The arrival of the railways has led scholars of nineteenth-century Europe to posit the thesis of a shrinking world, in which distances were annihilated and travel became a decorporealised and delocalised experience. This article uses travellers’ own writings to empirically complicate this thesis by looking at which journeys were characterised as near or far, and why. Building on Massey’s and Wenzlhuemer’s work on the multiplicity of space and spatial power, the seemingly contradictory findings are explained by suggesting the coexistence of a number of different types of lived distance. The article thus offers a taxonomy of sorts, outlining those distance types that were experienced most often by western-European travellers – grounded in physical effort, landscape elements and other often highly specific, material characteristics of their journeys. Together, they suggest that distances remained a tangible reality to travellers, firmly anchored in their bodies and the physical spaces they occupied and traversed.

中文翻译：

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火车，身体，风景。在漫长的十九世纪体验距离

铁路的到来使 19 世纪欧洲的学者提出了世界正在缩小的论点，在这个世界中，距离消失了，旅行变成了一种去空间化和去地域化的体验。本文使用旅行者自己的著作，通过查看哪些旅程被描述为近或远以及原因，从经验上使本论文复杂化。在梅西和 Wenzlhuemer 关于空间和空间力量多样性的工作的基础上，看似矛盾的发现可以通过暗示许多不同类型的生活距离的共存来解释。因此，这篇文章提供了一个分类法，概述了西欧旅行者最常经历的距离类型——以体力、景观元素和其他通常非常具体的旅行物质特征为基础。