Fear of Trains

What Freud's own anxiety shows

Freud used Reiseangst, literally fear of travel, in a number of letters confessing to a version of this anxiety, and some translators render it as railroad phobia. The material makes a distinction that matters: his anxiety was not classified as a true phobia, because it disappeared once the journey began, and he travelled a great deal and enjoyed it.

That is a useful clinical line rather than a piece of biography. An anxiety confined to anticipation, which lifts on departure, is doing something different from a fear that intensifies inside the carriage.

What the analysts made of it

Psychoanalysis took the fear of trains as one of its early subjects and the explanation was consistent. Three writers reached the same answer:

• Freud, in 1906, tied railway travel to the pleasurable sensation of being shaken during the journey, so that where sexuality is repressed the person meets the journey with anxiety instead
• Karl Abraham read the fear of a train's uncontrollable motion as a projection of the fear of uncontrolled sexuality
• Wilhelm Stekel, in 1908, also fixed on the rocking sensation, and added embarrassment at recollections of being rocked in early childhood

Three writers, one mechanism, and no evidence in any of it beyond interpretation. It is preserved here because it is what the record contains and because it shows a whole school reaching the same answer about a machine.

What passengers were actually afraid of

Alongside the analysts, other writers of the period gave a straightforward account: the uncontrollable movement of the train meant derailment and catastrophe.

The second fear was structural. Early railway carriages divided passengers into small sealed compartments with no corridor, isolating each group entirely from the rest of the train. A person taken ill or attacked had no way to summon help, and one contemporary line preserved in the material makes the point better than any analysis: the loudest screams are swallowed up by the roar of the wheels.

Actual crimes committed in compartments were reported prominently in the newspapers, and after a number of well-known cases the fear is described as having reached the level of a collective psychosis. This is a fear with a documented mass phase, driven by press coverage of real events, which is rare in this catalogue.

What railway spine described

Public alarm was heightened further by a diagnosis. The British surgeon John Eric Erichsen described a post-traumatic condition following rail accidents, known as railway spine or Erichsen's disease. Patients had no obvious injury and were widely dismissed as fraudulent.

The material's own comment on this is the important one: it is now understood that traffic accidents can cause post-traumatic stress disorder. Erichsen was describing something real in the vocabulary available to him, and the people accused of faking it were the first cohort of a diagnosis that took another century to arrive.

Where siderodromophobia is filed

Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary places fear of trains under vehicle phobia, alongside fears of boats, aircraft and cars, which is a reasonable filing and removes any claim the term has to be about railways specifically. The 2008 printed encyclopedia gives the roots, sideros for iron and dromos for course or running, and cross-references its own headings.

Which story records the fear

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's short story Terror, from 1913, is a first-person account of a young man with a morbid fear of travelling by train and streetcar. Tanizaki uses the German word Eisenbahnkrankheit, railroad sickness, which shows how far the German vocabulary for this fear had travelled by then.

No prevalence figure exists, no study is named, and nothing in the material measures the fear at all. What it has instead is a nineteenth-century history that most modern phobias would envy.