How travelling by train changed

As I was travelling on the Italian high speed train this weekend, I thought of what I once read:

That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think now how the railroad was pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes…

R.L.Stevenson,
The Amateur Emigrant

Picture courtesy Railway-Technology