Before Long, Any Random Weirdness Committed on Trains Was Attributed to This Myth
An illustrative example of the ridiculous belief that trains drove people insane occurred in 1865, during a train journey from Carnforth to Liverpool in England. An armed passenger went crazy and began to attack windows to get at passengers in other compartments. When the train slowed down and stopped at its next station, the lunatic calmed down. When the train got underway again, he went nuts, only to calm down once more when the train stopped at the next station. The pattern of berserk rage while the train was in motion, followed by a return to relative calmness when it slowed down and stopped, was repeated until the train reached Liverpool.
Contemporary newspapers and mental health professionals linked those bouts of madness to train travel. However, rather than reason that he was a mentally disturbed individual, for whom train travel was a trigger, they concluded that train travel was the cause of his mental illness. The myth persisted, well into the twentieth century, that the speed or motion of trains made people go nuts. The pattern of flawed analysis that confused causation with correlation, repeated itself. Somebody would act crazy or in a socially unacceptable way in a train, and the train’s speed or motion would be blamed for the craziness.
