. There villages, cities and industrial sites crew up whereas other places which did not achieve becoming connected to the tracks fall back in their development.(1)
But this network formed no homogenous entity and was by far not dominated by economic reason. We find in every region of the space certain particularities. To start with, Russia did not develop a space-covering network with many railway knots but a structure with only a few centres because of the wide space and because of the tradition of central government.(2) Russia’s first railway line with a length of 27 kilometres were built between the metropolis Petersburg and Zarskoje Selo the seat of the tsarist family – as in Prussia (Berlin-Potsdam) and France (Paris-Versailles).(3) After this prestige project further lines were constructed not for economic but for strategic reason – for example the line from Warsaw to Skernewizy at the border region of tsarist Russia. However, in 1851 followed the first far distance line from Petersburg to Moscow – currently rebuilt as a high speed rail connection. In the 1850s the railway development stagnated and flourished first after the defeat in the Crimean War. The construction of the 4.300 kilometer long line from Moscow to Sewastopol – even for strategic reason was made possible by French capital organised by the Crédit mobilier of the brother Pereire. That was the beginning of Russians increasing state debt which skyrocketed up to several billion pounds up to 1913.(4)
However the network increased from 27 to 76.250 kilometres in 1910. This was at this time the biggest but by far not the densiest railway network in Europe. One of the particularities of the Russian railway network was that the main lines had been built for administration and military reason. Moscow formed always the centre of the Russian network. In a star structure most lines were directed to the capital. From there Russia with its gigantic landscape became administrable. The railways worked so far as an iron backbone of the Empire. It made the tsarist rule more efficient and stabilised the territories occupied in the Southern and Eastern regions in the 18th and 19th centuries. It structured and developed the economic resources for the purpose of the central government.(5) Characteristic for this kind of network were long distance lines. Obviously these elements worked together when the biggest railway project of Europe were set into life at the end of the 19th century – the so called Transsiberian Railway. This railway made possible the continuation of the imperialistic expansion of the Empire and served as an infrastructure for Russia’s imperialistic interest in Far East Asia – to compete there with other European countries. The expansion program of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century was focussed on territories in China. With the Transsiberian Railway the Empire had a direct railway connection to China’s Northern east. At this time railways were seen as of geo-strategic importance. The colonial powers of Europe saw railway lines as surrounded by spheres of imperialistic interests. This was why Russia (and Japan) established a “railway colony” in Manchuria. The grip to China failed and ended up in a heavy conflict with another imperialistic power – Japan. The Russian-Japan war of 1904 resulted in a harsh defeat and the turmoil of Russia’s first Revolution of 1905. This was the begin of Russia’s decline, the loss of territories during and at the end of World War I, and the establishment of independent states as consequence of the Brest-Litowsk and then Trianon treaty in 1918 and 1920. Together with the loss of territories the Russian network declined from 76.000 to 72.000 kilometres. The retreat of the collapsed Empire opened the way for an independent development of railways in the Baltic States, Poland and the Ukraine.
After revolution, the collapse of the tsarist state, civil war and the establishment of the Bolshevik government the Soviet Union continued the tradition of tsarist Russia and developed its Eastern territories in Asia by the expansion of the railway network there. To mention only a few, the Turksib or the most Nordic railway line of the world to the mines of Norilsk or the famous Baikal-Amur-main line. All in all the length of the network doubled in all these decades and reached 143.000 kilometres in 1983.(6) The situation in Russia is not comparable with the railways of other Eastern Europe countries. In Southeast Europe most of the railway lines were a relict of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires.(7) As in Russia there existed a transcontinental railway for colonial reason: the so called Orient Railway which crossed Austria and Hungary as well as Romania, Bulgaria or on a second track Serbia and the European territories of the Ottoman Empire.(8) The key figure behind the railways investment in the Ottoman part of this line was not a single state as in Russia but Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who established the Société imperiale des chemins de fer de Turquie d’Europe in 1870 and a bit later the Société générale pour l’exploitation des chemins de fer Orientaux based in Paris.(9) He sold all the finished lines to the Deutsche Bank in 1890 which forwarded them to the Zurich Bank for Oriental Railways that had been established by German, Austrian and Swiss banks.(10) The other parts of the line were built by the Habsburg Empire, Serbia and Bulgaria either by the state or by private investors in many cases by foreign companies.(11) The first through going train between Vienna and Istanbul ran on 12 August 1888. Afterwards began the run for concessions of investors from Great Britain, France and Germany and from other European states in the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire and planning and construction of a line up to Bagdad.(12)

One can see the Orient railway as the starting point of Germany’s imperial interest into the Near and Middle East but many European countries were engaged in this railway project. However, as the railway imperialism of Russia failed in Far East, so did the European in Near East and ended up in World War I and the breakdown of all four empires that dominated the Eastern-Europen space. Between the losers of the war – Germany, Austria, the Soviet Union and the modern Turkey – the winners established a cordon sanitâire of independent states. It is not space enough in these short remarks to present all of the new states and their particular railway history but one can imagine the complexity and particularities of the multiethnic kingdom of Yugoslavia and the role of Serbia played in this kingdom as well as in the peoples Republic established after World War II when reading the abstract of Henry Jacolin: The Access of Serbia to the Sea (1832–2006). With the collapse of Yugoslavia after 1990 and the transformation into a series of new states the railways were split into companies of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Montenegro: All in all a network stemming from the Habsburg, Hungarian and Ottoman railway lines with a length of 11.000 kilometres including the isolated railway of Albania.(13)
As in the former territories of Yugoslavia the state railway construction in Bulgaria and Romania started with a delay of three decades. One can see the Orient Railway as a backbone of the developing network in both countries. We can read more in the abstract of Valcheva Rumyana: „The Heritage of Bulgarian Railways”. All in all both countries developed a railway network of 15.000 kilometres. The particularity of the Romanian net was that it was not only influenced by the Habsburg and Ottoman Empire but also by Germany, i. e. Prussia. The first Romanian line was built by the German railway king Henry Bethel Strousberg. Between 1869 and 1873 he constructed four railway lines in Romania. All four lines started in Bucharest and then led to Roman, Pitesi, Tehatsch and Berlad. He planned an infrastructural backbone that would be able to support Romania’s rapid evolution into a modern state.(14) The plan failed. The French-German war of 1870–1871 imbalanced his railway trust and the first project which went bankrupt was the railway projects in Romania. This caused a shock wave that heavily shattered Germany because the breakdown of Strousberg marked the beginning of a new debate on the nationalisation of German’s railways. At first Bismarck failed with several initiatives but in 1879 he achieved the nationalisation of the Prussian Railways (not of the Empire). The other German states followed him. This is why one can say the origins of Germany’s state railways lies in Romania. However, after the breakdown of Strousberg the Romanian state took over the railways and formed the Caile Ferate Romane (CFR).(15)
Next to Romania lies the Ukraine. On the history and particularities of the Ukrainian railway see the contribution Ihor Zhaloba: “The railways of the Socialist Ukranian Republik: 1920 to 1990”. Also we have a lot of contributions about the railway history in Hungary.
For this reason it is enough to mention only the fact that in Hungary the railways developed independent from Austria although the state as one part of the double monarchy was closely tied with Austria and. But already in 1867 both networks became separated and the Magyar Államvasutak (MÁV) was founded in 1868. The company existed still today even its structure and the territory of its service changed several times.(16)
As of the Hungarian railway history we have for the development of railways in Czech and Slovakia the contributions of Martin Kvizda, Ivan Jakubec, Miklós Devecz and Milan Klubal who shed light on the history of railways in both countries wich took over Habsburg and Hungarian railway line on their new states territory. Contrary to Czech, Slovakia and Hungary the railways of Poland (Polskie Koleje Panstwowe) were taken from parts of the Russian, Austrian and German net. The net had a length of 16.000 kilometres and was not very dense with the exception in the industrial regions.(17)The Polish Republic added further lines to the net. Then Germany occupied the country, lost again the war, and Poland were shifted westwards, lost territories to the Soviet Union and gained new territories from Germany. Up to 1980 2.200 kilometres of new railways were built: among them the line from Kattowitz (Katowice) to Warsaw (Warszawa) and further on to Danzig (Gdansk) as new main line. In the 1980s the Polish state railway run a net of 24.305 kilometre length.(18)
The railroads of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were all a part of the Soviet Baltic Railroad during the Soviet era. The lines are not designed according to the present country borders and the trains are still mostly the same which were “inherited” from the Soviet SZD Baltic Railroad at the time when the Baltic States regained their independence. Some of them have a long tradition as the Lithuanian railway which lasts back to 1857. They became independent state railways in 1992. Unfortunately we have no paper on their history.

Last but not least, Germany has to be mentioned. Of course it is not seen as part of Eastern Europe but had been once an influencing power for the East, then partly dominated by the East, i. e. the Soviet Union. It was no accident that the so called Eastern Railway of the Prussian network was built with enormous support of the state. Moreover a most important debate sprang up on the principle purpose of railway construction – economic reason or administration and military one. This debate was initiated by the question of financing and caused indirect the revolution of 1848 when liberals (i.e. among them railway entrepreneur David Hansemann and Camphausen et al.) at the Vereinigte Landtag in Berlin rejected the states wish of financial contributions to the Eastern Railway from Berlin up to Königsberg. However, Germany played an important role for the development of railways in Eastern Europe. It has been mentioned the Orient Railway and the activities of Deutsche Bank at the Balkan and Ottoman Empire, and it has been mentioned the railway king Henry B. Strousberg and his activities in Russia, Hungary and Romania. With the defeat of World War I and the breakdown of its imperialistic activities it lost territories to the new states of Poland and Czecheslovakia and with it important railway lines. Five articles are addressed to this subject, the contributions of Jan Musekamp, Tomáš Nigrin, Ralf Roth, Peter F. N. Hörz and Marcus Richter and Rainer Mertens.

We were very pleased from the intense debate between academics who are involved in research studies on railway history and railway historians from transport museums and professionals of different railway companies at our conference. All of them experts on their fields and this seem to be a good fundament for a collection of articles on the Eastern Europe railways.
The conference started with a discussion about theoretical models concerning the role railways played in history and especially the paritcular role they played in societies in societies of Eastern Europe countries. The theory of a normal life cycle of big infrastructure systems as the railways – of an up and down depending on the available facilies on the transport market was confronted with detailed descriptions and interpretations of the particularities history of the railway system in Eastern Europe. As striking examples of non economic factors that had driven the railway system forward were mentioned the construction of railway lines for strategic and military reason. A lot of contributors stressed this point and brought many cases into the audience’s consideration.(19) Probably we have to face that this is indeed a characteristic that distinct the Eastern Europe railway system very clear from the Western Europe part of the network.
Another particularity which played a central role in papers and debate was the permanent shift of borders in the aftermath of World War One and Second and the consequences this had on the railway system, its structure and economic, political and public use. This was a central line of argumentation and run through more than half a dozen papers of the conference.(20) A third outcome was the role the four empires of Russia, Germany, Habsburg and Ottoman had played in the construction and structure of the railway network. After the decline from three of these four, Russia survived in the form of the Sowjetunion. The Sowjetunion had a tremendous impact on the Eastern Europe railway system. At first this is obvious the case in Ukraine and after Worl War II in all countries of this part of Europe.
After World War II most of these railway companies became part of the planned economy carried through by the Soviet Union. This means regulation, less dynamic, bureaucratic structures of the limited resources, but on the other side less competition with other transport means as motor cars and air transport and a higher ranking in the economic order as in the Western countries which supported competition by motorisation.(21) But one can imagine that more than the planned economy system the isolation caused a certain delay in the technological development.
The divided Europe in the Cold War period was marked by severed traffic routes, dead end railway stations along the border, limitations of the right to move and travel, a general slowdown, and bureaucratic obstacles. The people were separated from the network in Middle and Western Europe. It became difficult to travel from West to East and in many cases impossible making journeys vice versa from East to West.
The conference papers shed light in the understanding of this fact and they improved our knowledge what has been done afterwards, after 1990 – the big transition from a planned economy to a market system as in Western Europe. The conference intensively debated the cases of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia.(22) Since 1990 Europe’s two halves, torn apart by the Cold War, are beginning to come together again. The political changes were accompanied by tremendous economic and social changes, and changes in the transport industry. Europe has made an effort to reconnect severed railway lines, to repair and restart decommissioned and blocked East-West connections. At the conference we spoke about the problems of this transition accompanied by shrinking railway networks, reduction of employment and serious problems in financing the railway infrastructure. But also the conference discussed the outlook and optimistic views that railway could survive when the new management face the problems and that there not necessary an end of railways has to be envisaged.
It is obvious that a modern and reunited Europe cannot exist without a unified and modernised transportation system in which the railway mode has an important part to play. Speed connections between the regions should link them closer together. Probably this could get a bit more intensified. Based on the modernisation of railways in Eastern Europe there existed extrapolations of the progress in mobility and they estimated that the time-space correlation of Europe will further on shrink – also in its Eastern part. This means more and more centres will be connected by a more dynamic railway network. This and of course innovations in all other transport modes should lead to a more homogenous development in economic wealth, social harmony and political freedom and stability. That is the vision of Europe. But in between is a transition period of unknown length – not only for the East but also for the South which began their modernisation efforts 30 years ago in the 1980s. For the Eastern parts of Europe the transition lasted meanwhile 20 years. These 20 years met our particular interest.

• main lines of the historical development of railways in Eastern European countries since the beginning in the mid of the nineteenth century
• the political, geopolitical and economical context in Eastern Europe in the period between 1945 and 1989
• the impact ot the transition starting in 1989 on the railways systems as a whole and the national railway companies in particular
• the radical transformation and the drastic increase in competition
• the efforts that have been undertaken for technological and administrative modernisation and the discussion on privatisation
• the role West European plans and visions played for a Trans-European Railway Network (TEN)

The conference ended with a session of four papers that provided an additional access to history. Not only the historical description and interpretation but also the heritage is important for the understanding of railway history. The papers of Valcheva Rumyana, András Szendrey, József Soltész and Rainer Mertens were focused on the question how to preserve the left overs and making people interest in the railway mode of transport. Rumyana presented an overview of the “The Heritage of Bulgarian Railways”. Szendrey delivered interesting insights in “Financial managing questions of the preservation of historical and technical relics” and Soltész introduced in his paper “Preserved Steam Locomotives in Hungary from 1966 to 2009” into the collection of the Transport Museum in Budapest. Last but not least Rainer Mertens talked about “The Heritage of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and its Presentation in the Deutsche Bahn Museum in Nuremberg”. The conference was seen as a success by the organisers and it is intended to publish the papers making them available for a broader public.

Verkehr und Logistik, Fortbewegung und Infrastruktur sind, obwohl sie das Alltagsleben von Abermillionen von Menschen und ganzer Gesellschaften bestimmen, bisher nur am Rande als geschichtsmächtige Kräfte und Faktoren zur Kenntnis genommen und erforscht worden. Dabei ist offensichtlich, dass Entfernung und Nähe, Versorgung und Verteilung von Gütern, Ideen und Menschen ohne das Medium des Verkehrs nicht denkbar sind. Verkehr und Mobilität haben den globalen Raum, in dem wir uns bewegen, erst möglich gemacht.
Verkehr ist keine Konstante, sondern eine äußerst dynamische Relation in den vielfältigen gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen. In den letzten 200 Jahren sind extrem effiziente Transportsysteme und -netze entstanden, die nicht nur die Möglichkeiten grenzüberschreitender Verkehre stark ausgeweitet haben, sondern auch die transnationale und interkontinentale Mobilität. Mit der Verbilligung aller Transportleistungen, dem Sinken der Transport- und Reisezeiten sowie der enormen Ausweitung der Transportkapazitäten von Schiff, Eisenbahn, Flugzeug und Lastkraftwagen – und nicht zu vergessen der Nachrichten- und Kommunikationsnetze – veränderten sich nicht nur die europäischen, sondern insgesamt die globalen Beziehungen. Das hat Auswirkungen auf die Geschichtsschreibung. In den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten erleben die transnationale, die europäische und die Weltgeschichte einen großen Aufschwung und man kann mit gutem Grund von einer Renaissance der Universalgeschichte sprechen, nachdem sie in der Hochzeit der Nationalgeschichtsschreibung de facto untergegangen war.(1)
Was kann aber eine sinnvolle transnationale, ja europäische Geschichte sein, womit soll sie sich jenseits der variierenden nationalen und kulturellen Besonderheiten der Staaten und Länder dieses Kontinents beschäftigen? Leopold Ranke hat in seiner Vorrede zu seinem Weltgeschichtefragment einen wichtigen Hinweis gegeben: »Die Aufgabe der welthistorischen Wissenschaft«, bestehe darin, den »Zusammenhang zu erkennen, den Gang der großen Begebenheiten, welche alle Völker verbindet und beherrscht, nachzuweisen.«(2) Man solle also nicht nach dem Trennenden, sondern nach dem Suchen, was die Völker und Nationen miteinander verbindet. Diese Einschätzung teilt ein beträchtlicher Teil der heutigen Historiker, die sich mit transnationaler oder Weltgeschichte beschäftigen. Einen großen Einfluss erzielten in diesem Kontext die Studien von John and William McNeill. Beide argumentieren, dass es in jeder Epoche wichtige Einflüsse über die politischen Grenzen hinweg gegeben hat, und dass gerade die »Kontakte« mit fremden Kulturen eine Schlüsselrolle für den ökonomischen, sozialen, politischen und militärischen Fortschritt jeder Zivilisation, jedes Staates gespielt hätten. Diese Argumentation erwies sich als außerordentlich fruchtbar und inspirierte zahlreiche Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der transnationalen Beziehungen und insbesondere auch der transnationalen »communication networks«.(3) Tatsächlich lassen Untersuchungen auf dem Feld der Verbindungen zwischen den Staaten, Ländern und Kontinenten im 20. Jahrhundert reichhaltigere Ergebnisse erwahrten als eine Konzentration auf die Barrieren und Hürden oder Separierung und Absonderung, obwohl auch dies sicher zu einer Geschichte der großen Räume gehört. Wenn wir auf die letzten 200 Jahre zurückblicken, sprechen die zahlreichen Prozesse der Kommunikation und des Austauschs, der Überwindung der kontinentalen und maritimen Räume aber eine eindeutige Sprache. Nur mit Blick auf sie lassen sich die internationale Arbeitsteilung und ihre Folgen, die weltweiten Kapitalflüsse sowie der internationale kulturelle Austausch verfolgen.(1) Das legt nahe, dass Kommunikation, Verkehr, Mobilität, Migration, Transfer und Austausch Schlüsselbegriffe für eine Geschichtsforschung sind, die große Räume – den europäischen, kontinentale wie globale – beschreiben und interpretieren will.

Warum wurde das große Thema des Verkehrs und der Kommunikation in der Europäischen Geschichte bisher so stiefmütterlich behandelt? Das hat vor allem eine Ursache: Die Revolutionierung des Verkehrs war eindeutig ein Kind des 19. Jahrhunderts und setzte sich parallel zum Aufstieg des Nationalstaats durch. Deshalb wurde Verkehr im Allgemeinen und insbesondere der Eisenbahn- und Schiffsverkehr nach Ländern getrennt – sozusagen als nationale Aufgabe – untersucht und beschrieben.(5) Damit bekam jede Studie immer nur einen Teil der weltweiten Netze zu fassen und konnte nur einen Teil der Auswirkungen berücksichtigen. Im Ergebnis zerfiel die Vorstellung von dem Ganzen in zahllose Splitter und Fragmente. Das Bewusstsein von dem Zusammenhang, das am Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts durchaus vorhanden war, ging verloren. Aber jedes Infrastrukturnetzwerk ist mehr als die Summe seiner Teile und das bedeutet, dass historische Untersuchungen über die nationalen Verkehrsnetzwerke von Deutschland, Portugal oder Russland und so weiter kein Verständnis für die europäische oder die europaweite Kommunikationsstruktur liefern – insbesondere dann, wenn der auf der Hand liegende Umstand, dass sich die Eisenbahnstrecken und Schifffahrtslinien jenseits der nationalen Grenzen fortsetzen, nur selten problematisiert wurde.(6)
Das ist ein bemerkenswertes Defizit, denn es ist ja nicht zu übersehen, in jedem Land waren die Verkehrsverbindungen ein offenes System mit zahlreichen Verbindungen in die benachbarten Staaten. Handelskarawanen überschritten seit alters her jegliche Grenzen, die Postgesellschaften bauten ihre Netze grenzüberschreitend auf und auch bei den Eisenbahnen gab es von Anfang an oft mehrere Grenzen passierende Durchgangszüge. Weil dies zu wenig Berücksichtigung fand, kann man in der Konsequenz auf vielen Feldern Vereinseitigungen und Beschränkungen feststellen. Bei näherem Nachdenken finden sich noch mehr transnationale Aspekte und Eigenschaften. Wie soll man mit einer national beschränkten Sicht etwa den Prozess des technologischen Fortschritts im Verkehrsbereich erklären, der nur in wenigen Fällen auf den nationalen Eigenleistungen nur eines Landes beruhte. Gerade die Tätigkeit der Ingenieure war international ausgerichtet, ihr Wissen bezogen sie aus einem internationalen Austausch der Erfahrungen und Ideen. Zahlreiche der bedeutenden Innovationen beruhten auf dem Austausch von Ingenieuren und Architekten gleich mehrerer Länder. Auch die Investitionen im Verkehrsbereich, beispielsweise in das Eisenbahnnetz zwischen 1830 und 1880, waren in vielen Fällen von Anfang an eine internationale Angelegenheit. Viele der als nationale Tat gepriesenen Ländernetze entpuppen sich in Wahrheit als das Werk ausländischer Investoren, Banken und Eisenbahngesellschaften, die auf der Suche nach zusammenhängenden Verkehrsmärkten bereits damals in großen, die Grenzen außer acht lassenden Verkehrsräumen dachten und ihre Investitionen entsprechend ausrichteten.(7) Nicht zuletzt mit Hilfe dieser international agierenden Investoren wurde ein gigantisches Netzwerk errichtet, das man mit gutem Grund ein europäisches nennen kann, auch wenn es kein politisches Zentrum gegeben hat, von dem die Initiative ausgegangen wäre und das Projekt der Europäischen Union erst 120 bis 130 Jahre später ins Leben trat.(8)
Was für das Netz der Eisenbahnen gilt, gilt im Prinzip für alle Transport- und Kommunikationsnetze. Das Wachsen dieser Netze und ihre die Grenzen überwindende und verbindende Eigenschaft liefern somit ein ersts Beispiel für eine europäische Geschichte jenseits des Nationalstaats. Wie diese europäischen Transport- und Kommunikationsnetze die Geschichte des kontinentalen Raums zwischen Lissabon und Moskau oder Helsinki und Athen ihrerseits wiederum beeinflussten, das ist allerdings immer noch ein Desiderat der Forschung. Man kann diesen unbefriedigenden Befund nicht auf sich beruhen lassen, denn das Verständnis dieser transnationalen Netzwerke ist von fundamentaler Bedeutung für das Verständnis unserer heutigen Gesellschaft. Historiker stehen hier also in der Pflicht.
Vor diesem Hintergrund versteht sich der Sammelband als Anstoß, um einen bisher vernachlässigten vuwgnkomplex in die Diskussion zu bringen, neue Forschungsfelder zu öffnen und eine Brücke aus der Universität in eine rasend sich verändernde Welt zu schlagen. Die 25 Autoren greifen mit Blick auf Europa zentrale Aspekte des umfassenden und komplexen Themas Verkehr und seine Bedeutung für eine moderne europäische Geschichtsschreibung auf und möchten der Forschung damit neue Wege öffnen. Es kam uns in erster Linie darauf an, möglichst viele Aspekte anzureißen, um die Komplexität deutlich zu machen, und es kam uns darauf an, das Thema von vornherein in eine grenzüberschreitende, transnationale Perspektive zu rücken. Beabsichtigt ist also nicht Vollständigkeit, sondern Öffnung von vuwgn und möglichen Bearbeitungsweisen, das Zusammenführen von ganz verschiedenen Partnern, die häufig ohne voneinander zu wissen, an identischen Fragestellungen arbeiten. Interdisziplinarität und Internationalität sind selbstverständliche Voraussetzungen für die Behandlung des Themas »Neue Wege in ein neues Europa«.

Im weiteren Verlauf bediente sich Schlögel deshalb der Thesen von Benedict Anderson, der Nationalitäten als imagined communities begriffen hat und eines der Bilder, in denen sie gedacht wurden, sei das Kartenbild des Nationalstaats gewesen.(2) Im Zeitalter des Nationalismus – und in Ansätzen bereits vorher im Territorialisierungsprozess des Absolutismus – wurde Europa deshalb ganz im Gegensatz zu den Karten der vorherigen Jahrhunderte als eine Ansammlung großer, monochrom eingefärbter Flächen dargestellt. „Das Ende der Imperien ist die große Stunde der Nationalatlanten. jede Nation hat endlich ihre Karte, jede Gesellschaft die Topographie, von der sie immer schon geträumt hat. Endlich können die Städte und Orte die Namen tragen, die sie schon immer hatten oder gehabt haben sollten, die zu tragen ihnen aber verwehrt gewesen war – den stolzen Namen der eigenen Nation.“(3)
Die Grenzen werden nun scharf markiert, fließende Übergänge zeigen die Karten nicht mehr. Das Verschwinden des traditionellen Flickenteppichs wird gefeiert.(4) Noch nicht mit den Hauptfarben eingefärbte Bereiche werden – wie jüngst noch einmal die Untersuchungen von Arnim Wolf und Jeremy Black gezeigt haben – als Störungen des Gesamtbildes angesehen und zeigen nur an, wo die Nationsbildung noch zu ihrem Ende geführt werden müsse.(5)
Hinter dieser Nationalisierung des Kartenbildes trat die geographische Betrachtung, die etwa landschaftliche Zusammenhänge jenseits der Grenzziehungen deutlich macht, ebenso zurück wie Kartendarstellungen, die die grenzüberschreitenden Verbindungen und Gemeinsamkeiten deutlich machten – etwa Verkehrsverbindungen oder strukturelle Gemeinsamkeiten von Regionen in ökonomischer oder kultureller Hinsicht. Das Kartenbild spiegelte im 19. und in weiten Strecken auch im 20. Jahrhundert die Monopolisierung der Sicht auf Europa und den europäischen Raum durch den Nationalismus.(6) Alle grenzüberschreitenden Beziehungen wurden als international, als Beziehungen zwischen den Nationen gedacht, nicht aber als Beziehungen von europäischen Regionen oder Städten oder Unternehmen untereinander und auch nicht als Beziehungen der Güter- und Menschenströme beziehungsweise des Informations- und Kommunikationsaustausches.
Dabei war der Raum seit Jahrhunderten von den grenzüberschreitenden Netzwerken der Straßen- und Flussverbindungen sowie dann später von den Eisenbahntrassen und Leitungen der Telegrafen dicht durchzogen. Die meisten Karten reflektierten nicht die Wirkungen dieser kontinentalen Netze. Aber diese sind vorhanden und entwickelten sich seit dem 18. Jahrhundert als Konsequenz einer dichten Abfolge von Mobilitäts- und Kommunikationsrevolutionen rasant. Sie brachten – so die These – die Entwicklung der einzelnen Länder in eine immer engere Beziehung und mit zunehmender Verdichtung der Kommunikation in einen immer schnelleren Takt. Die über die Kommunikationsnetze miteinander verbundenen europäischen Siedlungsverdichtungen entwickelten sich also nicht zufällig auffallend parallel. Das veranschaulichen so ganz unterschiedliche Metropolen wie Paris, London und Berlin oder Helsinki, Madrid und Barcelona. Alle diese europäischen Zentren zeichneten sich im 19. Jahrhundert gleichermaßen durch ein beträchtliches Größenwachstum aus, es entstanden im Außenbereich zahlreiche Vorortsiedlungen und es bildeten sich im inneren Stadtteile mit separierten Funktionen aus.(7) Die überall ähnliche und sich im Großen und Ganzen parallel vollziehende Entwicklung machte nicht vor Grenzen halt und kümmerte sich wenig um politische Systemunterschiede. Dieser allgemeine Trend zur Verstädterung und Großstadtbildung wurde in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten vor allem aus der Perspektive der Stadtplaner und ihrer im 19. Jahrhundert entstandenen Wissenschaft betrachtet. Die grundlegenden Studien von Leonardo Benevolo, Siegfried Giedion, Françoise Choay, Lars Dybdahl, Gerd Albers und Gerhard Fehl sowie Juan Rodriguez-Lores kamen in ihren Untersuchungen immer wieder auf die internationale Gemeinde der Stadtplaner zurück und maßen ihrem Gedanken- und Erfahrungsaustausch eine hohe Bedeutung bei.(8) Wie kam diese transnationale Wirkung zustande? Wie kann sich das Funktionieren einer derart großräumigen Struktur vorgestellt werden? Nur, indem Stadt- und Verkehrs- beziehungsweise Kommunikationsgeschichte zusammengebracht werden.

Der vorliegende Sammelband „Städte im europäischen Raum – Verkehr, Kommunikation und Urbanität im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert“ betrachtet die Städte im europäischen Raum unter dem Gesichtspunkt ihrer Vernetzung und dementsprechend Stadt, Kommunikation und Raum als eng miteinander verbundene Begriffe. Von zentraler Bedeutung ist die inhaltliche Füllung des Begriffs „Kommunikation“ in Verbindung mit Stadt und Raum. Die Austauschprozesse, die sich zwischen den Städten vollzogen und vollziehen, sind Prozesse der Kommunikation und sie haben materielle und informelle Netze zu ihrer Grundlage, die untersucht werden können. Wir haben uns nicht für eine eingeschränkte verkehrstechnische Lösung dieser Aufgabe entschieden, sondern einen etwas weiter gefassten Begriff von „Kommunikation“ benutzt, der neben dem Verkehr von Menschen und dem Transport von Gütern auch die Rolle von Nachrichten und ihren materiellen Grundlagen, den Nachrichtennetzen, zulässt. Es geht dabei darum, nach transnationalen Kommunikationsmustern und alternativen Vorstellungen von der Gliederung des europäischen Raumes zu fragen, und das bedeutet zum einen, die die Städtelandschaft verbindenden Verkehrs- und Kommunikationsbeziehungen und die ihnen zugrunde liegenden Infrastrukturen, technischen Systeme und Medien zu würdigen.(9) Zum anderen bedeutet dies aber auch die informellen Netzwerke von besonderen Personengruppen und damit die Verbreitung von Ideen in den Blick zu bekommen. Es sollte das gesamte Spektrum an gegenseitigen Austauschprozessen, also Verkehr und Transport von Gütern und Menschen, Migrationbewegungen, Nachrichten und Information sowie Personennetzwerke berücksichtigt werden, ohne den Anspruch zu erheben, dies an dieser Stelle erschöpfend in allen Facetten abarbeiten und ausführen zu können.
Die europäische Dimension ihrer Netzwerke ist den beteiligten Zeitgenossen jenseits ihrer nationalen Überzeugungen immer klar gewesen. In der Frühen Neuzeit wurden die rasselnden Wagen der Postkutschen als eine überwölbende europäische Innovation angesehen und begeistert begrüßt. So heißt es etwa in einer Quelle aus dem 18. Jahrhundert: „Unaussprechlich, unsterblich hat sich der Mann um das ganze Menschengeschlecht verdient gemacht, der uns mit der ietzigen Postanstalt beglücket hat. Unter den in der That einfachen und wenigen Ursachen, durch deren Zusammenfluß unser kleines Europa zum herrschenden Welttheil und zum ausschließenden Size aller Cultur und Politik geworden ist, stehet seine Erfindung oben an. Ohne sie würde der Deutsche in seinem Deutschland fremder seyn, als er nun mittels desselben in Spanien oder Rußland ist. Ohne sie würde der Handel niemals aus seiner Wiege gerissen, noch seine Kenntniß zum Gegenstand der tiefsten Speculation und zu einem der reichhaltigsten Capitel der Regierungs Kunst, d. i. der großen Kunst, das Glück eines Staats zu befördern, gemacht worden seyn. Auch der Adlerflug, welchen unsere neuere Literatur genommen hat, war nicht möglich ohne einen so leichten und schnellen Weg, seine Gedanken, Erfindungen, Aussichten, Vorschläge anderen mitzuteilen. Dadurch allein sind wir in Stand gesetzt worden, in höchstens 6 Wochen an jedem Ende Deutschlands einen Syllogism zu machen, von dessen Vordersätzen der eine in Lissabon der andere in Warschau geholet werden muß. Groß also in jeder Rücksicht ist das Verdienst des Mannes, welchem wir die Erfindung der ietzigen Postanstalt zu verdanken haben.“(10)
Auch die Eisenbahngesellschaften, die ab den 1830er Jahren ins Leben traten, bewahrten sich in der Hochzeit des Nationalismus ein Bewusstsein für die europäische Struktur des Netzes, zu dem sie jeweils einen Teil beitrugen. So war es, um ein Beispiel zu nennen, der besondere Stolz verschiedener europäischer Eisenbahngesellschaften, ziemlich genau zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts eine zentrale Verkehrsachse in der Mitte Europas von Paris nach Warschau fertig gestellt zu haben – nicht einmal 15 Jahre nach dem Beginn des Eisenbahnbaus in Deutschland und nicht einmal 20 Jahre nachdem sich diese Innovation in Europa erstmals als funktionsfähiges System etabliert hatte. In diesem Zusammenhang entstand 1849 die „Eisenbahnkarte von Deutschland“. Obwohl es sich dem Namen nach um eine deutsche Eisenbahnkarte handelt, konterkariert der Inhalt die überladene nationale Ornamentik. Als Symbol für die erstmals mögliche durchgehende Fahrt von Paris nach Warschau sind in der Nähe von Paris und Warschau zwei kleine Eisenbahnen eingezeichnet. Das Netz der Eisenbahnen, das auf dem Straßennetz der Handelsverbindungen und Postkurse aufsetzte, verband in den folgenden Jahrzehnten so effizient wie kein anderes Verkehrsmittel zuvor in erster Linie Städte miteinander, die die Knoten des Netzes bildeten. Im 20. Jahrhundert hat sich das Spektrum der Verkehrs- und Kommunikationssysteme stark ausgeweitet und bildete fortan in den Städten komplexe miteinander verknüpfte modulare Mobilitätsstrukturen.(11)
In der Technik- und Verkehrs- sowie der jüngeren Kommunikationsgeschichte nimmt die Untersuchung dieser Hilfsmittel und ihrer aufwendigen technischen Netze einen breiten Raum ein.(12) Doch meist wird zu wenig in Betracht gezogen, dass die Systeme nicht einfach aus sich heraus funktionieren, sondern komplexe organisatorische Strukturen, Unternehmen und auf diese Funktionen spezialisierte Menschengruppen benötigen, die nicht von ihnen, sondern von der Wirtschafts-, Sozial- und Politikgeschichte untersucht werden. Von fundamentaler Bedeutung sind in dieser Hinsicht die Gemeinden und Städte, in denen sich die Einrichtungen des Verkehrs und des Informationsaustausches bündeln. Auf diese Weise bilden sie Knoten der Kommunikationsnetze, die die Kontinente in Form eines feinmaschigen Netzes überziehen. Die Städte spielen dabei einerseits selbst häufig eine aktive Rolle in der Ausbildung dieser Kommunikationsnetze und sind doch andererseits in vielfältiger Weise von der politischen, wirtschaftlichen und kulturellen Konstruktion des Kommunikationsraumes, in dem sie agieren, abhängig.
Das Projekt „Städte im europäischen Raum – Verkehr, Kommunikation und Urbanität im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert“ zielt darauf, Kommunikation und Raum am Beispiel der Städte im Zusammenhang zu denken und dabei neben den technischen, medialen und wirtschaftlichen Aspekten die sozialen, politischen und auch kulturellen Faktoren direkt mit einzubeziehen. Mit dem Fokus auf die Städte lassen sich in diesem Zusammenhang eine Reihe von allgemeinen Fragestellungen untersuchen und beantworten. So treten im Kontext der Trias von Stadt – Raum – Kommunikation etwa sowohl die Fernwirkungen, die auf die gesellschaftliche Entwicklung einer Lokalität Einfluss nehmen, als auch das Leben der Menschen in immer größeren räumlichen Bezügen im Verlauf des historischen Prozesses hevor. Auch die Vernetzung und Interaktion in den Räumen kann aufgezeigt werden.
Über diese konkreten Untersuchungen zu den Kommunikationsbeziehungen und Vernetzungen im europäischen Raum hinaus verbindet die einzelnen Beiträge die Frage nach der jeweiligen Sicht auf den europäischen Raum und seine Gliederungsprinzipien: Wie wurden seine Grenzen definiert, welche seiner Teile wurden ausgegrenzt oder ausgeblendet oder welche geographischen, politischen und sozialen Strukturen gliederten den so definierten europäischen Raum? Und vor allem: Inwieweit wurden die Städte als zentrale Bausteine und Strukturelemente innerhalb dieses Raumes gesehen? So eröffnet sich die vielversprechende Aussicht, neben dem Wandel der Kommunikationsstrukturen auch den Einfluß der Nationalisierungs- und Europäisierungsprozesse im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert in den Blick zu bekommen – oder anders gewendet: Die städtische Perspektive kann unter Umständen Kommunikations- und Interaktionsmuster im europäischen Raum freilegen, die durch die Ausbildung nationalstaatlicher Strukturen überformt und geschwächt wurden, an die aber die Europäisierungstendenzen insbesondere in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts anknüpfen konnten. Das ist alles in allem ein anspruchsvolles Unternehmen, und die Ergebnisse können sich sehen lassen.

Some of these studies are excellent, groundbreaking works; their authors include historians like François Caron for France, Michael J. Freeman and Michael Robbins for the United Kingdom, Michel Laffut for Belgium, Augustus J. Veenendaal for the Netherlands, Francisco Wais San Martín for Spain, Michèle Merger for Italy, Rainer Fremdling, Lothar Gall and Manfred Pohl for Germany, Robert William Fogel and John F. Stover for the United States, Robert F. Leggett for Canada, Brian Fawcett, P. Lacoste, and Ian Thomson for the Andean states in South America, Ian J. Kerr for India, John C. Decker for Russia, Yakub N. Karkar for the Ottoman Empire, and Édouard de Laboulaye for China.(1)
But these studies were separate; each provided us with knowledge of only one part of the network. They regularly compared investments in railways with investments in other fields of particular national economies. But the international background for these investments was not developed, and the research did not shed light on the neighbouring processes across the borders. Every network is more than the sum of its parts. Histories of the national networks of Germany, Portugal, Russia and so on provide no understanding of the railway network as a Europe-wide and even global communication structure.
In the last 200 years, efficient networks developed that not only increased the possibilities of freight traffic but also broadened human mobility. The first direct consequences of the worldwide revolution in transport included drastic reductions in travel time and decreases in the costs of journeys. This made it easier for people to reach distant regions from every locality in the world and take advantage of the possibilities inherent in those regions. This happened long before automobiles, long before airplanes, and it had far-reaching consequences.
As long as products from Asia, Africa and South America were traded in Western Europe as colonial products, as an exotic broadening of the spectrum of goods, they did not compete with the products of the national economy. But after the lowering of transport, communication and transaction costs between the different production areas in the world, the situation changed fundamentally. On the world market, when businesspeople compare goods of similar quality, only the cost counts. The cost depends on things like productivity, wages, exchange rates, tariffs, government subsidies and last but not least transport costs. International trade networks and the worldwide synchronisation of timetables changed the world into a single marketplace, where the raw materials and all goods for production are bought where they are the cheapest. This development began in the nineteenth century.(2)
The global economic interrelationship was and is accompanied by gigantic continental and transcontinental migration. In the nineteenth century, migration was mainly across the Atlantic Ocean, but also took place in many other regions of the world at the same time. To consider the evolution of a compact globe in space and time filled with dynamic processes has many practical consequences. The historically developed norm of our current working and living conditions is set into relief, as are the traditional systems of prices and the spectra of goods we are accustomed to consuming. Social standards collide with the competition for the best production site, and the social dynamic of globalisation is a controverse conversation topic in all the regions of the world. At the same time we are experiencing the beginnings of a debate on economic and social standards for the world as a whole.
In the reality of a global economy, and in the discussion of a new social policy, the differences between national societies have vanished, as norms, values and models of economic and social regulation have been standardised internationally. Not very long ago one spoke of German society, British society, American society, or Japanese society. But nowadays one distinguishes between Rhenish capitalism, Atlantic capitalism, and Asian capitalism.(3) The world is more and more shaped by a ‘rational’ system that started its triumphant progress in the wake of the great discoveries in the sixteenth century. This rational system tends to equalise all qualities and distinctions, and to subjugate them to one conformity, a reductio ad unum. In this process, the global networks of communication and transport have played a key role.(4)
These worldwide processes in society also have effects on history: For a long time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, history was written in a national style, primarily as history of politics, but in later times, since the 1950s, it has been written also as history of societies. In many nations, like Germany, England, USA, France, Italy, etc., history was conceptualised as the history of each single country. This obsession dominated for many decades and any idea of a trans-national view of history had been rejected.(5)Change did not come until the end of the twentieth century. In the late 1980s, the writing of history in a nationally separated style collapsed. Numerous books and periodicals appeared which were dedicated to European history, multinational history, world history.(6) These attempts seem pompous and self-important today. For example, the 36-volume Fischer World History, published in Frankfurt am Main in 1965, claimed to present the ‘totality of world affairs’, to give ‘Asian and African countries and people their full importance’, to point out ‘culture and economy as history builders’, and finally to demonstrate ‘how humankind awoke in its history to consciousness of itself’.(7) A closer look in any of these works brings disillusionment: they fall apart into single studies of particular national histories; the links between them are missing. The question remains: What could a world history be, beyond each varying national and cultural background?
It’s the connections that should come into focus in writings on the history of the early modern age up to the twentieth century, not the separations. But in what particulars can this be shown? If we look at the global processes of the last 200 years, the answer lies in the processes of communication and exchange between the countries. There we find the effects of international division of labour and the worldwide flow of capital; there, too, we find international transport of people and goods, international communication, and cultural exchange. This short list relates to processes in today’s societies which rose to powerful dimensions at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and depict – even if incompletely – fundamental facets of the emergence of a world society.(8)

The world’s societies have grown together because of global trade, traffic and transport; because of the mobility of the masses, including migration within and between continents; and because of the worldwide transfer of knowledge and culture. In this context, transport history is an important field, if not the most important of modern world history. That means not the rationality (Vernunft) or teleological processes of a world spirit (Weltgeist), as the universalistic historians thought at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, nor class struggle or structures of longue durrée, as historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries argued are key terms of world history, but communication, traffic, mobility, migration, transfer and exchange. Hence the topic of this anthology: the gestation and birth of the first real worldwide traffic network of modern history – railways. The railways are seen here as a worldwide web; the traditional understanding of this transport system as an isolated product of each national economy is put into doubt.
To illustrate the difference between traditional and contemporary approaches, let us take the German example. In 1935, during the Nazi period, the German national railway company Deutsche Reichsbahn celebrated the anniversary of the German railways and published a big volume entitled Hundert Jahre deutsche Eisenbahnen (One Hundred Years of German Railways).(9) In it, the authors characterised the German network as a purely German innovation, and mentioned only one small exception: the locomotives for the first German railway line from Nuremberg to Fürth had been supplied by the English locomotive company of Robert Stephenson. The rest of the story is a tale of how speedily the lack of knowledge and engineering capacity had been overcome by German energy and innovation. English technological knowledge was quickly assimilated by German engineers, English steelworks and railway factories were replaced by German factories, and finally the German state itself became involved, forming what became the largest railway company in the world, with nearly one million employees in the 1930s. The authors asserted the railway’s role in supporting nationalist thinking: ‘The aim that German railways have served for one hundred years is to be the instrument for a deeply rooted feeling of community of all Germans.’(10) But this story left out serious parts of the construction of the German railway network. It was not only the work of German engineers, German entrepreneurs, German workers, German investors and German state authorities, it was also heavily supported by foreign innovations and foreign capital.
There are many further reasons to interpret railway history as world history. First, the railway system of each country was, in most cases, an open system with connections to the railway networks of the neighbouring countries. It was possible to run through-going trains between the nations. In the middle of the nineteenth century, various European railway companies were proud of having created the first central European traffic axis from Paris to Warsaw. For that purpose, since the beginning, there have been international treaties on technical standards, proposed, prepared, and controlled by international organisations that were formed in the first decades of the railway history – above all the Union internationeau de chemin de fer (UIC) founded in 1922. Second, we have to consider the internationality of technical knowledge. Many innovations have been taken from one country to another. Third, and this is our main subject, foreign capital played a much greater role in creating the national railway networks than the authors of the German anniversary book and many railway historians in other countries believed – a greater role than many historians assume even today. In fact, investors and railway companies were energetically engaged in exporting knowledge and capital into foreign countries in Europe and all over the world.
One of the first large-scale projects – the railway line from Cologne to Aachen and onwards to Antwerp – was financially backed both by the Belgian state and by foreign investors. This enabled the Belgian state to plan what was one of the most ambitious railway networks in Europe at that time. Among the providers of foreign investment for this project was the banking house of N M Rothschild in London, which had been founded by Nathan Rothschild, son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild of the German banking city of Frankfurt am Main. A second example is the case of Germany itself. The first decades of the construction of the German railway network were characterised by the presence of private railway committees in many German cities. As local organisations, they planned city to city connections, applied for concessions, and collected money for their projects. For that purpose, they set up shareholder companies and traded their shares with the help of bank houses that operated Europe-wide; quite a lot of the investment money therefore came from abroad – across the borders.
Railway history provides many further examples. It is well known that the German Deutsche Bank was involved with a railway line from the Balkan states through the Ottoman Empire to Baghdad; this line’s influence on the troublesome imperialistic politics of the European states around 1900 is well documented. Based on files that came from Russian archives after the end of the Cold War, Manfred Pohl has written about this railway line and its German financing and political background.(11) In Frankfurt, the German banking centre, to bring up a fourth example, many private banking houses were heavily involved in railway financing in the United States of America in the second half of the nineteenth century. One such success story is that of Charles Hallgarten, who began his career financing railways in the United States and then emigrated back to Frankfurt as a wealthy banker. Another Frankfurter-American was Wilhelm Bonn. At the age of 20, Bonn was sent to New York to familiarise himself with the American financial market and to sell American war bonds on the German market. He speedily built up his career in New York and became the director of the banking house of Speyer & Co., a subsidiary of Lazard Speyer-Ellissen. Later on he founded his own banking firm, Ruette & Bonn, which successfully financed American transcontinental railway lines.
The most important banker in this small sample was Jakob Schiff, born in Frankfurt in 1847. He studied business and trade and then emigrated to America in 1865. There he became an employee of the New York banking firm Frank & Gans. Two years later, together with Henry Budge, another Frankfurt and Hamburg banker, he founded the banking firm Budge, Schiff & Co. His career really took off when he entered the banking house of Abraham Kuhn and Salomon Loeb, recognised the tremendous importance of traffic for the industrial development of the United States, and entered the railway business. Soon he controlled half a dozen big railway companies. Under his leadership, Kuhn & Loeb became the second largest investment banking house in America. The international scope of these men’s operations was not unusual. We can find similar stories everywhere the railway industry flourished.(12)
When the Austrian state-owned railways were privatised in the 1850s, two companies were founded which pumped a great deal of foreign money into the country. These were the Imperial Royal and Privileged (IRP) Austrian State Railway Company (k.k. privilegierte österreichische Staatseisenbahn-Gesellschaft) and the k.k. privilegiert Südbahn-Gesellschaft (Southern Railway Company). The first one, the State Railway Company, was founded in 1855. The company bought up several railway lines which had been built by the state, including. the northern lines from Brünn (Brno, nowadays Czech Republic) to Prague (Praha) and to the border with Saxony at Bodenbach, and some other lines which had been built by private companies, such as the line from Vienna to Raab (Györ) in Hungary. Later on, new lines were built which joined the lines together into a single railway network. By 1870, this company’s network comprised more than 1,300 kilometres of track in the northern and eastern regions of the Habsburg Empire.
The initiative to set up the State Railway Company and its financial backing actually came from France. It was a plan of the Pereire brothers. While the administrative council had its headquarters in Vienna, the strategic steering committee was located in Paris. In 1870, this committee was decidedly international. It was headed by Isaac Pereire, the vice-president was Raffaele de Ferrari, Duke of Galliera, and members included Adolf von Eichenthal, Baron Heeckeren, Carl Mallet, Casimir Salvador and, of course, Emile Pereire.(13) In the time when the Southern Railway Company was founded, a new fiscal instrument was introduced in the railway politics of the Habsburg Empire. It was the first railway company that received a state guarantee for the rate of interest. The rate was fixed at 5.2 per cent each year.(14) Nationalisation efforts begun in 1884 reached fruition in 1908, ending the reign of the international board. The nationalised railway was named kaiserlich-königliche Staatsbahnen (Imperial Royal State Railways) and included nearly 30 railway companies.(15) 1858 saw the founding of the Southern Railway Company, which took over the southern state railway line from Vienna to Austria’s single harbour in Trieste at the Adriatic Sea. The Southern Railway Company built several lines of its own, such as the Alpine crossing at Brenner in Tyrol, a railway link from Budapest to the Vienna-Trieste trunk line at Pragerhof, and a branch line to Fiume, a military port at the Adriatic. After the turn of the century, the poet Peter Rosegger was so impressed by the extent of the rail network – more than 2850 kilometres in length – that he wrote in 1908: “Today steam-horse of the Southern Railway blows its clouds of smoke up to the masts of the circumnavigators of the globe, and tomorrow it whistles with the chamois in the high mountain regions. (...) While at the eastern end of the Southern Railway the sun rises on the Hungarian Paris on the Danube,, at its western end, the last stars of night shine above the towers of Bozen and Innsbruck.”(16) Like the State Railway Company, the Southern Railway Company was heavily supported by foreign capital, especially by James de Rothschild’s French banking house. The organisational structure of the Southern Railway Company was also similar to that of the State Railway Company. The administrative council had its headquarters in Vienna, while the strategic committee was located in Paris. In 1870 the committee included Alphons Baron de Rothschild, Lionel Baron de Rothschild, Gustav Baron de Rothschild, Raffaele de Ferrari, Duke of Galliera, Johann Franz Bartholony, Edouard Blount, Cornelio de Witt, and Eugen de la Rosière.(17) In contrast to the State Railway Company, the Southern Railway Company resisted the state’s efforts to nationalise it. Finally, the First World War and its shifted borders brought this company to an end. The division of the Habsburg Empire after 1918 created numerous new states, while some other territories were given to existing countries, for example the region around Trieste to Italy.
These examples demonstrate that international investments played an important role in the establishment of ‘national’ railway networks. That is why we have to dig out these forgotten, ignored and covered parts of railway histories as we seek to achieve a broader understanding and contribute to the international history of railways in the nineteenth and twentieth century.(18) This ignored chapter of railway history is re-examined in our anthology. In a 1957 article, Michael Robbins asked the question: ‘What kind of railway history do we want?’ Robbins enquired further where the expensive national railways managed to get their funding.(19) Our answer is clear: across the borders. We would like to contribute to the body of knowledge related to international financial transactions that have taken place across national borders. It is this aspect that continues to attract our attention and is of greatest importance in Europe and throughout the world. It is the intention of the anthology to dis-cover the financing of the world’s railways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to take the first step in leaving behind the national(ist) perspective in railway history, and to explore the railway system as an international communication network. For these reasons we seek to understand railway lines as international communication systems that came into being as a result of complex international activities. The contributions to our anthology provide compelling answers to many questions. When, where and why were railway investments from foreign investors of great importance? How difficult was it for foreign investors to realise their interests in the light of national laws and government policy, as well as the economic and cultural barriers that existed at that time? And what were the economic and political consequences of railway investments across the borders?

If his vision had become reality, this line would have not only connected the cities of Frankfurt, Offenbach, and Hanau together, but would also have linked them to the regional railway system (S-Bahn) which covered a region of four to five million people.(1) As it turned out however, his idea was rejected by the city government because of the prevailing attitudes towards motor traffic at that time. The general tendency was to pour money into improving and enlarging roads for motor cars, rather than investing in rail traffic. This rejection resulted in the replacement of the rusty and decaying tracks with a main street to accommodate the increasing car traffic. Street construction followed the flood of car traffic in every city of Europe.
Although personal mobility does have clear advantages, there is a growing feeling that its advantages are quickly being outweighed by its disadvantages. One disadvantage is that when cars are not being driven they take up valuable public urban space. This means that a vast amount of public space is not available for other uses. Secondly, the permanent stream of motor cars cuts cities and towns up into a thousand little pieces that block the routes of pedestrians. As a result of the increasing devastation of public space, people have been forced back into smaller pedestrian precincts. This growing emphasis on improving and enlarging the traffic system has meant a serious reduction of the space available for pedestrians. The motor car pollutes the air one breathes. It causes noise. It diminishes the quality of life for every resident.(2) In the past several decades the advantages have always more or less balanced the disadvantages. Nowadays however, the number of complaints about noise and motor-car emissions in all major cities is on the rise. In spite of this fact, the tremendous increase in motor-traffic and the reduction of railway networks all over the world is a conspicuous sign that the motor car has indeed replaced train traffic.
But the so-called ‘motor car society’ (Automobilgesellschaft) will probably only survive for a relatively short period of time. All in all, it stretches over four or five decades which is a brief period in the history of urbanisation. Although motor traffic is currently the predominant mode of transport throughout the world, it has become a growing burden in the densely populated metropolises or city agglomerations in Europe. Unrestricted private vehicle traffic collides more and more with the limited capacity of streets.
The older terms of traffic jam, Stau, or embouteillage of the nineteenth century have being used once again as this phenomenon has become widespread throughout societies in the modern world. These expressions came into existence because of the crowds of coaches and carriages in places such as Ludgate Hill in London, at Place de l’Opéra in Paris, or at Leipziger Straße in Berlin. None of the current efforts in street construction have been able to solve the problem of traffic jams. This problem intensified in the case of Offenbach when the actual space available on the streets around the city rapidly reached their capacity. This was the reason why thirty years after Wortmann’s vision, the city of Offenbach returned to his ideas of 1965 and constructed an underground railway in a short period of time. Since 1995 the city has been connected with Wiesbaden, Frankfurt and Hanau via a system of modern electric local trains. It has also been successfully integrated into the regional S-train system. It is now possible to commute between the cores of half a dozen cities in a region of 3,000 square kilometres within fifteen to thirty minutes. Millions can use the trains without having to worry about where to park their cars in a densely crowded city like Frankfurt. They also avoid contributing more noise to an already noisy city and air-pollution to a highly polluted city.
Another interesting aspect of public transport is that one can witness a diverse cross section of humanity travelling together side-by-side in these train compartments. There are the young and old, the poorer residents together with the wealthy bankers on their way to work in the heart of the financial district as well as the wide and varied spectrum of all those who come in between. It is a colourful, sometimes picturesque scene. People from 140 nations are living today in Frankfurt as well as in Offenbach, most of whom, interestingly enough, have only just immigrated in the last decade. Everyone is mixed together in this dynamic prosperous region of Europe. In ten or fifteen years the cities and towns of this region will probably have grown together into a metropolis of six to ten million people.
Growing city agglomerations, metropolises, or megalopolises seem to be the most likely form that urban living will take, not only in the Rhein-Main-region of Germany but throughout the entire world. If we follow projections on the future of cities, such as Peter Hall’s and Ulrich Pfeiffer’s study Urban 21, one can imagine that what we are experiencing at the moment is only the beginning of a second phase of urbanisation.(3) In the last four decades mankind has doubled. Within every continent people have been migrating to big cities and metropolises. Another striking development is that of people making their way by air from anywhere in the world to the centres of the global economy. These gigantic streams of migration are extremely mobile and transcontinental.(4) The consequences of this could either be an extremely high density of living space, or a further spreading outward into the surrounding region, or both. In either case this new dynamic in urbanisation in the near future will require new means of efficient and rational traffic systems for cities. The capacity of these new systems of transport has to be high and in addition, quieter and almost emission free. They must also be so well constructed as to minimally encroach upon the already limited city space in which 80 per cent of the European population will live.
It is precisely because of this current situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century that the question of efficient traffic systems in such densely populated living spheres and the role of railways as linking networks in and between cities reappears. The requirement for the urban future demands that we re-examine the urban past with its nineteenth century densely constructed cities in a new light. It is from there that fruitful theoretical discussions can harvest a richness of practical experiences about the current problem of how to solve traffic problems in a more and more crowded world. Furthermore, nineteenth-century cities were not dominated by private vehicle traffic, but by systems of railways, which were adapted in several steps to be used comfortably in urban spheres.
Looking back nearly 150 years ago to the middle of the nineteenth century, it is extremely interesting that the problem of limited city space and traffic being discussed at that time, possessed an uncanny and perceptive grasp of a problem we undoubtedly must deal with today. The prefect of Paris in the time of Napoleon III, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, not only planned a system of boulevards and squares laid out on a grand scale, but also tackled the question of which traffic systems would best suit this space.(5) He doubted the efficiency of private vehicle traffic and feared the wasting of space. To avoid this, he preferred a monopoly by horse-omnibuses for the public passenger traffic. For this reason, the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus (CGO) was founded in 1855. They were more efficient than coaches, transported more passengers per car than private carriages and saved the public street space. The idea caused a sensation and spread to many European and North American cities in the 1860s. It was the beginning of a series of further innovations, especially in the case of the railways that conquered the urban space. In the 1880s horse omnibuses were replaced by more efficient horse-trains and then followed by electric trams.(6) Around 1900 modern high-speed trains (Schnellbahnen) finally appeared. Built as elevated trains or undergrounds, they left the streets, thereby leaving more space available for other uses. In addition to this, modern railways were regarded unanimously as being indispensable for real modern cities. Based on the model of London’s underground, the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Métropolitain de Paris (CMP), succeeded in presenting its system as the most successful mass traffic system for the new twentieth century at the World Fair of 1900 in Paris.(7)
Whatever their specific form was, these new traffic systems which were electric, almost emission-free, quiet, and compatible with city space, fulfilled the pre-conditions for easing the traffic jams in the metropolises of London, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere in Europe. They had realised a new vision of urban living in the twentieth century. Le Corbusier’s sunny and glassy solitaire high-rise buildings were connected by subways and separated from each other by 500 metre green spaces.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the electrified means of mass-traffic freed up the streets and created space for a new, noisy and smellier piece of equipment, the motor car. Its triumphant progress after World War II was caused by many factors and had many consequences. As a result of the motor car, we have experienced an extreme reconstruction of our cities. The urban sphere spread out into the region with enormous side effects upon our social and cultural lifestyle.(8) It is due to the proliferation of millions of commuters that the volume of traffic has increased so tremendously in recent years. Therefore, it can be safely said that car traffic is the main perpetrator responsible for the more negative phenomena occurring in our modern day cities. The next logical question to be asked is, whether these problems will give birth to a renaissance in rail construction of cities?
The answer is probably yes, especially when we take into consideration another factor that would support such a development. There is no large city within Europe today that can exist without either a modern system of railways or the traffic networks that link them together. This development clearly signals the end of the reduction of railways that we have been experiencing since World War II. Supported by the European Commission, more and more old railway networks will be restructured to solve the problems motor traffic has caused.(9) Meanwhile in some countries, high-speed trains are successfully competing with air traffic. To illustrate this, we will cite four examples from the twelve countries that are reviewed in this book.
In 1991, the Inter City Express (ICE) was introduced in Germany. It not only covers the distance between the most important cities in a shorter time than planes need, but it also allows managers working in the centre of Frankfurt to live 200 kilometres away in the cities of Mannheim or Kassel.(10) The same can be said about the new high-speed line between Frankfurt and Cologne as well as a planned connection between Frankfurt and Stuttgart.(11) The lines linking these cities to each other will reduce commuter travelling time to less than one hour. Could it really happen that Mannheim, Kassel or even Cologne and Stuttgart become the future suburbs of Frankfurt? Leaving Germany to concentrate on France, we see that an identical process has occurred. French cities have wanted to be associated with what was presented by the Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) as a ‘new mode of transport’ and thus acquiring the title and being recognised as ‘TGV cities’.(12) However, twenty years after the opening of the first stretch of the new line there is still no consensus concerning the tools for measuring the effects these have had on the cities themselves. In June 2001, Le Monde published an article on the occasion of the opening of a new TGV railway-track between Lyon and Marseilles. It pointed out that this new connection combined with the Paris-Lyon section allows passengers to cover the distance between Paris and Marseilles within a mere three hours. Will Marseilles eventually become a suburb of Paris? The manner in which the media covered the June 7, 2001 inauguration of the new Valence-Marseilles line clearly shows to what extent the debate surrounding the new line has sparked discussion about the hierarchy of cities, the reconfiguration of their relationships to one another, the creation of new passenger traffic flow patterns and the emergence of new behaviours whose real impact cannot be measured yet. It does not however, touch upon the impact of the new structures or the modification of the century-old railway land holdings on the cities themselves.(13) On the other hand, we can note the transformation, even inversion, of the values attached to public transport in general and to the train in particular. The recent network of new lines being constructed is encouraging urban development projects which are regarded as being positive. This is because these projects increase the financial worth of those urban areas that had been tainted by the development of railway zones a century earlier and left out of planning projects which would have projected them as cities being ‘turned toward the future’. The TGV has successfully shown that railways, as a means of mass transport, can still be a modern and effective mode of transport. It is perhaps for this reason that, in the past ten years, public transportation has systematically been proposed as a solution in all of the urban development proposals from which it had hitherto been systematically excluded in favour of the automobile. French cities are building metro systems or tram systems that often follow the routes or re-use the tracks of old tramways or secondary rail lines abandoned during the 1930s. Just as the TGV has become instrumental to the weekend breaks of the residents of the greater Paris area, so has the Réseau Express Régional (RER) to their daily working life. Any break in the service provided by the Metro or RER creates insurmountable problems of congestion for the ‘capital region’ and its ten million inhabitants. It is the balance between the ‘private’ automobile and ‘public’ transport with regard to peoples’ behavioural patterns and existing infrastructures, that seems to be the challenge facing cities during the next decade in France.(14) To the important decision-makers, these work stoppages regularly prove the importance of rail transport for cities as well as the inevitability of their development in the future of public transport. In the history of this transport system the question is raised regarding the constraints which it has carved into the urban fabric and surroundings of cities.
What is so obviously apparent in the Rhein-Main region of Germany and the Île-de-France is even more so for regions on the periphery of Europe such as the area around Lisbon in Portugal or Helsinki in Finland. In Helsinki the most interesting developments are the plans to improve its international rail connections to St. Petersburg and Moscow. One will be able to reach Moscow within five hours, less than half the time it takes today. The rail traffic in metropolitan Helsinki and within a 100 kilometre radius has been improved, extended and now seriously competes with car traffic. Everywhere else in the country, including the other major cities, the local railway traffic has been dramatically reduced or even entirely discontinued. The local railway traffic that was established in the 1880s, is an intrinsic part of the mass transportation systems of the metropolitan area. It is still popular, reliable and relatively cheap. The impact of railways in cities can also be felt in Italy as well. This was in part, not only due to the construction of high-speed lines, the well-known Direttissime, but also by the second wave of station construction. Similar plans for improvements in high-speed railways traffic, inter-city lines and modern railway systems for the regions around large cities currently exist in Poland, Austria, Spain, the United Kingdom, and in many other European countries. Furthermore, on the basis of analogous suggestions, the European Commission and the Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer (UIC) in 1997 developed the project of a ‘Pan European Transport Network’, that would link European and Asian cities within a broad corridor from the West to the East. However, the signs for a renaissance of the railway systems of large cities cannot be overlooked. The relationship of the city and the railway has currently generated quite a bit of interest in Europe, it has also entailed a rediscovery of its historical experiences as well. Although the history of this more than 150 year old relationship with its economic, social, political, and cultural consequences is clearly a wide field for historical research, it is interesting to note that it has been an astonishingly neglected research topic in the past.

Firstly, it is important for us to consider that a European historical study on the question, ‘How railways affected cities?’ does not in fact, really exist. In Allan Mitchell’s recent scholarly study, The Great Train Race, the problem is barely touched upon when he compares the railway networks of Germany and France and then only returns to the role of the capital from time to time.(15) It is however, on the national level that the study of the achievements in railway history seems to be more convincing. But the quality of these achievements do not only differ from country to country they barely cover the many ‘blank spaces’ on the map of historical research as can be seen in the case of Germany. Although we can note some impressive improvements in railway history since the 1970s many aspects of the development of railways still remain unknown.(16) In none of these works about German railway history has the diverse aspects of the relationship between city and railway been sufficiently reflected upon. This is strikingly true for most local studies. Many authors have only provided an overview of the history of the railway network itself. The studies deal with the foundation of local railway companies, the construction of the tracks and stations inside the city and surrounding area. In others, we find long-winded tales about the expansion of the system with all its facilities. In the main, many accounts were dominated by technical details, and the key interest focused on trains, special locomotives, wagons, and other technical material. Due to the lack of easily available and reliable traffic statistics being in some cases, a circonstance atténuante, it is hardly surprising that most writers did not turn their attention towards the consequences of railways for the city and vice versa.(17)
Apart from the architectural history of stations and the debate on their picturesque styles, nothing exists which is comparable to the scholarly achievements of Anglo-American historians such as John R. Kellett in The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities, Jack Simmons in The Railway in Town and Country, or William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis about the rise of Chicago. Horst Matzerath made some critical remarks about this deficit in German history in his anthology, Stadt und Verkehr im Industriezeitalter (City and Traffic in the Age of Industrialisation).(18) Although his book failed to generate more active interest in the topic, it did however, presents a mosaic of interesting contributions about the history of railways in Ulm, Konstanz, Stuttgart, Berlin and a few cities in Saxony. It also picks up the subject of our volume, ‘The City and the Railway’. One of the most important issues dismissed in many of the contributions was how railways changed from being city-developers into obstacles for city-planning. Another issue concerned the different systems of railways for urban traffic. Something similar can be said about the scholarly work of Elfi Bendikat Öffentliche Nahverkehrspolitik in Berlin und Paris (Public Traffic Policy in Berlin and Paris), which highlighted the role of inner urban traffic in the development of these two metropolises and compared them in an ambitious study. In Die Vernetzung der Stadt (The Networked Cities), Dieter Schott integrates the railway network into a wider and more expansive perspective when considering how cities work. He illustrates how the growth of economic and social needs in the cities was responsible for the spread of different networks for water, gas and electricity supplies as well as for railways. We are also provided insights into the role of railways in the development of these regions.(19) Although there has been a multitude of observations concerning the relationship between city and railways and achievements in railway history in Germany there is still no work to this day, that is comparable to Berlin und seine Eisenbahnen (Berlin and its Railways). Written on the occasion of an exhibition fair in 1896, the study is quite sobering in its conclusion that until now, only a few aspects of the relationship between city and railway have come under closer scrutiny.(20) Many of the variables that seriously influenced the widespread economic, social, political and cultural facets of the topic still remain open questions today.
A similar conclusion can be drawn for many European countries and especially for France which has experienced a similar situation. For the past twenty years people have spoken more of ‘The Railway and Cities’ than of ‘The Railway and the City’, although French urban studies have become a growing field.(21) It is extremely surprising that the experience of the high-speed train in today’s French cities, with its contrasts and hopes, its enthusiasts and its detractors, has not attracted the attention of researchers as much as one would have expected. There has been little interest toward the founding experience of the nineteenth century in the field of ‘railways and cities’. Just ten years ago, the history of these relationships was a mosaic of disciplines and monographic studies that were only held together by mostly modernist presuppositions which acted as a sort of ‘screen’ between the researcher and his or her subject.(22) Art historians have traditionally regarded ‘industry’ as being non-art and it was only in the wake of Carroll Meeks that railway stations were finally recognised as part of this field of research.(23) Urban history in the same manner, regarded railway land holdings as ‘breaks’, ‘constraints’ or ‘brown fields’, something whose effects had to be cancelled out before erasing it entirely from the urban fabric. It is not easy to evaluate ten years of research in the time of a theoretical renewal and considerable activities for new railway construction. This integration and spread of the very high-speed networks into the European transport systems, has caused some new political and commercial consequences in western Europe. The subsequent developments of massive investments, the creation of complex intermodal stations, and especially the systematic renewal of commercial and interconnecting spaces, have clearly influenced the ways in which we perceive the subject of study.(24) Looking at it from this perspective, we can see today that rail travel, rail stations and rail heritage all benefit from a certain type of fashionableness. The architectural and urban analysis of railway stations viewed as exchange nodes continues to develop. Comparing the impacts of the present to the past during the construction of the first network and the siting of railway functions, is rich not only in theoretical lessons but also in practical ones for current operations. The reality of a world wide technical heritage and its landscape is increasingly being taken into account by historians, town planners and municipal office-holders who are responsible for the management of our historical and cultural heritage and to a lesser degree, by those building the new structures. Railway land holdings change very quickly because their development follows that of technological and economic activity, increases in the volume of goods transported and the emergence of new types of rail traffic and needs. The study of their history familiarises us with their continual extensions and re-workings and commits us to taking care of them.
Economic and sociological studies of transport systems often aim to determine the impact of infrastructures and new services. Even more interestingly, they study the decisions that made them possible, their workings and their procedures, modifications of behaviour and the mobility of people and goods.(25) Geography highlights morphology and the development of transport networks in urban networks, the space created by the relationship between cities and railways and their representations.(26) Architecture and planning ensure the re-use of nineteenth-century railway land holdings by inserting new infrastructures. The studies of the ‘GDR’ (Groupe de Recherche) ‘Networks’ of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which is now being continued by the group ‘LATTS Réseaux, institutions et territoires’, underline the integration of the network as a whole in the analysis of urban planning. This has now become a primary issue for the new century.(27) Many questions have been raised today with respect to other sites and other players, questions whose answers will permit us to measure the role of the railway in the city. The strategic, economic and social issues that it has raised now determine the developmental constraints of historic city centres and have created a legacy that is increasingly being regarded as a heritage.
Aside from these general descriptions of the situation in many countries there are many aspects which are not even being looked at. In Russia, for example, the enormous influence of railways on colonisation and the reorganisation of vast territories of land into an urban landscape with numerous brand new cities had been neglected.(28) The railway in Europe was a successful revolution in the development of communication structures. The advent and spread of railways during the nineteenth century not only contributed to industrialisation and urbanisation but also transformed the meaning of space and time, perceptions and experiences of distance and geography. Although we have invested in serious research and harvested fruitful yields of scholarly debate about this topic, the detailed causes and consequences of mobility as well as their differentiation and complexity, are rarely mentioned in the main historical studies of all European countries.
Travel and goods-traffic was a complex social occurrence with different dimensions such as business travel, migration, commuter traffic, family visits of relatives, cultural and tourist trips as well as the transport of all kinds of goods. The mobility that resulted caused tremendous changes in the departure and arrival points in both villages and cities. This is of great importance especially for the hubs of the railway network. That is why it is so important to bridge the wide gap that existed between railway and urban history. Because of these numerous ‘missing tracks’ in railway history we offer this collection of essays on the topic: ‘The City and the Railway in Europe’. The series of well-documented case studies presented here allows us to make comparisons of the ways that railways have impacted modern cities and in which ways they have developed along with them. These fourteen studies, situated at the intersection of social, cultural, urban, architectural, art and transport history, permit clarification of issues that we feel are fundamental to the history of cities and territories, but which are insufficiently brought into focus unless the different approaches are combined.

Es fehlen Arbeiten, die die Entwicklung der neuen Dienstleistungsangebote und ihre Nutzung durch die Menschen in den Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung rücken. (1) Zentral sind in diesem Kontext die sozialen und kulturellen Folgewirkungen, die nicht selten wiederum zu Innovationsschüben in der Gestaltung des technischen Systems führten.
Zu dieser Aufgabenstellung möchte das Forschungsvorhaben „Die Verkürzung von Raum und Zeit“ einen Beitrag leisten. Es geht dabei nicht um eine abschließende Monographie zur Geschichte des Eisenbahnwesens, sondern um eine Annäherung an die Frage: Was wurde im Verlauf des langen 19. Jahrhunderts aus den Ideen, den Hoffnungen und Erwartungen am Beginn des Eisenbahnzeitalters, wie sie etwa im Eingangszitat formuliert wurden, und wie veränderte die praktische Realisierung die Gewohnheiten der Menschen und ihr Lebensumfeld? Dabei stellen sich aufgrund der Komplexität des Gegenstandes eine Reihe methodischer und inhaltlicher Fragen. Allgemein wurde bei der Sichtung des bisherigen Forschungsertrags als vorrangiges Defizit festgestellt, daß kaum die Wirkung auf die Menschen selbst untersucht wurde, sondern im Zentrum allgemeine wirtschaftliche und politische Aspekte gestanden haben. Die Eisenbahn war jedoch von Anfang an nicht nur ein Transportmedium für die Belange der Wirtschaft und des Staates, sondern ein Instrument zur Befriedigung multifunktionaler Belange.
Von den sehr verschiedenen Zwecken zeichnen die in zahlreichen Denkschriften publizierten Visionen, die eng in den gesamtgesellschaftlichen Aufbruchsprozeß der bürgerlichen Bewegung eingebunden waren, ein eindrucksvolles Bild. (2) Ihre systematische Auswertung und struktureller Vergleich soll auf der Grundlage einer Beschreibungen zur Situation der Güter- und Personentransporte am Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts Aufschluß über die genauen Zielsetzungen und Erwartungen geben, die an die Eisenbahnen und mit ihnen an das neue Zeitalter gerichtet wurden. (3) Einen ersten Eindruck von der Spannweite dieser Visionen lieferte z. B. Friedrich List, der von geradezu „mythischen“ Eigenschaften der Eisenbahnen ausging: „Was die Dampfschiffahrt für den See- und Flußverkehr, ist der Eisenbahn-Dampfwagentransport für den Landverkehr, ein Herkules in der Wiege, der die Völker erlösen wird von der Plage des Kriegs, der Theuerung und Hungersnoth, des Nationalhasses und der Arbeitslosigkeit, der Unwissenheit und des Schlendrians; der ihre Felder befruchten, ihre Werkstätte und Schachte beleben und auch den Niedrigsten unter ihnen Kraft verleihen wird, sich durch den Besuch fremder Länder zu bilden, in entfernten Gegenden Arbeit und an fernen Heilquellen und Seegestaden Wiederherstellung ihrer Gesundheit zu suchen.“ (4) Neben der Spannweite tritt deutlich die Verbindung zu allgemein gesellschaftlichen vuwgn und die enge Verflechtung der Eisenbahn zu den gesellschaftlichen Bewegungen hervor. Die systematische Untersuchung der Visionen und ihre Rolle bei der Initialzündung Eisenbahn wird deshalb am Anfang der Untersuchung stehen.
Die vorausgesagten vielfältigen Interdependenzen zwischen Eisenbahnsystem und der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung zeigten sich bereits unmittelbar nach dem Aufbau eines rudimentären Netzes. Die radikale Veränderung der Raum-/Zeitkoordinaten lieferte in wirtschaftlicher, politischer, sozialer und kultureller Hinsicht zahlreiche neue Chancen und Möglichkeiten. Die Wirkungsmächtigkeit dieser Infrastruktur ist tiefgreifend und hat Konsequenzen nicht nur in bezug auf Wirtschaft und Staat. Das zeigt sich gerade in zugespitzten politischen oder sozialen Situationen. So fand die Revolution von 1848 beispielsweise unter den Rahmenbedingung ganz erheblich beschleunigter Kommunikationsprozesse statt, die im wesentlichen von der Eisenbahn verursacht wurden. Sie ermöglichte eine neue Qualität in der Beförderung großer Menschenmengen und von Informationen. (5) Die Kommunikationsstrukturen befanden sich seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts im Umbruch. Reisen wurde in zunehmendem Maße für immer größere Teile der Gesellschaft erschwinglich. In diesem Zusammenhang steht der Versuch, den Zusammenhang zwischen gewachsener Mobilität und dem Aufschwung der nationalen Bewegung zu bewerten. Zum raschen Austausch von Gütern und Personen gehört auch der rasche Austausch von Informationen und Ideen. Zu denken ist dabei nicht nur an die Möglichkeiten für die Meinungsbildner der bürgerlichen Bewegung, sondern auch an die Möglichkeit, viele Menschen über große Entfernungen hin an einem Ort zusammenzuziehen, was bei den großen nationalen Demonstrationen dieser Zeit, bei den Bundesschützen- oder nationalen Sängerfesten oder bei der Gründung und Ausbreitung des Nationalvereins augenfällig wurde.6 Ähnliche Zusammenhänge lassen sich bei der entstehenden Arbeiterbewegung feststellen. Diesen ersten Implikationen des Netzes ist der zweite Komplex der Arbeit gewidmet.
Der dritte Komplex der Studie geht vom Entfaltungsprozeß der Strecken und ihrem Zusammenwachsen zu einem Netz aus, der zu einem qualitativen Sprung im Dienstleistungsangebot der Eisenbahnen führte. Binnen zweier Jahrzehnte wurde die Struktur des nationalen Verkehrs vollkommen umgeformt. Aus dem Zusammenwachsen der Räume und den Zeitverkürzungen für Personen- und Gütertransporte ergaben sich zahlreiche neue Chancen und Möglichkeiten für das Zusammenleben der Menschen.
Das hatte für die Städte als den Knoten des Netzes erhebliche Konsequenzen. Gerade die Städte profitierten in vielfacher Hinsicht vom Ausbau des Eisenbahnsystems. Bereits am Beginn des Eisenbahnzeitalters waren die Städte die eigentlichen Motoren der Eisenbahnentwicklung. Noch bevor die ersten Strecken gebaut waren, spielten Städte in den Visionen bereits eine besondere Rolle. (…)
Das Verhältnis von Eisenbahn und Stadt ist ein zentraler Aspekt bei einer Untersuchung des gesellschaftlichen Einflusses der Eisenbahn und aus diesem Grund ist nach der Rolle der Eisenbahn für Städte im Deutschen Reich und für die Veränderungen des Raumgefüges zwischen Stadt und Land zu fragen. (…)Gerade auf der kommunalen Ebene zeigt sich die Vielfalt der Chancen und Möglichkeiten, die die Eisenbahn bot und es zeigt sich wie sehr sie in das tägliche Leben der Menschen eingriff, wie tiefgreifend die Folgen der Veränderung der Raum-/Zeitkoordinaten waren, wie sie die kulturellen Beziehungen prägte und wie jahrhundertelang gültige Vorstellungen der Beziehung von Stadt und Land, der Zivilisation und Natur sowie Bildung, Kunst und Kultur verändert wurden. (…)
Zusammenfassend kann gesagt werden, daß sich mit einer fundierten Auswahl von Städten die Umsetzung bestimmter Momente der Visionen wie die Einbindung der Städte in den nationalen und internationalen Warenaustausch, die Folgen der gestiegenen Mobilität, das ungeheure Wachstum des Reiseverkehrs mit seinen kulturellen Folgewirkungen, die Veränderung der Städte, die Erschließung der Region mit neuen Wohn- und Arbeitsmöglichkeiten und der Moment der Repräsentation, des Glanzes und Stolzes der Periode konkret fassen läßt. Die Errungenschaften des Eisenbahnzeitalters treten in ihren praktischen Resultaten auf Stadtebene offen zutage.
Damit sind die Möglichkeiten eines derartigen Ansatzes noch nicht erschöpft. Denn neben dem Fortschritt geraten auf kommunaler Ebene auch die Lasten des Eisenbahnzeitalters in den Blick. Allgemein läßt sich sagen: Kein Fortschritt ohne Verlust, kein Verlust ohne Versuch der Substitution. Diesen Zusammenhängen soll der vierte und letzte Komplex der Studie gewidmet werden. Die Lasten sind in den Städten in Form zahlreicher Konflikte um den Ausbau des Eisenbahnsystems greifbar. Von Standortkonflikten beim Bahnhofsbau über Konflikte um die Folgen für den Straßenverkehr reichen die Auseinandersetzungen bis hin zu regelrechten Protestbewegungen gegen die Zunahme von Umweltemissionen wie Rauch und Lärm, gegen das Zerschneiden der Städte und die Zerstörung gewachsener Nachbarschaften oder ästhetischen Auseinandersetzungen um die Gestaltung der Eisenbahnanlagen. (7) Die Konflikte sind somit methodischer und inhaltlicher Ausgangspunkt für die Untersuchung dieses Abschnitts. Die Folgen des immer dichter werdenden Eisenbahnsystems waren gravierend und reihten sich relativ bruchlos in das Unbehagen der Epoche am Ende des 19. und Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts ein. Die Konflikte im Zusammenhang mit dem rasanten Ausbau der Eisenbahn standen der damaligen Großstadtkritik nahe und wirkten tief in die sozialen und politischen Bewegungen wie die Lebensreformbewegung hinein. Mit den Zweifeln an den Segnungen der modernen Zeit und den fühlbaren Belastungen wie Rauch und Lärm oder der ästhetischen Kritik an den von der Hand des Ingenieurs geformten Stadtlandschaften verbinden sich Namen von Stadtsoziologen wie Simmel, von Literaten wie den Naturalisten Liliencron, Hart oder Hauptmann oder auch von Künstlern der Moderne wie die Brückekünstler Kirchner, Heckel und Felixmüller. Sie als Avantgarde thematisierten das Verhältnis von Eisenbahn und Stadt in vielerlei Hinsicht kritisch und dokumentierten in ihren Werken auf ihre Weise die Lasten des Fortschritts. Hier ist ein deutlicher Umschlag zur künstlerischen Behandlung des Motivfeldes Eisenbahn in den vorhergehenden Jahrzehnten zu beobachten.
Der Ansatz soll insofern ein facettenreiches Bild von den Eisenbahnstrukturen und ein möglichst vielschichtiger und unkonventioneller Eindruck von den wirtschaftlichen, sozialen, politischen und kulturellen Konsequenzen moderner Verkehrsstrukturen und ihren Verflechtungen mit dem gesellschaftlichen Umfeld liefern.