Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about what air travel actually did to the world, not just the obvious stuff. The real question he's asking is: did the airplane shrink the railways? Did it kill off long-distance train travel, or did something more complicated happen? And before all that, when someone needed to cross an ocean or a continent, how did they actually pull it off? Because we do see these accounts of people making epic journeys in eras where that sounds borderline impossible. What did that look like on the ground?
Oh, this is a fantastic question. And the short answer is — no, the airplane did not contract railways. Not in the way people assume. But the real story is way more interesting than just yes or no.
You've got that look.
The "I found a dataset and I'm about to make it everyone's problem" look.
I don't have a look. But I do have numbers. So here's the thing — the peak of railway track mileage in the United States was nineteen sixteen. Two hundred fifty-four thousand miles of track. That's the all-time high. Commercial aviation effectively doesn't exist yet. The first scheduled passenger flight in the US is nineteen fourteen, the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line, and it lasts all of four months. So railways hit their absolute zenith before airplanes were even a factor.
Wait, nineteen sixteen? So the decline started before commercial flight was real?
What actually shrank American railways was the automobile. And the bus. And better roads. By the time commercial aviation becomes a meaningful competitor — we're talking post-World War Two, late nineteen forties, early nineteen fifties — the US rail network had already lost something like forty thousand miles of track. The damage was done by the Model T, not the DC-3.
The airplane arrived to a crime scene where the car had already done the deed.
And it's not just the US. You see similar patterns in a lot of industrialized countries. Railways peaked at different times — in Britain it was earlier, around nineteen ten or so — but the common thread is that road transport was the primary disruptor. Buses, trucks, private cars. The airplane just accelerated a trend that was already well underway.
There's got to be places where the airplane did directly clobber the train, right? I'm thinking of specific routes. New York to Chicago. London to Paris. Routes where flying just made the train look slow.
And that's where the story gets more nuanced. So passenger rail didn't disappear, but it did fundamentally shift its role. Long-distance passenger trains in the US were losing money on those routes by the nineteen fifties and sixties. The railroads were desperate to get out of the passenger business. That's literally why Amtrak was created in nineteen seventy-one — the government had to step in because the private railroads wanted to drop passenger service entirely.
The airplane killed the long-haul passenger train, but the car had already killed the short-haul one?
Yes, and the medium-haul too. But here's what's interesting — freight rail didn't die. The US moves more freight by rail today than it did in the nineteen twenties, just on a smaller network that's been optimized. The airplane never competed with freight. You're not shipping coal by 747. So what you actually see is a specialization. Passenger rail retreated to dense corridors — the Northeast, parts of California, the Chicago hub — where it could actually compete on convenience. Everything else became freight-dominant.
The network contracted, but it didn't contract because of aviation. It contracted because of cars, and then aviation finished off the long-distance passenger piece.
And even then, it's not universal. If you look at Europe and Japan, the story is completely different. High-speed rail is genuinely competitive with flying on routes under about five hundred miles. Tokyo to Osaka, the Shinkansen carries more passengers than the airlines do on that corridor. Paris to Lyon, same thing. The train has about a ninety percent market share on that route versus flying.
Because when you factor in getting to the airport, security, boarding, taxiing — the train is just faster door to door for those distances.
The threshold is usually cited as about three to four hours of train travel. Under that, trains dominate. Over that, planes take over. And that's held pretty stable for decades now. What's changed recently is that some routes are pushing that boundary — the Beijing to Shanghai high-speed line is about eight hundred miles, and the train still has something like a sixty percent share. That's a five-hour trip.
Daniel's question about contraction is almost backwards in some places. In parts of Asia and Europe, railways actually expanded after aviation existed, just in a different form.
Japan's Shinkansen opened in nineteen sixty-four, well into the jet age. France's TGV launched in nineteen eighty-one. These were new builds, not legacy lines. And they directly compete with airlines. So the relationship between rail and air is more complicated than one replacing the other. It's about distance bands, population density, government investment choices.
Okay, so that's the rail side. But the second part of Daniel's question is actually the one I find more interesting. How did people travel long distances before any of this existed? Like, we're talking pre-railway, pre-steamship, or at least early days of those technologies. And we have these accounts of people crossing oceans, crossing continents. How did that actually work?
Let's start with ocean travel, because that's the one that really reshaped global movement. Before steam power, you're talking about sailing ships. And the key thing people get wrong is they imagine everyone traveling in some kind of miserable cargo hold for months. That's not how it worked — at least not for everyone.
Right, because there's a class system even on an eighteenth-century ship.
Massive class system. But the real variable wasn't comfort, it was time and reliability. A transatlantic crossing under sail in the seventeen hundreds could take anywhere from four weeks to three months, depending on wind, weather, season, the skill of the captain, and whether you got unlucky with storms. There was no schedule. You left when the wind was favorable, and you arrived when you arrived.
That's wild to think about now. You'd just... go to the dock and hope?
There were packet ships by the early eighteen hundreds that tried to maintain regular schedules, but even those were at the mercy of the weather. The real transformation was steam. The first steamship to cross the Atlantic was the SS Savannah in eighteen nineteen, but it was a hybrid — it used sail most of the way. The first all-steam crossing was the SS Sirius in eighteen thirty-eight. That trip took eighteen and a half days.
That's still not fast, but it's predictable.
Predictability is the revolution. You can now say "I will arrive in New York on approximately this date," and be reasonably confident. By the eighteen fifties, the crossing was down to about ten days. By nineteen hundred, the big ocean liners like the Mauretania were doing it in under five days. And that's when you get the golden age of ocean travel — not because it was fast by our standards, but because it was fast enough and reliable enough that mass migration and regular business travel became feasible.
The experience itself evolved. The ocean liners of the early nineteen hundreds were luxurious if you had money.
The Titanic, the Queen Mary, the Normandie — these were floating palaces. But that was first class. Steerage was still steerage. The majority of transatlantic passengers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were immigrants, and their experience was crowded, uncomfortable, and often pretty grim. But it was still better than sail had been. Shorter, safer, more predictable.
What about overland travel? Daniel mentioned people doing long-distance journeys that seem impossible for the time. I'm thinking of things like Marco Polo, or the Silk Road, or even just someone traveling from London to Rome in the seventeen hundreds.
This is where it helps to think in terms of infrastructure, even before modern technology. The Roman road network was still partially usable in the seventeen hundreds. The Persians had the Royal Road. The Inca had a road system stretching thousands of miles through the Andes. Long-distance travel has always existed — it was just slower, more dangerous, and required a lot more planning.
More people involved. You couldn't just hop on a horse and go. You needed support.
If you were wealthy, you traveled with an entourage — servants, guards, guides. If you were a merchant, you joined a caravan. The Silk Road wasn't one road, and you didn't travel it alone. You moved in groups for safety, and you stopped at caravanserais — fortified inns spaced about a day's journey apart along the route. There was an entire infrastructure for long-distance travel across Central Asia that functioned for centuries.
If you were just a regular person? A farmer who needed to get somewhere?
Or you didn't go. Most people in most of human history never traveled more than about twenty miles from where they were born. Long-distance travel was for merchants, soldiers, pilgrims, and the wealthy. The idea that ordinary people could just decide to visit another country is extremely modern.
That's humbling. We think of travel as this universal human experience, but for most of history it just wasn't.
There's a statistic I came across — in eighteen hundred, something like ninety-five percent of the world's population lived and died within fifty miles of their birthplace. That number starts shifting dramatically with railways. Trains were the first form of mass transit that ordinary people could afford. Not luxury travel, but basic movement. Third-class rail carriages in Britain in the eighteen forties were crowded wooden benches, but they cost a penny a mile. A factory worker could afford to visit family in the next city.
Rail democratized travel before aviation ever did.
And it did it at a scale that's hard to appreciate now. By nineteen hundred, Britain's railways were carrying over a billion passenger journeys a year. The population of Britain at the time was about forty million. That's an average of twenty-five rail journeys per person per year. Rail was deeply embedded in daily life.
When Daniel asks whether the airplane contracted railways, part of the answer is that rail had already done the democratization work. The airplane didn't replace that — it added a new layer on top.
And the layer it added was speed over very long distances. What's interesting is how people adapted to that. The first commercial jet airliner was the de Havilland Comet in nineteen fifty-two. Before that, long-distance travel was still measured in days. After the 707 and the DC-8 in the late fifties, you could cross the Atlantic in hours. That's a qualitative shift, not just a quantitative one. It changes what "long distance" even means.
The psychological distance collapsed. A trip from New York to London went from being a major life event to something you could do for a long weekend.
That changed culture in ways we're still processing. Before jet travel, if you emigrated, you probably never saw your home country again. Letters took weeks. Now someone can move to Australia and fly back for Christmas. It's a fundamentally different relationship with distance and family and place.
Let me pull on something Daniel mentioned — he said we see historical accounts of people doing long-range travel that seems impossible for the time. And I think part of what makes it seem impossible to us is that we've lost the context of how those journeys were supported.
We imagine someone just setting out into the wilderness alone. That's not how it worked. Travel was social, networked, and supported by infrastructure we don't think about. Inns, post stations, caravanserais, hostels run by religious orders along pilgrimage routes. The Camino de Santiago in Spain has been walked by pilgrims for over a thousand years, and there were hospitals and shelters along the route in the Middle Ages.
The infrastructure was there, just at a different scale and pace.
A different rhythm. A journey from Venice to Beijing in the thirteen hundreds, like Marco Polo's family did, took about three to four years round trip. But you weren't traveling continuously. You'd stop for months at a time — to trade, to wait out weather, to recover from illness, to let political situations stabilize ahead of you. Travel was episodic.
That's such a different mental model. We think of travel as continuous movement from A to B. They thought of it as a series of stays with movement in between.
That model persisted well into the railway era, actually. Early train travel wasn't nonstop. You'd change trains at junctions, sometimes stay overnight in a hotel near the station, continue the next day. The idea of a seamless journey is very recent.
What killed that episodic model? Was it speed, or was it the infrastructure catching up?
Speed compressed trips to the point where stopping didn't make sense. And infrastructure — better tracks, better scheduling, integrated networks — made connections smoother. But the real shift was cultural. People started valuing speed and efficiency over the experience of the journey itself.
Which is kind of ironic because now we have this whole slow travel movement — people deliberately choosing trains over planes, not for cost or convenience, but because they want the journey to be part of the experience again.
And that's actually bringing back some of the pre-aviation travel patterns. Night trains are having a renaissance in Europe. The Caledonian Sleeper from London to Scotland, the Nightjet services across Central Europe. People are rediscovering that waking up in a new city after sleeping on a train is delightful.
You've done that, haven't you? The sleeper train thing?
I took the Nightjet from Vienna to Venice a few years ago. Woke up as we were crossing the lagoon. The sun was coming up over the water. And it's not nostalgia — it's a practical way to travel. You save a hotel night, you arrive in the city center, and you didn't lose a day to airports.
That's the pitch right there. Airports are usually far from the city. Train stations are in the middle of everything.
That's why high-speed rail works so well in Europe and Japan. The city-center to city-center time is what matters, not the vehicle speed. A plane might fly at five hundred miles per hour, but if you spend two hours getting to the airport and two hours at the airport and an hour getting from the destination airport into the city, your average speed drops dramatically. A train going two hundred miles per hour from city center to city center beats it on a lot of routes.
Daniel's question about contraction is really about understanding that the transportation landscape didn't simplify — it specialized. Different modes found their niches.
And that specialization is still evolving. Look at what's happening with short-haul flights in Europe. France has actually banned domestic flights on routes where there's a train alternative under two and a half hours. That went into effect in twenty twenty-three. So aviation is now being deliberately contracted in some markets where rail is the better option.
That's a policy-driven contraction, not a market-driven one.
It connects to the climate conversation, which is a whole other dimension. But the core pattern holds — aviation didn't destroy rail. It forced rail to figure out what it's best at, and in many places rail has come back stronger in those niches.
Let me circle back to something you mentioned earlier about ocean liners, because I think there's a parallel. The airplane did eventually kill the ocean liner as a mode of transportation. But it took decades.
The golden age of ocean liners peaked in the nineteen twenties and thirties. After World War Two, the liners came back briefly — the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were still making transatlantic runs. But by the late nineteen fifties, jet aircraft were taking over. The final blow was the Boeing 707. By the mid nineteen sixties, more people were crossing the Atlantic by air than by sea. The ocean liner as transportation was dead.
Cruise ships exist. So the industry pivoted from transportation to leisure.
Exactly the same dynamic as rail in some ways. The ocean liner didn't disappear — it transformed into the cruise ship. The journey became the destination. Instead of competing on speed, they compete on experience. And that's a multibillion-dollar industry now. So even when aviation "wins," the older mode often finds a new niche rather than vanishing entirely.
That's a really useful framework. Transportation modes don't die, they specialize.
Canal boats are another example. The Erie Canal was a revolutionary transportation technology in the eighteen twenties. It made New York City the dominant port in America. Then railways came along and made canals obsolete for freight and passengers. But canals didn't disappear — they became recreational. People live on narrowboats in Britain. It's a whole subculture.
What would you say to someone who assumes that before aviation, nobody traveled long distances?
I'd say they're confusing speed with possibility. People traveled enormous distances throughout history. They just did it slowly, with support networks, and often not by choice — trade, war, pilgrimage, migration. The scale of movement in some periods is staggering. The Mongol Empire had a postal relay system called the Yam that could move messages over a thousand miles in a few days using fresh horses at stations spaced about twenty-five miles apart. That's thirteen-hundreds. Genghis Khan was running an express mail network across Asia six hundred years before the Pony Express.
A thousand miles in a few days?
The riders would change horses at each station and keep going. They could cover two hundred miles in a day. The system had something like fifty thousand horses and thousands of stations across the empire. It was one of the most sophisticated communication networks in the pre-modern world.
That's incredible. And it reinforces your point — the infrastructure existed, just in a form we don't recognize because we're looking for railways and airplanes.
And speaking of pre-modern travel networks, the Inca road system deserves mention. At its peak, it stretched about twenty-five thousand miles through the Andes, connecting modern-day Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. They had relay runners called chasquis who could carry messages across the empire at remarkable speeds. And they did all of this without the wheel — they used llamas as pack animals and walked.
Without the wheel. That's the part that always gets me. The Inca had a massive empire connected by roads and runners, and they never used wheels for transport.
Terrain played a role there — wheeled vehicles aren't great in the Andes. But it's a reminder that "advanced" transportation looks different in different contexts. The wheel isn't always the answer. Sometimes a llama and a really fit runner are the optimal solution.
When Daniel asks how people made long-distance travel work before modern aviation, part of the answer is that they built systems that were optimized for their specific constraints. And those systems were often incredibly sophisticated.
And I think there's a tendency to view pre-modern travel as just "harder." And it was, in terms of time and physical discomfort. But it wasn't chaotic or disorganized. It was highly structured, with established routes, support infrastructure, and social conventions around hospitality to strangers. Travelers in many cultures could expect food and shelter at monasteries, or from fellow members of their religious or trade networks.
The hospitality piece is interesting. In a world without hotels on every corner, you relied on social obligation.
That shaped travel itself. You carried letters of introduction. You knew who to contact in the next city. Travel was embedded in social networks in a way that modern tourism completely bypasses. You didn't just show up somewhere — you arrived with connections.
Which also meant travel was more exclusive in some ways. If you didn't have those connections, you probably weren't traveling.
Which brings us back to the democratization point. Railways and then aviation didn't just make travel faster — they made it accessible to people without social capital. You didn't need a letter of introduction to buy a train ticket. That's a profound shift in who gets to move through the world.
Let me ask you about a specific case. Daniel mentioned crossing the Atlantic by boat. What was that actually like for someone in, say, eighteen fifty? Not a wealthy person, but not steerage either. A middle-class traveler.
By eighteen fifty, you're in the steamship era. The crossing is taking about ten to twelve days. You'd book passage on a ship like the SS Great Britain or one of the Cunard liners. Second-class accommodations would be a small but private cabin, probably shared with one or two other people. Meals were included and served in a dining saloon. There was a social routine — people dressed for dinner, there were deck promenades, card games, reading. It was boring, mostly. But it was civilized.
The North Atlantic is rough, and nineteenth-century ships didn't have stabilizers. Everyone was seasick. It was just accepted as part of the experience. There are endless diary entries from travelers describing the misery of it. But you endured it because the alternative was months under sail.
By the time you get to the great liners of the early nineteen hundreds, the experience is completely different.
Night and day. The Mauretania in nineteen-oh-seven had steam turbines, stabilizers, electric lighting, elevators, a swimming pool. The crossing was under five days. First-class passengers were living in luxury that rivaled the best hotels on land. But again, that was first class. The majority of passengers were still in much more modest accommodations. The class divide on those ships was stark — separate dining rooms, separate deck space, separate everything.
That class system on ships mirrors the class system in rail travel too, right? First, second, third class.
And it persisted into early aviation. The first commercial flights were extremely expensive, and the experience was luxurious because it had to be — you were competing with first-class ocean travel. Pan Am's Clipper flying boats in the nineteen thirties had sleeping berths and dining saloons. Flying was an event. It wasn't until the jet age and deregulation that air travel became a mass-market commodity.
In a weird way, the democratization of air travel made it worse in terms of comfort. The seats got smaller, the service got stripped down.
That's exactly what happened to rail before it. Early trains were uncomfortable for third-class passengers, but by the late nineteenth century, even third class had roofs and seats. Standards improved as it became mass transit. Then aviation went through the same cycle — started luxurious, became mass-market, and now we have budget airlines where you pay extra for a seat assignment.
There's a pattern there. New transportation technology starts as a luxury product, becomes mass-market, and the experience gets optimized for cost rather than comfort.
Then the older mode sometimes reinvents itself as the premium option. That's what's happening with rail in some places. Premium train services — think the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, or the Seven Stars in Kyushu in Japan — these are ultra-luxury experiences that cost more than flying first class. They're selling the journey, not the destination.
We've come full circle. The modes that were supposedly killed by aviation are now competing on luxury and experience.
Full circle, exactly. And I think that's the answer to Daniel's question about contraction. Yes, the total route mileage of railways contracted in many countries during the twentieth century. But that contraction was primarily driven by road transport, not aviation. And what remained specialized — freight dominated in some regions, high-speed passenger rail in others, luxury and tourist trains in still others. The airplane didn't kill the train. It forced the train to get good at specific things.
Where the train couldn't compete, it didn't just vanish — it found a new role.
Even in the US, where passenger rail is a shadow of what it was, Amtrak's Acela service in the Northeast Corridor is competitive with flying. It carries more passengers between New York and Washington than the airlines do. About seventy-five percent of the air-rail market on that route goes to rail. That's not a dead mode. That's a mode that found its niche.
What's the takeaway for someone who, like Daniel, assumed that pre-aviation travel was rare and difficult and that airplanes shrank everything else?
The takeaway is that transportation networks are ecosystems, not zero-sum competitions. A new mode changes the ecosystem — it doesn't replace it. Pre-aviation travel was slower and less comfortable by our standards, but it was extensive, well-organized, and supported by sophisticated infrastructure. The airplane added speed and global reach, but it didn't make trains, ships, or buses obsolete. It just rearranged what each mode does best.
That rearrangement is still happening. We're still figuring out the optimal mix.
And it's worth paying attention to, because transportation policy shapes everything — where people live, where jobs are, how cities grow, carbon emissions, everything. Understanding that these modes coexist and specialize rather than simply replacing each other is essential to making good decisions about infrastructure investment.
Daniel's question about contraction turns out to be a question about evolution. Not what died, but what changed.
What survived by changing. The canal boat, the ocean liner, the long-distance train — none of them are what they were in their peak eras. But they're still here, doing things that airplanes and cars can't do, or can't do as well. There's a resilience in that.
I think we've given Daniel a pretty thorough answer. But before we wrap, I believe we have a fun fact to get to.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the Outer Hebrides during the nineteen seventies, linguists documented one of the last surviving speakers of Tuyuca — a language from the Amazon — who had been brought to Scotland as a child by missionaries. Tuyuca requires speakers to mark how they know every piece of information they convey, a system called evidentiality marking. You cannot say "the jaguar killed the man" without also grammatically indicating whether you saw it happen, heard about it, or inferred it from evidence. This single speaker, isolated on a Scottish island for decades, preserved a complete evidentiality system that had no equivalent in any language she encountered for over sixty years.
A Tuyuca speaker in the Outer Hebrides. Hilbert continues to outdo himself.
So if there's one thing I'd leave listeners with, it's this — the next time you're on a train, or a plane, or even just stuck in traffic, remember that you're participating in an ecosystem that's been evolving for centuries. And the modes we think of as obsolete are often just waiting for their next niche.
If you want to go deeper on any of this, the history of transportation is full of incredible stories. The opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway in nineteen sixteen, the last scheduled transatlantic passenger sailing in nineteen sixty-nine aboard the Queen Elizabeth two before she was converted to cruising, the first Shinkansen run from Tokyo to Osaka in nineteen sixty-four hitting a hundred and thirty miles per hour while the world watched. It's all there.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, and thanks to Daniel for the question. You can find us at myweirdprompts dot com, on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next time.
