The Third Class Wagon, by Honoré Daumier. 1862. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS On September 15, 1830, a machine transformed the daily lives of millions of people:the steam engine, which towed the first cars over the 48 km from Manchester to Liverpool at the hectic speed of 35 km per hour. British novelist Charles Dickens worries about the event, saying it is the most profound transformation of human experience since the great migrations of peoples. Journey on the Orient-Express In fact, the railway revolutionized the means of communication. It opens up the interior to a form of massive, fast and profitable travel for passengers and goods. It also unites countries, such as the United States, where it connects the east coast to the west coast through the Great Plains. In Germany, he created the Berlin-Hamburg axis, which would then extend to Cologne and Munich and serve as a driving force for the reunification of the country. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Vienna-Budapest line served to connect the capitals of the dual monarchy – and it became a theme in the poems of Valéry Larbaud. In Russia, the St. Petersburg-Moscow line is the setting for the most moving romance novel in Russian literature:Anna Karenina , by Tolstoy. Train travel became a form of cultural entertainment for Europe's privileged classes. To this end, the luxurious transcontinental trains were created, such as the famous Orient-Express inaugurated in 1883. In addition to its comfort, the first class offers a set of specific pleasures:excellent food prepared on the stoves of a kitchen installed in the train, served in the dining car by smartly dressed waiters; a well-kept cellar allowing high-quality wines to be poured into crystal glasses that match the brilliance of silver cutlery; spacious and private compartments, well-lit at night and welcoming in the day, with floor-to-ceiling windows through which the landscape passes, good heating in winter and excellent ventilation in summer. The invention of the station The train thus materializes the social situation of the moment:the wealthy classes move with speed, comfort and elegance. A reality that also affects the new architecture created for the arrival of trains:the urban station. As the painter Monet testifies in his series La Gare Saint-Lazare , the way of combining iron, steel and glass gives the stations their modern appearance. There are first-class waiting rooms, which reflect the comfort of cars; in Paris, in the Gare de Lyon, one of these rooms has been preserved under the name of Train bleu, a renowned restaurant. The silk seats and wooden benches reflect more than the varied conditions of train travel:they also symbolize the social divide between first and third class travellers. However, train travel is quite different when considering third-class carriages. This is where people with few means take their place, in some cases to embark on the path of emigration to countries offering them a better future; in others, to go to work from the suburbs where they live – populated by families arriving from the countryside – to the city centers, where most jobs are concentrated. In 1864, the artist Honoré Daumier, a figure of realism, painted The Third Class Wagon to draw attention to the conditions of the train journey of the little people. Conditions partly comparable to those of steerage travelers on boats or, currently, to certain public transport; travelers who all offer the image of a new social promiscuity and who are therefore condemned to a permanent and inevitable brushing with people they do not know. A collateral damage of this form of travel in third-class cars is the consumption of strong alcohol to fight against the cold that enters through the gaps in the windows. Because, in these compartments, heating is conspicuous by its absence. In England, whiskey – the alcohol of Irish workers who worked on the tracks, in the furnaces or in freight cars – replaced gin, which was then the liquor of the upper classes. In other countries, the different forms of pomace, distillates of the grape, impregnate their characteristic smell in the early hours of the day in third-class carriages.
