Mobility for the Mainland: The Contribution of the Railway to the Emergence of the Age of Speed

Railway - not only as a means of transport, but also as a technological invention and a social construction - was mainly responsible for the diffusion of the Industrial Environment. With the Railways broadly disseminated in space, the natural environment was innovated. In England, especially, the transition was gradual, surpassing the previous slow rates of the canals transportation. By contrast, in developing areas such as the Balkans, the gap between pre-industrial and railway transport was enormous, because, until then, the chances for continental mobility were quite uncommon. In general, however, Railways and Industry provoked novel theoretical conceptions such as calculations of risks relating to technology, problems of governance and control of technical systems, energy policy, environmental issues, computational technology, scientific management, globalization and many other areas of development of the technological systems.