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Your 12-Hour Road Trip Would Have Taken Six Weeks in 1800

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These maps, published in 1932 in the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States and available through the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection , illustrate how arduous travel was in the country’s early history. In 1800, a journey from New York to Chicago would have taken an intrepid traveler roughly six weeks; travel times beyond the Mississippi River aren’t even charted. Three decades later, the trip dropped to three weeks in length and by the mid-19 th century, the New York–Chicago journey via railroad took two days. And the introduction of regional airlines in the 1920s made it possible to travel 1,000 or more miles in a single day.

Prior to 1800, sea routes, rudimentary postal roads, and a few navigable rivers—none of which linked the East Coast to lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains—were the only ways to cover long distances. At the turn of the 18 th century, New Englanders began constructing thousands of miles of toll roads that allowed for faster travel and wouldn’t become impassable with heavy rain or snow. The development of railroads—as well as canals, many of which were never finished or were made obsolete by the railroad—in the 19 th century brought an increasingly complex and speedy transportation system to the country. Cities such as Chicago—a dusty military outpost and frontier town until the mid-1800s— became booming centers of commerce and population growth thanks to the expansion of railroad and river routes.

Nowadays, travel by car—via our interstate highway system , which first received funding in 1956—from New York to Chicago takes roughly 12 hours. The rise of major commercial airlines in the mid-20 th century kicked off Americans’ reliance on air travel. A direct flight from La Guardia to O’Hare will now set you back just 2½ hours, excluding TSA pat-down time.

Click on the image below, or on this link to the map’s page on the David Rumsey site , to arrive at a larger, zoomable version.

“Rates of Travel, 1800-1930.” Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States , by Charles O. Paullin, ed. John K. Wright, published by the Carnegie Institution and the American Geographical Society, 1932. David Rumsey Map Collection.

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What travel looked like 100 years ago: Map shows how many DAYS it took to travel to the furthest corners of Britain's Empire in 1914

• Map shows 'isochronic' distance, measuring distance in days from London as they would have been in 1914
• The integration of railways allowed for easier land travel in U.S. and India
• Colours group locations, ranging from 5 days away to more than 40 days

By Cheyenne Macdonald For Dailymail.com

Published: 14:28 EDT, 30 November 2015 | Updated: 09:18 EDT, 1 December 2015

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If holiday travel seems like a nightmare today, it was surely a horror 100 years ago.

An 'isochronic' map published by the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society shows what it was like to travel in 1914 - and the travel time is not measured in hours, but in days.

The colourful map groups different sections of the world by their distance from London, distinguished by how many days it would take to get there.

An 'isochronic' map uncovered by Intelligent Life magazine shows what it was like to travel in 1914, and the travel time is not measured in hours, but in days. The colourful map groups different sections of the world by their distance from London, distinguished by how many days it would take to get there

The lines, called isochrones, join all the points that are accessible within the same amount of time from London, according to Intelligent Life .

These isochrones divide the map into six colour-coded time groups: dark pink, light pink, beige, light green, light blue and teal.

TRAVELING IN 1914 

By the time this map was published by John G. Bartholomew in 'An Atlas of Economic Geography,' railways has begun to change travel.

The Trans-Siberian Railway and the Indian railway opened up travel and trade, and were supported heavily by merchants. 

In this 1914 map, the travel time is not measured in hours, but in days.

An earlier map from by Francis Galton shows that some areas, like India, were less accessible in the 1870s.

Dark pink shows the locations a 1914 traveler could get to most quickly, while the teal shows the areas which would take the longest.

A traveller could get as far east as Perm, Russia, in just five days, while a similarly distanced trip to Africa, where several countries were still under British rule, could take over 40 days.

At the time of the map's publication, World War I was just beginning. H. H. Asquith was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and George V reigned as king.

Britain sent out its troops when it declared war and invaded Germany.

Soldiers would have had to travel up to five days to reach Germany once the declaration of war was announced. 

Troops from New Zealand and Australia also travelled for several days in order to invade and occupy Samoa and German New Guinea, respectively. 

If a travellers from the United Kingdom wanted to make a trip to Australia, a former British colony, in 1914, however, the journey would take at least a month and or more than 40 days.

Reaching places like India proved to be a less difficult task, with it taking approximately ten to 20 days for a Londoner to reach the British-led colony. 

An even easier journey would be that to the United States, which would take a traveller about five to ten days.

The map was first published by John G Bartholomew in An Atlas of Economic Geography, and shows how travel was changing due to the presence of railways. 

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Dark pink shows the locations a 1914 traveler could get to most quickly, while the teal shows the areas which would take the longest. A traveler could get as far east as Perm, Russia in just five days, while a trip to Africa of a similar distance could take over 40 days

Regions with large areas of continuous landmass, like the United States, show through colour that great distance could be travelled relatively quickly.

By the time of the map's creation, railways in the United States and Europe had been integrated into society, allowing passengers to travel on land with much greater ease.

The Trans-Siberian Railway and the Indian railway opened up travel and trade for merchants, and investors from Europe and the United States lobbied for their creation, said Intelligent Life.

Between 1860 and 1880, the Indian railway grew from 838 miles to 15,842 miles, making a train ticket a highly desired commodity for a young entrepreneur.

Isochronic maps can be traced back to the 1800s for use in transportation planning. 

These maps illustrated the days, or weeks, it could take to travel abroad.

Francis Galton's Isochronic Postal Charts and Isochronic Passage Charts mapped the 1880s, when much of the world was not as easily accessible as it became after the establishment of railways. 

Another mapper, Albrecht Penck took the idea further and plotted isochrones for smaller areas and specific ways of travel.

The Trans-Siberian Railway and the Indian railway opened up travel and trade for merchants, and investors from Europe and the Americas lobbied for their creation, says Intelligent Life. Between 1860 and 1880, the Indian railway grew from 838 miles to 15, 842 miles, making a train ticket a highly desired commodity for a young entrepreneur

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What Travel Looked Like Through the Decades

Getting from point A to point B has not always been as easy as online booking, Global Entry , and Uber. It was a surprisingly recent event when the average American traded in the old horse-and-carriage look for a car, plane, or even private jet .

What was it like to travel at the turn of the century? If you were heading out for a trans-Atlantic trip at the very beginning of the 20th century, there was one option: boat. Travelers planning a cross-country trip had something akin to options: carriage, car (for those who could afford one), rail, or electric trolley lines — especially as people moved from rural areas to cities.

At the beginning of the 1900s, leisure travel in general was something experienced exclusively by the wealthy and elite population. In the early-to-mid-20th century, trains were steadily a popular way to get around, as were cars. The debut regional airlines welcomed their first passengers in the 1920s, but the airline business didn't see its boom until several decades later. During the '50s, a huge portion of the American population purchased a set of wheels, giving them the opportunity to hit the open road and live the American dream.

Come 1960, airports had expanded globally to provide both international and domestic flights to passengers. Air travel became a luxury industry, and a transcontinental trip soon became nothing but a short journey.

So, what's next? The leisure travel industry has quite a legacy to fulfill — fancy a trip up to Mars , anyone? Here, we've outlined how travel (and specifically, transportation) has evolved over every decade of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The 1900s was all about that horse-and-carriage travel life. Horse-drawn carriages were the most popular mode of transport, as it was before cars came onto the scene. In fact, roadways were not plentiful in the 1900s, so most travelers would follow the waterways (primarily rivers) to reach their destinations. The 1900s is the last decade before the canals, roads, and railway plans really took hold in the U.S., and as such, it represents a much slower and antiquated form of travel than the traditions we associate with the rest of the 20th century.

Cross-continental travel became more prevalent in the 1910s as ocean liners surged in popularity. In the '10s, sailing via steam ship was the only way to get to Europe. The most famous ocean liner of this decade, of course, was the Titanic. The largest ship in service at the time of its 1912 sailing, the Titanic departed Southampton, England on April 10 (for its maiden voyage) and was due to arrive in New York City on April 17. At 11:40 p.m. on the evening of April 14, it collided with an iceberg and sank beneath the North Atlantic three hours later. Still, when the Titanic was constructed, it was the largest human-made moving object on the planet and the pinnacle of '10s travel.

The roaring '20s really opened our eyes up to the romance and excitement of travel. Railroads in the U.S. were expanded in World War II, and travelers were encouraged to hop on the train to visit out-of-state resorts. It was also a decade of prosperity and economic growth, and the first time middle-class families could afford one of the most crucial travel luxuries: a car. In Europe, luxury trains were having a '20s moment coming off the design glamour of La Belle Epoque, even though high-end train travel dates back to the mid-1800s when George Pullman introduced the concept of private train cars.

Finally, ocean liners bounced back after the challenges of 1912 with such popularity that the Suez Canal had to be expanded. Most notably, travelers would cruise to destinations like Jamaica and the Bahamas.

Cue "Jet Airliner" because we've made it to the '30s, which is when planes showed up on the mainstream travel scene. While the airplane was invented in 1903 by the Wright brothers, and commercial air travel was possible in the '20s, flying was quite a cramped, turbulent experience, and reserved only for the richest members of society. Flying in the 1930s (while still only for elite, business travelers) was slightly more comfortable. Flight cabins got bigger — and seats were plush, sometimes resembling living room furniture.

In 1935, the invention of the Douglas DC-3 changed the game — it was a commercial airliner that was larger, more comfortable, and faster than anything travelers had seen previously. Use of the Douglas DC-3 was picked up by Delta, TWA, American, and United. The '30s was also the first decade that saw trans-Atlantic flights. Pan American Airways led the charge on flying passengers across the Atlantic, beginning commercial flights across the pond in 1939.

1940s & 1950s

Road trip heyday was in full swing in the '40s, as cars got better and better. From convertibles to well-made family station wagons, cars were getting bigger, higher-tech, and more luxurious. Increased comfort in the car allowed for longer road trips, so it was only fitting that the 1950s brought a major expansion in U.S. highway opportunities.

The 1950s brought the Interstate system, introduced by President Eisenhower. Prior to the origination of the "I" routes, road trippers could take only the Lincoln Highway across the country (it ran all the way from NYC to San Francisco). But the Lincoln Highway wasn't exactly a smooth ride — parts of it were unpaved — and that's one of the reasons the Interstate system came to be. President Eisenhower felt great pressure from his constituents to improve the roadways, and he obliged in the '50s, paving the way for smoother road trips and commutes.

The '60s is the Concorde plane era. Enthusiasm for supersonic flight surged in the '60s when France and Britain banded together and announced that they would attempt to make the first supersonic aircraft, which they called Concorde. The Concorde was iconic because of what it represented, forging a path into the future of aviation with supersonic capabilities. France and Britain began building a supersonic jetliner in 1962, it was presented to the public in 1967, and it took its maiden voyage in 1969. However, because of noise complaints from the public, enthusiasm for the Concorde was quickly curbed. Only 20 were made, and only 14 were used for commercial airline purposes on Air France and British Airways. While they were retired in 2003, there is still fervent interest in supersonic jets nearly 20 years later.

Amtrak incorporated in 1971 and much of this decade was spent solidifying its brand and its place within American travel. Amtrak initially serviced 43 states (and Washington D.C.) with 21 routes. In the early '70s, Amtrak established railway stations and expanded to Canada. The Amtrak was meant to dissuade car usage, especially when commuting. But it wasn't until 1975, when Amtrak introduced a fleet of Pullman-Standard Company Superliner cars, that it was regarded as a long-distance travel option. The 235 new cars — which cost $313 million — featured overnight cabins, and dining and lounge cars.

The '80s are when long-distance travel via flight unequivocally became the norm. While the '60s and '70s saw the friendly skies become mainstream, to a certain extent, there was still a portion of the population that saw it as a risk or a luxury to be a high-flyer. Jetsetting became commonplace later than you might think, but by the '80s, it was the long-haul go-to mode of transportation.

1990s & 2000s

Plans for getting hybrid vehicles on the road began to take shape in the '90s. The Toyota Prius (a gas-electric hybrid) was introduced to the streets of Japan in 1997 and took hold outside Japan in 2001. Toyota had sold 1 million Priuses around the world by 2007. The hybrid trend that we saw from '97 to '07 paved the way for the success of Teslas, chargeable BMWs, and the electric car adoption we've now seen around the world. It's been impactful not only for the road trippers but for the average American commuter.

If we're still cueing songs up here, let's go ahead and throw on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," because the 2010s are when air travel became positively over-the-top. Qatar Airways rolled out their lavish Qsuites in 2017. Business class-only airlines like La Compagnie (founded in 2013) showed up on the scene. The '10s taught the luxury traveler that private jets weren't the only way to fly in exceptional style.

Of course, we can't really say what the 2020 transportation fixation will be — but the stage has certainly been set for this to be the decade of commercial space travel. With Elon Musk building an elaborate SpaceX rocket ship and making big plans to venture to Mars, and of course, the world's first space hotel set to open in 2027 , it certainly seems like commercialized space travel is where we're headed next.

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Travel time is the forgotten breakthrough of the past 200 years

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The classic Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States shows exactly how travel times across the United States have evolved over time. Back in the early 1800s, without easily navigable roads or railroads, even a journey from New York to Washington, DC, was a multi-day affair.

Map of travel times in 1800 and 1830. ( Hathi Trust )

Over time, that slowly improved. Construction on the National Road , which stretched from Cumberland, Maryland, across the United States, began in 1811 and continued through the 1830s. The advent of the steamboat also made it easier to use rivers.

The big advance, however, came through trains. By 1857, railroads had improved travel times significantly — culminating with the development of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. Even in 1857, travel was easier, thanks to the railroad system.

Map of travel times in 1857.  ( Hathi Trust )

By 1930, railroads had successfully compressed travel times to a couple of days versus the many weeks it took in the 1800s.

Map of railroad travel times in 1930.  ( Hathi Trust )

These maps don't just show the rapid pace of technological progress, however. They also show how that progress advanced unevenly, in fits and starts. Railroads didn't reduce travel times right away — they still required significant infrastructure investments, ranging from laying down tracks to building tunnels. That took decades.

The same thing happened to airline travel. This map of air travel times in the 1930 shows it was a huge advance on railroads. But it was still significantly slower than air travel is today:

Map of airline travel times in 1930.  ( Hathi Trust )

Travel times may get shorter still. But a faster plane or train isn't enough to change it — the infrastructure has to be able to handle whatever invention comes along next.

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The Geography of Transport Systems

The spatial organization of transportation and mobility

Liner Transatlantic Crossing Times, 1833 – 1952

Note: Liverpool / New York. Source: data from P.J. Hugill (1993) World Trade since 1431, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p.128. Stopford, M. (2009) Maritime Economics, Third Edition, London: Routledge.

The passenger liner era roughly lasted for about 100 years, from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Its evolution can be divided into four distinct phases:

• Introduction . The steamship Great Western can be considered one of the first liners in 1838, crossing the Atlantic in 15.5 days. Early liners were made of wood and used paddle wheels, often complemented by sails, as the main form of propulsion. Their capacity was limited to less than 200 passengers. This phase demonstrated the possibility and market potential of transatlantic liner services.
• Growth . By the 1860s, the introduction of iron hulls, compound steam engines, and screw propulsion significantly reduced crossing times to about 8-9 days. No longer limited by the technical limits of wood armatures, the size of liners increased substantially, with a tonnage exceeding 5,000 tons and a capacity of 1,500 passengers. The number and frequency of liner services across the Atlantic (and across the world) increased substantially as the market potential was being realized.
• Maturity . The early 20th century represented the Golden Age of the liner, where those ships dominated long-distance passenger movements. In 1907, the liner Mauretania with a capacity of 2,300 passengers, was able to cross the Atlantic in 4.5 days, a record held for 30 years until the liner Queen Mary reduced the crossing time by half a day (4 days). Liners reached their operational capacity of around 1,500 to 2,000 passengers, and Atlantic crossing times stabilized around 5 days. They relied on quadruple screws using turbine steam engines. This also corresponded to the peak American immigration years from European countries, a process to which liners contributed substantially.
• Obsolescence . By the 1950s, the prominence of the liner was challenged by the first regular transatlantic commercial flights. This challenge quickly asserted itself, and in a decade, the liners shifted from being the main support of transatlantic passenger movements to complete obsolescence. One of the last liners, the United States (mainly made of aluminum), held the transatlantic crossing speed record of 3.5 days in 1952. By the 1960s, air transportation had overtaken the supremacy of liners for transatlantic crossings, and reference time became hours instead of days. Liner services disappeared, and the surviving ships became the first cruise ships .

The usage of ships for carrying passengers is now restricted to cruise shipping, ferries, and small-scale passenger crafts in archipelago countries (Indonesia, the Philippines, Greece, the Caribbean) or great river systems in developing economies (Chang Jiang, Huang He, Nile, and Amazon).

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You Can Travel Like a 1900s Adventurer—Here’s How

A new book shows what a turn-of-the century food explorer can teach us about modern travel.

In 1900 people rarely left their hometown, let alone traveled around their country. But David Fairchild was different.

Fairchild was a food spy for the American government at the turn of the 20th century. He was a botanist, a plant adventurer assigned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to circle the world in search of exotic plants that could become new foods back home. Along the way he picked up avocados, mangoes, nectarines, dates, kale, and hundreds of other crops.

Fairchild visited the island of Java to see the teeming palms and strange fruits of the tropics. He sailed to Fiji , the so-called Cannibal Islands, and drank mouth-numbing kava with men who had eaten human flesh. In Chile , he picked up a peculiar fruit known as an alligator pear, a.k.a. the avocado, its insides green and smooth.

His path was full of unimaginable adventure—and often danger too. He bargained for plants with Egyptian royalty, and charmed Bavarian hops growers to bring to America the best hops in the world. He witnessed death, outran diseases, and got arrested for espionage. In all, he traveled to more than 50 countries—all by boat.

What can we learn from his travels? More than you’d think. As I scoured Fairchild’s 120-year-old journals to write The Food Explorer, the True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats , I picked up Fairchild’s best advice that still applies to your next voyage.

Ask lots of questions

Fairchild didn’t just arrive in a country hoping to stumble upon something magical. He asked anyone he could any question he could think of. What’s the greatest fruit in this country? How do you grow it? Who should I talk to next? If you’re looking for that charming off-the-beaten path restaurant or the non-touristy view that no one knows about, don’t just rely on your guidebook. Ask a local. He often tried to speak the native language wherever he was, and always thanked people for their advice.

Reciprocate kindness

Sometimes, Fairchild was a spy. But more often, he was a diplomat. He sought ways to reciprocate for a pleasant stay or a delicious meal. He wrote thank you notes and left lavish gifts, like the time he bought a plaque to hang in the doorway of the best hops-grower in Bavaria. Not long after Fairchild visited Japan and arranged the gift of cherry blossom trees to Washington D.C. , he arranged a return shipment of flowering dogwood trees—native to America—to thank his Japanese friends.

Write things down

Fairchild documented every detail. Who he talked to, what new foods he tried. He always had a notebook in his pocket and filled it with fits and starts to remind himself of the lessons he had learned and the recommendations people gave him. You can extend your travels by reminding yourself of what you were thinking, and what you were feeling during a special trip. Future you—and perhaps your descendants—will delight in rediscovering relics from a great voyage.

Send letters

Not emails or texts, but letters. Fairchild would occasionally spend afternoons writing to friends and family back home about his travels. It helped him think better, he said, and to reflect on a novel experience by relaying it to someone who wasn’t there. One time, on a boat in the India Ocean, Fairchild wrote to his mother (in Kansas ) that he was having a marvelous time and had yet to experience any violence at all. A moment after he finished writing, two men broke into his cabin screaming, fighting, and bleeding all over the floor. After the men were dragged away, Fairchild unsealed the letter and, at the bottom, added a postscript.

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Think your delayed flight is bad? On one of Fairchild’s first trips, he took a train from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco to catch a boat. He missed it. Then he took another train to New Orleans and missed a boat there, too. Finally, he returned to New York, not far from where he had started, and caught a steamship across the ocean. Another time, Fairchild spend a week eating only onions as he was quarantined on a boat in the Persian Gulf that suspected of having a case of typhoid fever on board. Travel came with its indignities—and it still does. Find a way to look beyond the inconveniences and, as Fairchild would often say, “push on.”

Learn more about David Fairchild’s adventures in the new book, The Food Explorer , The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats , available now.

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Although advances in steam packets would explode international travel in the mid to late 1800s, the Regency and early Victorian/late Georgian eras still saw some international travel.  Wars abroad, including the Napoleanic Wars saw modified travel routes around areas of conflict (Suntikul, 2013).  Although the Grand Tour went through a slow down during war time, its resurgence after the wars into the early Victorian era also ushered in “a more formalized tourist industry” (Towner, 1985, p.297).

The Grand Tour is typically talked about as an exclusively male activity, but frequently women and children would accompany gentlemen on their travels (https://www.york.ac.uk/media/eighteenth-century/cecsatthekingsmanor/Conference%20Abstracts.pdf).  For an inspirational article about trailblazing women travelers: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/mar/08/top-10-inspiring-female-travel-adventurer or there is this post about women travelers: https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/leightonarabhall/travel2.html .  We also did a post several years ago on Lady Hester Stanhope .

Limited travel abroad saw more activity in the U.K., with visitors flocking to not only Spa Towns but also far flung locations (at least by a carriage) like Scotland and Wales.  Limited travels also took place the U.S.A., Canada, Central and South America, Ireland, and the West Indies. For women traveling during the 19th century outside of the UK, I recommend the book Women, Travel, and Science in Nineteenth Century Americas (citation below) which focuses on the travel writer Frances Calderon de la Barca (nee Erskine Inglis) who was well known for her 1843 book Life in Mexico and Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, an American naturalist and writer who traveled to Brazil.

Travelling generally around the world boomed during the early to late Victorian era.  According to Stowe (1994), “many nineteenth-century Americans traveled, and many more participated vicariously in the experience of travel by reading travel letters, sketches, and narratives in newspapers, magazines, and published volumes” (p. 3).  Similarly, the appetite for travel in the U.K. was also voracious and included print media when travel was not possible.  Railroads made local, regional, and UK travel more accessible and affordable, with quicker speeds.

Take the Grand Tour Online: http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/grandtour_tourism/grandtour.html

Read about the Grand Tour:

https://www.regencyhistory.net/2013/04/the-grand-tour.html

https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/the-grand-tour-in-the-18th-19th-century/

https://www.bl.uk/picturing-places/articles/a-royal-armchair-traveller-the-grand-tour-and-the-kings-topographical-collection

Gerassi-Navarro, N. (2018). Women, Travel, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Americas: The Politics of Observation. (n.p.): Springer International Publishing.

MELISH, J. (1818). Travels through the United States of America, etc. United Kingdom: J. Smyth.

Stowe, W. (1994). Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture . PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1m3nzrr

Suntikul, W. (2013). Tourism and War. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.

Towner, J. (1985).  The Grand Tour: A key phase in the history of tourism.   Annals of Tourism Research, Voume 12, Issue 3, pp. 297-333.

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Travel in the 19th Century: Exploring the Modes and Methods of Transportation

Welcome to 19th Century , Stephen Grove’s blog dedicated to exploring the fascinating era of the 1800s. In this article, we delve into the captivating world of travel during this time, unveiling the various modes and methods of transportation that intrigued and shaped society throughout the century. Join us on this journey through time as we uncover the wonders of 19th-century travel.

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Traveling in the 19th Century: Exploring Transportation Methods of the Era

Traveling in the 19th Century : Exploring Transportation Methods of the Era

During the 19th century , traveling took on a whole new meaning as various transportation methods began to emerge. As industrialization and technological advancements gained momentum, the options for moving from one place to another expanded significantly.

Horse-drawn carriages were still commonly used for short-distance journeys, especially within cities. These elegant vehicles were often driven by skilled coachmen who navigated through bustling streets with finesse. However, for longer travels, more efficient alternatives were needed.

One of the most revolutionary developments was the steam-powered locomotive . This innovation introduced the world to railway travel , which quickly became a symbol of progress and connectivity. Railways enabled people and goods to be transported faster and farther than ever before, transforming both domestic and international travel.

Another significant advancement during this time was the steamship , which revolutionized long-distance travel across oceans and seas. Steamships were powered by steam engines and could carry large numbers of passengers and cargo. This new mode of transportation brought continents closer together and opened up opportunities for trade, exploration, and migration.

It is important to note that not all transportation methods of the era relied on steam power. Sailboats continued to play a crucial role, particularly for coastal navigation and trade. The wind-powered vessels were relied upon for their versatility and ability to navigate even the most challenging waterways.

Lastly, the advent of the bicycle in the late 19th century offered an affordable and accessible means of transportation for individuals. Although initially considered a novelty, bicycles quickly gained popularity as a practical mode of transport, especially in urban areas.

The 19th century witnessed significant advancements in transportation methods. From the elegance of horse-drawn carriages to the speed and efficiency of steam-powered locomotives and steamships, the era was defined by a newfound ability to connect with faraway places. Sailboats and bicycles also played important roles, offering alternative options for travel. The transportation methods of the 19th century laid the groundwork for the rapid advancements that would follow in the centuries to come.

Worst Places in the World to Travel

19th century portraits brought to life, what were the modes of transportation in the 1900s.

In the 19th century, modes of transportation varied greatly depending on the region and technological advancements of the time. However, some common modes of transportation during this period included:

1. Horse-drawn carriages: Carriages were commonly used for transportation, both for personal travel and public transportation within cities.

2. Steamboats: Steam-powered boats and steamships played a crucial role in transporting goods and people across rivers and lakes. They were particularly important for trade and connecting inland areas with coastal regions.

3. Railways: The development of railways was one of the major transportation innovations of the 19th century . Steam locomotives revolutionized long-distance travel, allowing people and goods to move rapidly between cities and regions. Railways also played a significant role in industrialization and the expansion of markets.

4. Canals: Canals were important waterways for transporting goods and connecting different regions. While canal transportation declined with the rise of railways, they were still used in specific areas.

5. Bicycles: Although not as prominent as other modes of transportation, bicycles gained popularity during the latter half of the 19th century, providing a relatively affordable means of personal transportation.

6. Horseback riding: Despite the emergence of new modes of transportation, horseback riding remained an essential means of transportation, particularly in rural areas or where roads were inaccessible.

Overall, the 19th century witnessed significant advancements in transportation technology, leading to increased mobility and facilitating economic growth and social change.

What were the means of transportation before the 1800s?

Before the 1800s , there were several means of transportation available. The most common mode of transportation was horse-drawn vehicles such as carriages and wagons. These vehicles were used for both short and long-distance travel, although they were relatively slow and could only cover a limited distance in a day.

Ships were another significant means of transportation during the 19th century. They were primarily used for long-distance travel across oceans and seas. Sail-powered ships were the primary mode of transportation until the early 19th century when steam-powered ships were developed, providing faster and more reliable travel.

Riverboats were commonly used for transportation along rivers in the 19th century. These boats were powered by steam engines and played a crucial role in connecting inland areas with major trading cities.

Canals were also an important transportation method during this time. Canals were constructed to connect rivers, lakes, and oceans, allowing goods and passengers to be transported efficiently. These canals were often used by barges pulled by horses, providing a slower but cost-effective mode of transportation.

Stagecoaches were widely used as a means of transportation for both passengers and mail delivery between towns and cities. These horse-drawn carriages were relatively fast compared to other modes of transportation and played a vital role in connecting different regions.

It is important to note that during this period, public transportation systems as we know them today were not widespread. Most transportation methods were privately owned and operated, and the development of railways, which revolutionized transport, did not occur until the mid-19th century.

What was the transportation revolution in the 19th century?

The transportation revolution in the 19th century refers to the significant advancements in transportation systems and infrastructure that took place during this period. It was a time of great innovation and progress, transforming the way people and goods were transported.

One major development was the growth of railroads , which had a profound impact on the economy and society. The construction of extensive railway networks connected different regions, allowing for faster and more efficient movement of goods and people. Railways facilitated the expansion of trade and industry, enabling the transportation of raw materials, finished products, and agricultural produce over long distances. They also contributed to urbanization, as cities grew around railway hubs.

Another important aspect of the transportation revolution was the advent of steamships . These vessels powered by steam engines replaced traditional sailing ships, enabling faster and more reliable transoceanic travel. Steamships played a crucial role in expanding global trade and facilitating the colonization and exploration of new territories. They also enhanced communication and cultural exchange between different nations and continents.

Additionally, the improvement of road infrastructure was a significant part of the transportation revolution. Macadamized roads, made of compacted layers of small stones, became more common, providing a smoother surface for horse-drawn carriages and later automobiles. The construction of canals, such as the Erie Canal in the United States, also played a crucial role in connecting inland regions and facilitating trade.

The transportation revolution of the 19th century had far-reaching effects on various aspects of society. It fostered economic growth, expanded markets, and spurred industrialization. It also led to the development of new job opportunities, particularly in the railway and shipping industries. The increased mobility of people led to the growth of tourism and transformed social dynamics as individuals could travel greater distances more easily.

The transportation revolution of the 19th century, marked by the growth of railways, steamships, and improved road infrastructure, revolutionized the way people and goods were transported. This period of innovation and progress had a profound impact on the economy, society, and global connections.

What was the extent of travel in the 1800s?

In the 19th century, travel underwent significant changes and developments.

During this time, the extent of travel expanded greatly due to advancements in transportation and infrastructure. The industrial revolution led to the development of steam-powered locomotives, which revolutionized long-distance travel. Railways were built across countries and continents, connecting previously isolated regions. This allowed people to travel further and faster than ever before.

Steamships also played a crucial role in expanding travel during the 19th century. These vessels enabled transoceanic travel and opened up new trade routes. Additionally, the invention of the telegraph facilitated communication between ships and ports, making sea travel safer and more efficient.

The expansion of travel in the 19th century was not limited to land and sea. Around the mid-century, the invention of the bicycle provided an affordable and accessible mode of transportation for short distances. This contributed to increased mobility for individuals in urban areas.

Furthermore, the 19th century saw the emergence of luxury passenger ships, catering to the growing demand for leisure travel. Companies like Cunard Line and White Star Line established regular transatlantic services, allowing people to travel comfortably and experience new cultures.

However, it’s important to note that the extent of travel in the 19th century varied depending on socioeconomic factors. While the middle and upper classes had greater access to transportation options, the working class and rural communities often had more limited travel opportunities.

The 19th century witnessed a significant expansion in travel thanks to advancements in transportation technology. Railways, steamships, bicycles, and luxury passenger ships all contributed to the increasing mobility of people during this time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What were the most common modes of transportation used by people in the 19th century.

During the 19th century, the most common modes of transportation used by people were primarily dependent on their location and socioeconomic status.

Horse-drawn vehicles such as carriages, wagons, and stagecoaches were widely used in both urban and rural areas. They were commonly employed for personal transportation, delivery services, and public transportation.

Railways became increasingly popular during this time period, revolutionizing transportation. Steam-powered locomotives were introduced, allowing for faster and more efficient transportation of goods and passengers. Railways connected major cities and towns, making long-distance travel much more accessible.

Ships and boats were essential for travel and trade, especially for crossing oceans and navigating rivers and lakes. Sailing ships were widely used for long-distance voyages, while steam-powered ships started to gain popularity towards the end of the century.

Bicycles began to gain popularity in the latter half of the 19th century, providing a more affordable and personal means of transportation for individuals. However, they were initially only accessible to the wealthier population due to their high cost.

It is important to note that the availability and usage of these modes of transportation varied greatly depending on factors such as geographic location, social class, and technological advancements.

How did advancements in transportation technology impact the way people traveled in the 19th century?

Advancements in transportation technology greatly impacted the way people traveled in the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution brought about significant changes in transportation, leading to faster, more efficient, and more accessible modes of travel.

Railways were perhaps the most transformative form of transportation during this time. The construction of railway networks across the United States and Europe allowed for the rapid movement of goods and people. Railways enabled individuals to travel long distances in a matter of hours, connecting rural areas to urban centers. This led to increased social and economic integration, as well as the growth of tourism and trade.

Steamships revolutionized long-distance travel across bodies of water. Powered by steam engines, these ships could traverse oceans with greater speed and reliability compared to traditional sailing vessels. The advent of steamships facilitated the movement of people and goods between continents, opening up new opportunities for exploration, trade, and colonization.

Horse-drawn carriages also played a significant role in the transportation landscape of the 19th century. Although slower and less efficient than railways and steamships, carriages provided a means of transportation within cities and towns. They were used for personal travel, transportation of goods, and as public transportation systems. Carriages were eventually replaced by horse-drawn trams and later by electric streetcars, further improving urban mobility.

With the development of canals and roads , transportation infrastructure improved significantly during this time period. Canals allowed for the efficient movement of goods and reduced transportation costs. Roads, although initially limited in quality, were gradually improved and expanded, making travel by carriage and stagecoach easier and more accessible.

Overall, advancements in transportation technology in the 19th century revolutionized the way people traveled. The introduction of railways, steamships, and improved road and canal systems opened up new opportunities for trade, exploration, and social mobility. These advancements contributed to the growth of industrialized societies and paved the way for further progress in transportation in the following centuries.

What were some of the challenges people faced while traveling in the 19th century and how did they overcome them?

During the 19th century, people faced several challenges while traveling. Some of these challenges included:

1. Poor transportation infrastructure: Roads were often poorly maintained, making travel slow and difficult. In remote areas, there might be no roads at all. To overcome this challenge, people relied on horses, carriages, and wagons. In urban areas, people used horse-drawn omnibuses and later, steam-powered trains.

2. Unpredictable weather conditions: Weather could greatly impact travel plans, especially in areas with harsh climates. Winter snowstorms and heavy rains made roads impassable. To overcome this challenge, travelers would plan their trips during more favorable weather conditions and seek shelter during storms.

3. Limited communication: Communication was slow and unreliable during the 19th century, making it difficult for travelers to relay information and stay connected. They had to rely on letters and post offices, which could be slow or unreliable. Some resort

The modes of transportation in the 19th century were vastly different from what we are accustomed to today . People during this era relied heavily on horse-drawn carriages and stagecoaches for land travel, while sailing ships dominated long-distance journeys across the seas . The advent of the railway system revolutionized travel, making it faster, safer, and more accessible to the masses. However, it was only towards the end of the century that steam-powered locomotives gained widespread popularity. These advancements in transportation not only facilitated trade and commerce but also ignited a sense of wanderlust among individuals, as they could explore new places and experience different cultures more easily . Despite the limitations and challenges faced in travel during the 19th century, it is undeniable that these pioneers laid the foundation for the modern transportation systems we enjoy today . Looking back on their perseverance and innovation, we can appreciate how far we have come and the opportunities that await us in the future.

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These Maps Show How Ridiculously Long U.S. Travel Took in 1800

We complain that it takes over four hours to travel from New York to Washington, D.C., but it’s easy to forget that modern transportation is pretty damn fast. Over the course of the 19th century, the United States was transformed by the development of its rail network — before then, a trip to D.C. would have taken days .

Infrastructure improvements sound dull, but they have the ability to transform how we think about geography and time. It’s possible for a New Yorker to take a (very, very short) weekend trip to California, but in the year 1800, you would have needed to take the entire summer just to visit someone in Chicago. And if you made a friend on that vacation and then left, you probably wouldn’t ever see them again.

Look at this map below, taken from the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States published in 1932, which shows how long it would take someone in 1800 to travel across the country, using New York as a starting point:

It seems unfathomable these days, but the above situation didn’t last for long. By 1830, infrastructure was on the move. The first commercial railroad was built in Massachusetts in 1826, which led to the gradual development of further tracks based on British steam locomotive technology . At the same time, roads were rebuilt, extended and improved, which led to more vehicles. By now, you could probably visit your friend in Chicago in around six weeks. Here’s the same map in 1830:

In the ensuing period, rail went full steam ahead. By 1840, around 3,000 miles of railroad track had been built, and the earlier noisy trains improved and were made faster. Your friend in Chicago? You could visit them during a long weekend. By 1857, New Yorkers could travel to other northeastern cities in a matter of hours:

The improved infrastructure led to a dramatic change in American industry. Goods could now ship far further than ever before. The end of the First World War led to an increased construction workforce, as military men sought to use their skills for other projects. In 1830, three days travel would take you as far as North Carolina, but by 1930, you could reach the Californian coast:

These days? You can fly from New York City to Los Angeles in around six hours. Way back in 1800 you probably wouldn’t have made it out of New Jersey by that point. Your friend in Chicago is now just a two-and-a-half-hour flight away, and the rest of the world is open for us to explore.

Cache of Newly Digitized Travel Photographs Will Transport You to 1900s California

Travelers William and Grace McCarthy really got around, and in nearly 3,000 photos, they captured a unique view of San Francisco, Tahoe and Yosemite

Jason Daley

Correspondent

In 1996, Audrey Fullerton-Samora of Sacramento gave the state of California a rather sweet gift. She donated the State Archives 3,000 photographs taken by her great aunt and uncle William and Grace McCarthy who toured around the state in the early 1900s taking photos. As Alyssa Pereira at SFGate  reports, the California Secretary of State recently digitized the photos and put them online, letting modern armchair tourists get a look at some of our favorite tourist attractions in the early days.

“While most of us do not leave the house without a camera on our smartphone now, William and Grace documented California during a much different time,” Alex Padilla, California's secretary of state, says in a press release . “As early adopters of automobile travel and personal photography, the McCarthy’s embodied California’s pioneering spirit. Their photo collection captures the landmarks and events that defined California, and beyond, during the early 2oth century. These clear, high-quality photos are some of the true gems of the State Archives, I’m proud of the hard work of our staff to ensure that they will be easily accessible to a global audience.”

According to the photography collection , the images were stored in 11 albums and chronicle the travels of the couple who lived primarily in San Francisco, where William was an armament expert for the U.S. war department. Not only did they chronicle tourist sites like Mount Shasta, Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, their images chronicle San Francisco before and after the catastrophic 1906 earthquake, the fire that destroyed the Cliff House in 1907, the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and even a 1938 journey along the newly completed Pan American Highway into Mexico.

Earlier this year, some of the McCarthy’s photos were shown on Google’s Arts and Culture platform in a story called “California Memoirs.” Pereira points out that some of the most interesting unreleased photos in the collection include the areas around Lake Tahoe from trips between 1905 and 1938, showing points of interest including Emerald Bay, Eagles Fall and classic turn of the century lodgings like the Bijou Inn and Cal-Neva Lodge.

Taken as a whole, the unique archive also tells a  story of  transition in the Golden State—from the time people visited the area via train and horse-drawn wagons to the slow but steady supremacy of the automobile.

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Jason Daley | | READ MORE

Jason Daley is a Madison, Wisconsin-based writer specializing in natural history, science, travel, and the environment. His work has appeared in Discover , Popular Science , Outside , Men’s Journal , and other magazines.

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What Was It Like to Ride the Transcontinental Railroad?

By: Erin Blakemore

Updated: October 3, 2023 | Original: October 16, 2020

Velvet cushions and gilt-framed mirrors. Feasts of antelope, trout, berries and Champagne. In 1869, a New York Times reporter experienced the ultimate in luxury—and he did so not in the parlor of a Gilded Age magnate, but on a train headed from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco, California.

Just a few years before, the author would have had to rely on a bumpy stagecoach or a covered wagon to tackle a journey that took months. Now, he was gliding along the rails, passing by the varied scenery of the American West while dining, sleeping and relaxing.

The ride was “not only tolerable but comfortable, and not only comfortable but a perpetual delight,” he wrote . “At the end of our journey [we] found ourselves not only wholly free from fatigue, but completely rehabilitated in body and spirits. Were we very far from wrong if we voted the Pacific Railroad a success?”

The author was just one of the thousands of people who flocked to the Transcontinental Railroad beginning in 1869. The railroad, which stretched nearly 2,000 miles between Iowa, Nebraska and California, reduced travel time across the West from about six months by wagon or 25 days by stagecoach to just four days. And for the travelers who tried out the new transportation route, the Transcontinental Railroad represented both the height of modern technology and the tempting possibility of unrestricted travel.

Railroads Passed Through ‘Untouched’ Indigenous Land

The first passenger train on the line took 102 hours to travel from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco, and a first-class ticket cost $134.50—the equivalent of about $2,700 today. It traveled what was known as the Overland Route, threading its way through prairies, mountains and deserts that had been nearly impassable just years before.

Passengers were impressed by the landscape’s beauty and seeming desolation. “For hundreds of miles we saw no other persons except now and then a station with a few hovels about it,” wrote Celia Cooley Graves, a Massachusetts woman who took the Overland Route to San Francisco in 1875.

At the time, the areas through which the train had been built were not yet home to large numbers of white settlers. In fact, millions of acres of the land the new railroad traversed had belonged to Indigenous people—but the U.S. Congress had granted the land to railroad companies.

For many Native nations, the railroads represented an unwelcome intrusion as they soon introduced a wave of white settlement. The trains provided supplies for those relocating from the East and allowed people with means to use the railroad instead of covered wagons.

First-Class Passenger Cars Offered Luxury

The journey west on railroads wasn’t only faster and easier than covered wagons, it could also be luxurious. First-class passengers reveled in what they saw as the comfort and modernity of the trains themselves. The train cars were “a constant delight,” wrote Henry T. Williams in an 1876 guide to railroad travel in the West. “One lives at home in the Palace Car with as much true enjoyment as in the home drawing-room.”

Williams was referring to Pullman palace cars, ornate train cars used for first-class passengers on the Union Pacific railroad. The cars, which included sleepers, dining cars and parlor cars, were lavishly decorated and full of sumptuous details like painstakingly carved wood and velvet hangings. Unlike the parlors of the Gilded Age’s rich and famous, palace cars were open to anyone who could pay the fee.

According to historian Lucius Morris Beebe, this had a lasting effect on American culture. “Before [Pullman’s] first palace cars few enough Americans had any least conception of what constituted true luxury,” he wrote ; “three decades of first-hand contact with the manifestations of opulence available aboard the cars created a universal demand for rich living which had a profound effect on the American economy and national way of life which has not yet disappeared.”

The elaborate cars were specially influential for women travelers. At the time, traveling in public or doing so alone was considered highly unusual, and undesirable, for middle- and upper-class white women. But the Pullman cars helped calm the fears of those who did not like to see women stepping outside their “separate sphere” of home and family. According to historian Amy G. Richter, the train cars’ home-like setting, and the presence of women in the living-room-like cars, legitimized train travel for women and soothed those who feared that public life would endanger women and the moral order.

Second- And Third-Class Passengers Faced a Rougher Journey

But rich travelers were not the only people who rode the new trains. The railroad system borrowed from the ocean liners that were bringing unprecedented numbers of immigrants to United States shores and offered different fares for different classes of travelers. The poorest travelers could ride the rails for less money, but their accommodations were less glitzy than those of the richer passengers.

Second-class passengers had upholstered seats; third-class, or “emigrant” passengers, paid half of what the first-class passengers did but had to sit on benches instead of seats and bring their own food. "The overland journey is no fairy tale to those who read it from a way car!” wrote a journalist in 1878, noting crowded conditions and discomfort in the ordinary passenger cars.

Racism rode the rails, too. When British author Robert Louis Stevenson rode the train in 1879, he noted that there was an entire car just for Chinese passengers. Though up to 20,000 Chinese immigrants had built the railroad , they were treated with contempt at the time, reflecting racist attitudes and socially sanctioned discrimination.

Though Black people did ride as passengers, they were more often spotted working as laborers or porters. From the 1860s, all of the porters in Pullman cars were Black men. Though the job could be demeaning, and perpetuated stereotypes of black men as servile, anonymous workers at the beck and call of white passengers, it also helped build a middle class among black men.

Dangers of the Journey on the Transcontinental Railroad

The trains shortened the journey across the country, but they weren’t without risk. In 1872, for example, Walter Scott Fitz’s journey toward San Francisco was literally derailed by a massive, weeks-long snowstorm. The men on the train, including passengers, had to dig it out of huge snow drifts in Wyoming. The passengers were so dismayed by the constant stops that they held what Fitz called an “indignation meeting” to express their outrage at the travel conditions. The hellish trip involved derailing, begging people who lived near their frequent stops to make the passengers food, and waiting days to move.

“There was, of course, much suffering amongst second class passengers, and others who could not afford to buy supplies & who were cooped up in ordinary cars,” Fitz wrote. “How they managed to eat, live, & sleep with two people in each seat will always be a marvel to me….Such a mess of filth, foul air and dirty people I never want to see again. The railroad people were so lazy that they refused to clean the cars, and, on the few occasions of cleaning, the passengers did it themselves.” The four-day trip ended up taking three weeks.

Eventually, the entire United States ended up being crisscrossed by train tracks that predated modern highways. The railroad changed life forever, enabling white settlement in areas of the West once considered desolate and forbidding and making it possible for people to strike out on the frontier without the dangers of months of travel in the open air.

And for those who made the once unthinkable trip, the Transcontinental Railroad inspired awe and wondered at the vastness and beauty of the American West. “We gazed long and enchanted on that scene of sublimity and beauty,” wrote Thomas A. Weed of an 1871 view of the Sierra Nevada. “With what interest did we look out upon this land of the extreme west.”

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What It Was Really Like To Travel Across The US In The 1800s

One of the things we take completely for granted in the 21st century is the act of being comfortable. If you are driving somewhere, you can open or close your car windows at the push of a button. You can push another button to warm your butt. Add in modern tires, not to mention good (or at least decent) roads, and it all means a painless ride. Sure, there's plenty you could complain about, like traffic jams, potholes, the type of music your passengers are making you listen to, and how you can never adjust the seat to get the lumbar support exactly how you like it.

Well, your ancestors are rolling over in their graves, you ungrateful little – Not only did traveling back in the 1800s take tens or even hundreds of times longer than it does now, but the process of traveling was painful, uncomfortable, and very often deadly. That's right: even though we're talking about covered wagons , slow trains, and bicycles , just about every type of travel would try to kill you. So you'd spend days or weeks being uncomfortable and cold, only to maybe die before you even reached your destination.

But the 1800s was a time of immense progress. In that 100-year period, you went from people dreaming that the Industrial Revolution might make boats a little bit faster, to the first person driving a car across the entire United States. Here's what it was really like to travel across the U.S. in the 1800s.

Wagon trains and the Oregon Trail

It won't be a surprise to anyone who's a millennial that traveling by wagon train, specifically on the Oregon Trail, was a dangerous endeavor. But there was a lot more that could kill you than fording rivers and dysentery. And even if you lived, that didn't mean taking a wagon out west was at all a pleasant experience.

The Oregon Trail Center says Margaret Frink kept a journal when she and her husband traveled to California in search of gold in 1850, and that it's one of the best records we have of the experience. One average day went like this: "We started at six o' clock, forded Thomas Fork, and, turning to the west, came to a high steep spur that extends to the river. Over this high spur we were compelled to climb ... Part of the way I rode on horseback, the rest I walked. The descent was very long and steep. All the wheels of the wagon were tied fast, and it slid along the ground. At one place the men held it back with ropes, and let it down slowly." Two days later, things got worse: "It rained considerably during the night. Mr. Frink was on guard until two o' clock, when he returned to camp bringing the startling news, that for some unknown cause, the horses had stampeded."

Abigail Scott was just a girl when she was put in charge of recording her family's journey out west. One line highlights the harsh realities of the trail: "The mosquitoes are troublesome in the extreme: passed four graves."

The Cumberland Road

In a country where an interstate system of highways has been the reality for almost 100 years, it's easy to forget that means for a century and a half before that there just ... wasn't one. But once the U.S. started claiming and colonizing the West in earnest around the turn of the 19th century, they realized the lack of good roads was an issue. Suddenly people on the East Coast had reason to head west in droves, and they knew the trip would be a million times easier if there was a road.

This meant there was a big push to build said road. Known as the National Road at the time, now the Cumberland Road, it transformed the country completely. According to National Geographic , it was the first road in the new country to be funded by the federal government. Started in 1811, it was a massive undertaking which continued for decades. But as each new section was built, it opened up wide areas of the country to colonizers, allowed easier trade, and laid the literal and figurative groundwork for the eventual highway system we have today.

Even at the time, everyone knew how big a deal the National Road was. Politico reveals that by 1825, the road was so beloved it was "celebrated in song, story, painting and poetry." Can that be said about any other road besides Route 66? After all, even with all the creative types who live in Los Angeles, no one is writing love songs about I-5.

Surely, of all the ways to travel in the 1800s, the steamboat must have been the most pleasant. No beautiful views, nice regular pace, room to walk around on deck. Look how happy Mickey Mouse was in that cartoon! The Mississippi was the backbone of the country, and people traveled up and down it constantly.

One person who spent a lot of time on steamboats on the Mississippi was Mark Twain. His pen name even comes from his time on the river, and he wrote a memoir about his experiences called "Old Times on the Mississippi." In an except ( via the New York Times ), he talked about how his first steamboat experience involved some unexpected issues: "What with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some other delays, the poor old Paul Jones fooled away about two weeks in making the voyage from Cincinnati to New-Orleans."

Not all steamboat trips were on the Mississippi, nor so boring. A student at Oberlin  wrote a letter to his family in 1837 telling them about his dramatic journey to the college on a steamboat traveling from Providence to New York: "A sudden and severe gale struck upon us, which for a few minutes, rendered the prospects of life, hopeless. There were three or four hundred on board, I should think, whose lives were all saved by a hair's breadth. – The wind came so sudden & strong, that it tipped the boat up so much that it almost dipped, ... But while it was safety for us, others were overwhelmed in the deep."

Before railroads, canals were going to be the next big thing. And they were the cutting edge of progress; Thomas Jefferson called the proposal for the Erie Canal "little short of madness," according to Eyewitness to History . Once it was finished in 1825, the Erie Canal cut the time it took to get from New York to Chicago in half, plus it was a much smoother ride than a carriage on unpaved roads.

Thomas S. Woodcock took a trip on the Erie Canal in 1836 was amazed at how nice the boat was, even though it looked so small from the outside. But, Tardis-like, somehow the inside was lovely. "These boats are about 70 feet long, and with the exception of the kitchen and bar, is occupied as a cabin ... at mealtimes ... the table is supplied with everything that is necessary and of the best quality with many of the luxuries of life."

Who wouldn't like traveling on a canal boat? Luxurious, calm, good food. And surely nothing could be safer than slowly floating down a canal. Right, Thomas S. Woodcock? You're not going to tell us that horrific deaths occurred on the boats? "The Bridges on the Canal are very low, particularly the old ones. Every bridge makes us bend double if seated on anything, and in many cases you have to lie on your back ... Some serious accidents have happened for want of caution. A young English woman met with her death a short time since, she having fallen asleep with her head upon a box, had her head crushed to pieces."

Early railroads

It cannot be overstated how important the railroad was. But in the year 1800, there were no railroads. Which meant the next 100 years involved inventing and perfecting them, but the bit in between could get a bit messy. Early railroads were not the same as the railroads travelers would enjoy at the turn of the 20th century.

Inventor Oliver Evans famously predicted in 1812, "The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another almost as fast as birds fly – 15 to 20 miles an hour ... A carriage will set out from Washington in the morning, and the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine in Philadelphia, and sup at New York the same day."

The dream began to be realized in 1827, according to the Library of Congress , when the first 13 miles of railroad track opened. The train was still only about as fast as a horse, but it was a start. What was fast was the expansion of the railroads from there. There was big money in it, no government oversight, and ridiculously half-arsed construction. This meant train derailments were common,  per American Rails , and people died. Sometimes the floors of the train car would "disintegrate," with deadly results. The trips were also psychologically jarring.  Railroads and the Making of Modern America explains how people's very concept of space and time was "annihilated" by the speed of this new way of travel.

Room and board

When you were traveling out west, you usually had to pack light. This meant that most people had to rely on places along the way for a place to sleep and, more importantly, a square meal. Even today stopping at a roadside restaurant while on a road trip is a gamble. Some places will be hidden gems, most ... not so much. While establishments like the St. James Hotel in Red Wing, Minnesota claim on its website today that after it opened in 1875 it was a "regular stop for riverboats and trains alike" and the guests found "modern features, including steam heat, hot and cold running water, and a state of-the-art kitchen," the general rule of stopping for food on your trip west was that it was going to be terrible.

"We found the quality on the whole bad," said traveler William Robertson, according to American Heritage , "and all three meals, breakfast, dinner and supper, were almost identical, viz., tea, buffalo steaks, antelope chops, sweet potatoes, and boiled Indian corn, with hoe cakes and syrup ad nauseam." Another man said things got worse the further west you went, when all you found were restaurants "consisting of miserable shanties, with tables dirty, and waiters not only dirty, but saucy."

But every now and then the traveler struck culinary gold ... or so one group thought. "The passengers were replenished with an excellent breakfast—a chicken stew, as they supposed, but which, as they were afterward informed, consisted of prairie-dogs—a new variety of chickens, without feathers. This information created an unpleasant sensation in sundry delicate stomachs."

Going around Cape Horn

Possibly the main reason so many advances in getting across the country emerged in the 1800s was because the only real viable way of doing it in the first half of the century took an absurdly long time. Basically, you got on a boat and then you didn't get off again for the better part of a year.

Not that the boats didn't look pretty! One observer, writing in "The Annals of the City of San Francisco, June 1852" ( via The Maritime Heritage Project ) described the sight of the boats entering the Bay, "large and beautifully lined marine palaces, often of two thousand tons ... These are like the white-winged masses of cloud that majestically soar upon the summer breeze."

But for those who were on the boats, they were probably more like a never-ending hell. Going from New York to California meant sailing around the very bottom of South America, a.k.a. Cape Horn. To get an idea of how slow this was,  according to Stephens & Kenau , "the fastest clipper ship ever launched" was the Flying Cloud and her stats make for depressing reading today. In 1851, the ship "reached San Francisco in a record time of 89 days and 8 hours. The average time for clipper ships being more than 120 days." Three years later the boat beat her own record by a mere 13 hours. Even more shocking, no one else would beat that time for well over a century: not until 1989. And since most people in the 1800s weren't on the Formula 1 car of boats, and even the Flying Cloud ran into major, time-consuming issues on many of her voyages, this was not sustainable.

'An Overland Journey From New York To San Francisco In The Summer Of 1859'

The most logical way to get across the country in a quicker, safer, relatively cheaper fashion seemed to be by rail. But the idea of a transcontinental railroad was almost ludicrous. Take just one of the issues you'd run into: the Rocky freaking Mountains. Considering how new the technology was even in the middle of the century, not everyone was convinced it was possible.

One person who was sure it was worth trying was the founder of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley. According to Encyclopedia.com , in 1859, he traveled across the country, writing articles about his journey for his newspaper. These were then turned into a book. Greeley wanted people to know all about the western part of the country and how awesome it was, and once they wanted to see it themselves, he'd get what he really wanted: a railroad to make the trip easier. Because Greeley had a tough time of it: a New York Times review of his book explained how "his stagecoach was overturned by buffaloes. His body was racked by boils from riding muleback weeks on end ... Fastidious about food and cleanliness, he had little chance to observe his principles about either westward of the Mississippi."

While the railroad was the most important reason he wanted people to learn about his trip west, there was another vital thing that he believed America needed to get to the frontier ASAP: "The first need of California today is a large influx of intelligent, capable, virtuous women."

The Transcontinental Railroad

While there were plenty of railroads before the Transcontinental railroad, they were a spider web of tracks and companies, mostly relatively localized. The Transcontinental would be different, and would do what it said on the tin: connect one coast to the other with railroad tracks. Technically, track only needed to be laid from Nebraska to California, and in 1869 it was finished. Now people could travel that 2,000 mile stretch in just a matter of days, according to History . Seven years after the Transcontinental railroad was finished, an express train made the journey in 83 hours .

It was not only faster, but impossibly more comfortable. "I had a sofa to myself, with a table and a lamp," wrote one rider ( via American Heritage ). "The sofas are widened and made into beds at night. My berth was three feet three inches wide, and six feet three inches long. It had two windows looking out of the train, a handsome mirror, and was well furnished with bedding and curtains." A reporter from the New York Times wrote it was "not only tolerable but comfortable, and not only comfortable but a perpetual delight. At the end of our journey [we] found ourselves not only wholly free from fatigue, but completely rehabilitated in body and spirits."

Of course, no long journey is perfect. In 1972, one traveler said the train trip "caused more hard words to be spoken than can be erased from the big book for many a day."

Getting across the country by (wo)manpower

One of the most extraordinary journeys that was undertaken during the 1800s wasn't from east to west, and it wasn't undertaken by a man.

An article in the San Francisco Call from May 5, 1896 explained the crazy plan: "Mrs. H. Estby and her daughter, aged 18, leave tomorrow morning to walk to New York City. They are respectable but will 'rough it' as regular tramps and carry no baggage." Respectable women walking alone across town was scandalous, let alone doing something no one had ever tried before. (Although Frank Weaver had made a cross-country trip by bicycle in 1890.) But times were hard, and the women had good reason, since "Mrs. Estby is the mother of eight children, all of whom are living with their father on a ranch near here, except the one going with her. The family is poor, and the ranch is mortgaged. Mrs. Estby, seeing no other way of getting out, concluded to make the journey afoot."

How would walking across the country save the farm? Well, some person or group or company (unfortunately this detail was lost somewhere over the past century, according to Transportation History ) was offering $10,000 to the first woman to accomplish the feat. For seven and a half months, going around 30 miles a day, working along the way to pay for food and board, the mother and daughter made their way to New York ... whereupon the sponsors refused to give them the prize on a technicality, and wouldn't even pay for the women to get home.

The first cross-country car journey was the end of an era

You could argue that in Britain, the 19th century didn't really end until 1901, with the death of Queen Victoria. In America, the key date could be seen as 1903, when the first person crossed the country by car. This signaled a new era, one where the West was no longer wild or out of reach to anyone. The continent had been crossed by foot, wagon, train, and now the newfangled car was added to the list.

H. Nelson Jackson, a doctor, and Sewall K. Crocker, a mechanic, drove from San Francisco to New York City after Jackson's friends said they didn't think it was possible. "The majority opinion expressed was that, save for short distances, the automobile was an unreliable novelty," Jackson would later explain ( via SFGate ). "Everyone pooh-poohed the idea of even attempting such a journey." So the two men and a dog named Bud set off.

While no one today would consider their trek easy, they managed it without major issues in just 63 days. Jackson spent $8,000 on the trip, which was a lot of money back then, but that number does include the cost of the car. Others were inspired, and copycat cross-country trips started by the dozens. The trip "was a pivotal moment in American automotive history ," said Roger White, curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. "At the time they made the trip, there was a perception that the American frontier was closed. The Jackson-Crocker trip excited people across the nation. It got people thinking about long-distance highways."

• Historical Background on Traveling in the Early 19th Century

A brief summary of traveling and the impact of changing technology in the early nineteenth-century.

Travel in the early nineteenth century was so much slower and more difficult than it is today that it is not easy to remember that it was also a time of significant change and improvement. In New England in 1790, vehicles were few, roads were generally rutted and rudimentary, and traveling any distance was both slow and difficult. Children and poorer adults walked everywhere, and only a minority of farmers had horses and wagons. Many loads of freight were drawn not by horses but by much slower-moving oxen. With a good horse, it took from four to six days, depending on the weather, to travel from Boston to New York. And this was on the best roads, which ran between major cities along the coast. Inland, the roads were even worse, turning to impassable mud when it rained or to choking dust when the weather was dry.

But beginning around 1790, a series of changes was beginning that historians have called “The Transportation Revolution.” Americans—and New Englanders in particular—rebuilt and vastly extended their roads. More than 3,700 miles of turnpikes, or toll roads, were built in New England between 1790 and 1820. Continuing through the 1840s, many thousands of miles of improved county and town roads were constructed as well. The new roads were far better constructed and maintained, and allowed for much faster travel. In response, the number of vehicles on the roads increased rapidly, far faster than population. It was noted in 1830 that Americans were driving a “multitudinous generation of travelling vehicles” that had been “totally unknown” in the 1790s. Stagecoach lines had spread across the Northeastern states, using continual relays, or “stages,” of fresh horses spaced out every 40 miles or so. They made travel, if not enjoyable, at least faster, less expensive, and less perilous than it had ever been. The 1830s had reduced the travel time between Boston and New York to a day and a half. Good roads and stages extended across southern New England, the lower Hudson Valley in New York, and southeastern Pennsylvania.

The most radical changes in the speed, scale and experience of traveling came with the application of newly emerging transportation technologies—the railroad, the steamboat, and the building of canals—to American conditions. Beginning with Robert Fulton’s Clermont, which successfully made the journey up the Hudson from New York City to Albany in 1807, Americans developed steamboats to ply both the deeper eastern rivers and the shallower western ones. Although steamboats were sometimes dangerously prone to fires and boiler explosions, they traveled faster, met tighter schedules and could travel against the river current far more effectively than rafts and barges. Steamboats vastly expanded passenger travel on the rivers and carried much higher value cargo upstream.

Americans turned as well to the massive infrastructure project of canal building, as the British had done decades earlier. Canals promised far less expensive transportation of farm produce, manufactured goods and passengers, but it was often difficult for them to return profits to their investors. The Erie Canal, traversing the breadth of New York State to connect Albany and Buffalo in 1825, was the great success among American canals. It opened up an enormous agricultural hinterland for trade with New York City and New England. In New England, New York and Pennsylvania, Americans created a vast system of inland waterways that significantly reduced transportation costs, although none of them matched the success of the Erie.

After 1830, the railroad or, as most Americans at that time said, the “Rail Way,” emerged as the most dramatic of the new technologies of transportation. Its speed and power was unprecedented. With good weather, a good road and rested horses, a stagecoach might manage eight or nine miles an hour. The small locomotives of the 1830s, pulling a handful of cars over uneven track, could travel at fifteen to twenty miles an hour. This was twice as fast, over long distances, as anything Americans had previously experienced. By 1840, 3000 miles of railroad track had been laid down, most of it concentrated in the Northeast. This meant that travel between directly connected cities could be much faster than before; a trip between Boston and Worcester now took less than 2 hours, and travelers could reach New York City from Boston in less than a day, using both coastal steamship and railway.

But before 1840 only a relatively small minority of Americans had felt its impact, and railway travel was both noisy (from the grating and squealing of iron wheels on the tracks) and dirty (from showers of ash and cinders from wood-burning locomotives). In the next twenty years the railroad, growing ever faster, more powerful and more efficient, would become America’s dominant mode of transportation east of the Mississippi, sweeping away the stage lines and even making some of the canals obsolete.

The years between 1790 and 1840 saw a true revolution in transportation even before the coming of the railroad. By 1840, transportation costs had been greatly reduced and travel had become faster by a factor of 5 or more. These changes made possible America’s first “Industrial Revolution,” the widespread development of commercial agriculture in the Midwest, and a national system of markets and the distribution of goods. Many ordinary Americans could now become travelers for pleasure and even the pathways of westward migration had become much faster and safer.

Copyright: Old Sturbridge Inc.

• The American Revolution
• Indian Removal
• Isaiah Thomas - Patriot Printer
• Lesson Plans
• Aspects of the Changing Status of New England Women
• Dining Out in the 1830's
• Early 19th Century Attitudes Toward Women and Their Roles
• Early Taverns and the Law
• Gathering Places
• Roads and Travel in New England 1790-1840
• The Blackstone Canal: Artery to the Heart of the Commonwealth
• The Debit Economy of 1830s New England
• Where Did Women Work on New England Farms?
• Temperance Reform in the Early 19th Century
• The Dred Scott Decision
• The Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bleeding Kansas
• The Second Great Awakening and the Age of Reform
• War of 1812 and the Hartford Convention
• Westward Expansion

In Development

• Nineteenth-Century Immigration
• The Civil War

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Ukraine war latest: Russia's troops 'partially pushed back' from key town, Ukraine claims - as Putin's offensive 'appears to slow'

The Ukrainian president has cancelled visits to Spain and Portugal after Moscow's forces began a new offensive in the northeast of the country. Submit your question on the war for our experts to answer in the box below.

Wednesday 15 May 2024 21:46, UK

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• Ukraine 'partially pushes back' Russian troops from Kharkiv town
• Russian offensive in Ukraine 'going to plan', Putin says
• Analysts say Russian offensive 'appears to have slowed'
• Situation there 'extremely difficult'
• Zelenskyy postpones all foreign visits due to 'situation in Kharkiv'
• US announces $2bn in extra aid for Ukraine
• Russia downs missiles launched at Crimea
• Analysis:  Putin's 'baffling' reshuffle explained
• Live reporting by Lauren Russell

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Vladimir Putin has landed in Beijing for a two-day state visit to China, in what marks a significant show of unity between the two allies.

He was greeted by Chinese officials as he stepped off the plane in the early hours of the morning local time.

Mr Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are not expected to announce any major deals during his visit - but the trip is a sign of the two countries' deepening "no limits" partnership.

Ahead of the visit, the Kremlin said Mr Putin and Mr Xi will "have a detailed discussion on the entire range of issues related to the comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation and determine the new directions for further development of cooperation between Russia and China".

We're pausing our live coverage for the day - thanks for following along.

We'll mark any major moments in the blog in the meantime, and will resume our rolling updates tomorrow. 

 By Ivor Bennett , Moscow correspondent 

You've heard of the transatlantic Special Relationship. 

This is the "no limits" partnership - a term coined when Vladimir Putin visited Beijing in February 2022.

It was just days before he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A lot's changed for Russia since then, of course. It’s now an international pariah. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is China’s support.

Why? For one, Presidents Xi and Putin share a similar outlook. Both oppose external "interference" in domestic affairs, and long for a "multipolar" world.

There are economic benefits for both, too. But this is not an equal partnership. The power lies with Beijing.

"Because of the war, Russia is in desperate need of any kind of partnership", said Alexandra Prokopenko, a Berlin-based fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, adding that Beijing had provided "a real lifeline" for Moscow.

"China is not only a market for Russian oil and gas, which is the major source of the currency for the Russian budget, but also China’s become a very important source of imports to Russia," she said.

Putin won't like being the junior partner, but it’s a role he’s clearly willing to accept, given the benefits.

Last year, trade between the two nations soared to $240 billion - an increase of more than 25%.

Cheap energy flows one way; cars and telephones come back. But the West fears that's not all Russia’s importing.

The US and others believe Chinese products and dual-use goods, like machine tools and microelectronics, are also fuelling the Kremlin's war machine, by filling critical gaps in its military-industrial.

China denies supplying any actual weaponry, and maintains a neutral stance on Ukraine.

But the assertions have done little to dampen suspicions with US secretary of state Antony Blinken reiterating his "deep concern" today.

Putin's entourage might also raise eyebrows. He’ll be accompanied by his new defence minister, Andrei Belousov, with Putin widely expected to push for more support for Russia's militarised economy.

But despite the "no limits" characterisation of the relationship, analysts say it does have boundaries.

"China knows red lines," Prokopenko said, referring to Washington’s concerns over the extent of Beijing's support.

In her view, the partnership between Xi and Putin should be viewed "as part of a big, big game between the US and China".

In that sense, then, this visit is likely to be more symbolic than anything else. It's the first foreign trip of Putin's new presidential term and signals his priorities.

But in terms of the optics - two strongmen leaders defying Western pressure - one of them is clearly stronger than the other.

These images show Vladimir Putin chairing a security council meeting. 

Former defence minister and new secretary of the council Sergei Shoigu was in attendance - pictured in the first image next to chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov.

Earlier today, Volodymyr Zelenskyy postponed all foreign trips due to the situation in the Kharviv region.

Russia has also claimed to have taken three more settlements in the country - two of which are in the Kharkiv region.

The offensive by Moscow started at the end of last week, and today our military analyst Michael Clarke says Russia has already achieved some of what it intended to do. 

He says by targeting the Kharkiv region Moscow's main goal is to "draw Ukrianian forces from elsewhere". 

"The Russians are trying to stretch the Ukrainian forces all the way round the front.

"If the Russians get to the village of Lyptsi then they can put Kharkiv under artillery barrage, because it is within range of normal artillery weapons.

"More importantly, the village of Vovchansk, may mark the beginning of a bigger offensive that could go southwards or maybe eastwards to link up with other forces."

Despite fierce fighting in Vovchansk, Clarke says the Ukrainians have slowed Russian advances down, by redirecting their best units from the south.

"Parts of their best brigades have been sent north to stem the tide," he says.

"But the Russians have already achieved what they wanted, which is to draw off some of the best troops and equipment which are fighting in Chavis Yar down in the south, which really mattered to the Ukrainians."

Watch Clarke's full analysis here:

Finland will change its legislation to allow thousands of reservists to patrol the country's border with Russia, should there be a sudden wave of migrants. 

"With the changed security situation, we need to complement existing methods with new ways to maintain border security," defence minister Antti Hakkanen said in a statement.

Finland, which joined NATO in April last year, has accused Moscow of weaponising migration against the Nordic nation, which the Kremlin denies. 

Finland shut its 1,340km-long border with Russia late last year amid a growing number of arrivals from countries such as Syria and Somalia via Russia.

Away from Kharkiv, and Ukraine has denied Russian claims of progress in the Zaporizhzhia region. 

The Ukrainian military dismissed reports that Moscow's forces had taken control of the village of Robotyne in the southern part of the region. 

"This information is not true," military spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk was quoted by Ukrinform agency as saying.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has condemned the assassination attempt on Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. 

Russia's offensive in northern Kharkiv has been the focus of much of the reporting on the war in Ukraine over recent days.

Sky News military analyst Michael Clarke has said the aim of Moscow is to draw Ukraine's forces to that area from the south, thus stretching the country's military resources.

And the latest analysis from US thinktank the Institute for the Study of War suggests that the pace of the offensive "appears to have slowed over the past 24 hours".

The group's experts said the pattern of Russian offensive activity in the area was consistent with assessments that Vladimir Putin's forces are prioritising the creation of a "buffer zone" in the international border area over a deeper penetration of Kharkiv Oblast.

It said several Ukrainian military officials reported yesterday that they believed the situation in Kharkiv Oblast was slowly stabilising.

"Drone footage purportedly from Vovchansk shows Russian foot mobile infantry operating within the settlement in small squad-sized assault groups, consistent with Ukrainian reports," the analysis added.

Two people have been killed after a Russian air attack on infrastructure in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, the regional governor has said.

Serhiy Lysak said on  Telegram that there were a number of people who had been injured, but gave no other details.

Dnipro is Ukraine's fourth-largest city, it sits on the Dnipro River  and is around 300 miles from Kyiv.

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‘A Gentleman in Moscow' production designer Victor Molero on creating the show's labyrinthine set [Exclusive Video Interview]

In Amor Towles 's novel "A Gentleman in Moscow," the story's central location, the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, is described as having "rooms behind rooms and doors behind doors." So when it came time to create the elaborate set required for the novel's television adaptation, production designer Victor Molero was given no easy task – especially because finding an appropriate location in northern England, where the show was produced, proved impossible.

"We needed to recreate this location and the timing was tight. So I did the research in 10 days and used another 10 days to design the hotel set," Molero tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. "So it was really stressful. But we did it. I always say that the real Metropol Hotel in Moscow was built in five years. We built the sets for ‘A Gentleman in Moscow' in five months."

Based on Towles's best-selling book, "A Gentleman in Moscow" is about a Russian count (played by Ewan McGregor ) who is sentenced to life under house arrest following the Russian Revolution. That puts the count inside the Metropol Hotel for years and makes the location one of the limited series' main attractions.

"It's really a stereotype to say that the hotel is like another character, but in this case, it is completely like another character," Molero says. "It was really a challenge in a way because the hotel was crucial in telling the story of the count."

Molero built detailed sets for "A Gentleman in Moscow," including the count's bedroom and other areas within the residence. But he says he's perhaps most proud of his work in the hotel's lobby, the bustling open space with one piece of furniture tied directly to the character: a bench

"When I was thinking how to create the lobby in a hotel, it's like a station. People go in and out all the time. And the count is there, he's waiting for something," Molero explains. "So it came to me, that image of the count waiting on that bench for what will happen with his life. And that is an element that I added. You try to play with this element in the space to give a layer to the story and the character."

Molero has received acclaim for his work on the show, but there is one review that stood out to the longtime production designer: a stamp of approval from Towles himself, who came to the set during the first week of production.

"When he arrived and he looked around, to see his face was the most special moment in my career," Molero says. "He was our father in a way, the one that created the whole thing. So it was a really special moment to see his reaction."

"A Gentleman in Moscow" is streaming on Paramount+ With Showtime.

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