8. The Fear That Nineteenth-Century Train Speeds Would Generate G Forces Strong Enough to Crush Passengers and Rip Women’s Uteri From Their Bodies
Nineteenth-century train alarmists anticipated the concerns about G forces in the era of powered flight and reasoned that the high speed of trains would compress passengers’ internal organs against their backs, with potentially lethal results. Women were thought to be particularly vulnerable: some doctors that a train’s speed could rip out a woman’s uterus. Such fears eventually receded, as railways and trains proliferated, with no reported fatalities from people getting their hearts or lungs flattened against their backs, or uteri ripped out of their bodies. However, because alarmists always need something to be alarmed about, they were replaced by another bizarre fear, this one of a danger to the mind instead of the body.
By the 1850s, the good people of the Victorian Era had ceased to worry that train speeds would crush them with irresistible G forces. Instead, they began to worry that the steadily increasing train speeds, combined with the rattle and jarring motions within railway cars, were causing injuries to passengers’ brains, and driving people insane. Sensationalist media did their part to whip up the frenzy. An illustrative example occurred in 1865, during a train journey from Carnforth to Liverpool in England.
