Adam is an international treasure
due to all the 20th century conflicts
I assume he’s referring to the same question I was asking: did you just extrapolate this from the phrase “fucked up, disastrous mess” (referring to the sheer number of different systems in Europe?), because I think the big long reply above seriously undersells the fact that “20th century conflicts” aren’t even mentioned or gestured at in the video. There’s a map showing…different countries…but while 20th century conflicts changed various borders in Europe, they aren’t the origin of the borders between countries in Europe, or the origin of different European countries developing their own independent rail systems without any centralised plan - because they’re different countries, and the various bodies which today unify much of the continent only began to come into existence after the Second World War.
If we were talking about Former Yugoslavia, you’d actually be right! The integrated rail infrastructure of that region was completely devastated by the 1990s. But that’s not the focus here.
I didn’t say he explained why this is the case in this video. I believe he may have talked about it elsewhere, but long-story short, European nation-states didn’t want unified railroad systems because they were afraid their opponents will use them to invade them during war.
That does clarify the point, but I also don’t think that it’s true. It may well be that a major reason proposals for unified European rail never got off the ground before recently was that European countries rejected such proposals on grounds that it would make it easier for them to be invaded. But the rail systems in different European countries nonetheless developed independently, using different technology and standards, mostly (arguably) in the 19th century.
This complex process doesn’t reduce to 20th century FUBAR, even insofar as diplomatic and security considerations were involved in its evolution (and yet of course beginning in the 19th, not the 20th, century).
@YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM It goes back to the mid 19th century. In an era where battlefields were controlled by massed infantry with rifles, railways revolutionised the process of mobilizing for war—they who ran the tightest timetables got to the battlefields first. But as a result, frontiers moved around and the networks fractured. And shit like the Russian Empire deliberately choosing a different track gauge to stop German and Austrian troop trains running on their tracks during an invasion.
I still think that this represents a bias towards a military-geopolitical interpretation of history that’s not wholly sustainable, in spite of its appeal. In the Russian Empire case, I’m quite certain that that’s a popular myth, because I know that it is certainly the case that when the first railway infrastructures were being built, the political powers, administrators, and engineers responsible were as much influenced by technological and physical geographical imperatives as they were by geopolitical. The Russian Empire’s decision to use what would become the Russian gauge was multi-factoral - indeed looking it up, it appears that they were persuaded by Brunel’s own preference for a wide gauge, which was famously thwarted in the early development of the British railways.
