Public opinion is a fickle thing. Worried about the risk of falling victim to an attack, thousands of travellers cancel or postpone journeys. We write not of today, but of 150 years ago when a great wave of apprehension caused the chattering classes to think twice about travelling by train. The chance of being murdered on a train journey was mercifully low. But statistics were not on the side of Monsieur Poinsot who was attacked and killed while on a train travelling through eastern France. Only when the train arrived at the Gare de l’Est in Paris was the body discovered, and by then the murderer had long fled, presumably alighting from the train at one of the stations along the way.
The fate of Monsieur Poinsot made French travellers think twice about buying a train ticket. The satirical weekly Le Figaro, precursor of the Paris daily newspaper of the same name, gently mocked the public mood. It suggested that, just as there were compartments reserved for smokers, and yet others set aside for lady travellers, could there not be a specially designated compartment for assassins?
Before long, Gallic panic over the dangers of train travel spread to England, when a particularly gruesome compartment murder took place in London. English trains were designed on the same lines as those in France, with first-class accommodation being in separate compartments, each accessed by a door directly from the railway platform. There was in those days no connection at all between adjacent compartments.
The railway compartment is slowly being challenged, even in its central European heartland, by the open-plan saloon.
This design was the norm across Europe for first class, in contrast to North America where the open-plan saloon car was more common. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his marvellous book The Railway Journey, suggests that on European trains well-to-do travellers enjoyed the privacy and style associated with travel in a horse-drawn coach on a highway. The railway compartment in Europe imitated the coach, but Schivelbusch notes that the design of the American railroad car was inspired by the open cabins on the riverboats and steamers which plied the young nation’s waterways.
“That only two cases of murder,” writes Schivelbusch, “occurring four years apart and in two different countries were able to trigger a collective psychosis tells us as much about the compartment’s significance for the nineteenth century European psyche as does the fact that it took so long to become conscious of the compartment’s dysfunctionality.”
That dysfunctionality lay not merely in the compartment’s appeal for assassins. There were surely many instances of lavatorial distress; no surprise perhaps that, when a train arrived at an intermediate station after a particularly long nonstop leg, there was often a communal rush for the station toilets.
The victim in the London murder was an unfortunate Mr Briggs; his assailant was a German villain named Franz Müller, who was eventually apprehended in New York and brought back to London. Müller’s public hanging outside Newgate Prison in London in November 1864 drew a huge crowd, but did nothing to diminish apprehension over rail travel in separate compartments. The railways responded by introducing a small glazed peephole between compartments. These peepholes were called Müller Lights. Many a courting couple surely bemoaned the resulting loss of privacy.
150 years ago this spring, the government in London was on the case, introducing legislation which required that railway companies install communication cords which passengers in distress could pull to alert the train crew to an emergency. But a German railway engineer, Edmund Heusinger von Waldegg, devised a more radical approach to mitigating the dangers of travel in compartments. He suggested an internal corridor down one side of each carriage, allowing passengers and train staff to move from compartment to compartment. It came at a cost in terms of space, as the incorporation of the corridor meant trimming the number of seats in each compartment. But it was a fair compromise, one which did not utterly undermine the intimacy of the small compartment but now afforded a new sense of safety and security. It also paved the way for the introduction of on-board facilities such as toilets and restaurant cars.
When Wolfgang Schivelbusch wrote the first edition of The Railway Journey in the mid-1970s, he rightly claimed that most Europeans making long-distance train journeys still travelled in compartments. But 40 years on, the railway compartment is slowly being challenged, even in its central European heartland, by the open-plan saloon.
Last summer Czech Railways (ČD) refitted existing compartment coaches to create new open-plan saloon carriages for trains on its Hamburg-Berlin-Prague route. Yet some carriages on these trains still retain the traditional compartment arrangement, thus giving passengers a choice of accommodation types. In November, Deutsche Bahn announced that new ICE 4 trains will no longer include any separate compartments for general use — although there will continue to be a very small number of compartments which can be reserved by families travelling with babies and small children.
A style of travel which at its best provoked amiable conversation is thus slowly disappearing. It may come with attendant dangers, but the compartment is also replete with possibility. True, there are many journeys where passengers in full compartments sit in sullen silence, rubbing knees in “embarrassed sedentary confrontation” (Schivelbusch’s phrase), but many more are the journeys where the possibility of conversation is exploited to the full.
The compartment is the perfect setting for the sharing of confidences and life stories — and the great advantage of these fleeting encounters is that you can invent an entirely fake biography with little chance of being found out. There’s far less dramatic potential in the more public space of the open-plan carriages, which nowadays have all the appeal of an open-plan office. Their very sterility does however allay the fears of passengers who worry that they might be murdered before they reach their destination.
