War by Timetable? The Railway Race before 1914

[Mark Kohut]

There is railroad metaphysics and railway war-mongering.....
   
  Great connection.

"grladams at teleport.com" <grladams at teleport.com> wrote:
  I tried to send the full text of this article, It is a piece about A J P
Taylor and his research on the origins of WWI; specifically Railways being
a catalyst.

War by Timetable? The Railway Race before 1914 
by David Stevenson
Past and Present, No. 162 (Feb., 1999), pp. 163-194
[This article consists of 32 page(s) which I can access off JSTOR, but I
believe that the Pynchon-l doesn't let me do such a big file.]
----snip the intro----
A. J. P. Taylor's most provocative legacy was his insistence on the
roles of accident and inadvertence in the outbreak of both world
wars. If his The Origins of the Second World War stated the case for
1939, he disseminated that for 1914 in his best-selling The First
World War: An Illustrated History and via his lectures and broadcasts,
as well as in his War by Timeetable: How the First World War Began.2'
No Great Power, he contended, wanted a major war in the summer
of 1914, the political points at issue were negotiable, and the fundamental
force for conflict was technical, in the shape of the European
armies' war plans. Like his friend and adviser, Sir Basil Liddell Hart,
Taylor highlighted the inflexibility of the Powers' mobilization
arrangements. The imperative of winning if war broke out, he urged,
had overwhelmed that of preserving peace. Precautions taken to
inhibit war turned out to provoke it.3 

Taylor made no secret of his proselytizing purpose. He warned
that military deterrence was a fragile basis for international stability.
He foresaw the danger of a third war of miscalculation, this time fought
with nuclear weapon. He therefore combined his stress on inadvertence with
a dash of technological determinism, derived from the centrality of
railways in pre-1914 strategy. This was not determinism in a crude or
simple sense: he used 'railway timetables' as a shorthand for a planning
system that governments themselves had created. None the less, he portrayed
the mobilization and deployment programmes of the early twentieth century
as foreshadowing
the ballistic missile arsenals of his own time.'

Indeed, the metaphor of military technology as a runaway train, hurtling
humanity to
disaster, had surfaced in the 1860s and by the turn of the century was a
commonplace thought. Several recent commentators have questioned whether
the 1914 war was 
'inadvertent', as have others with reference to that of 1939. On the
contrary, Fritz Fischer and his followers have held that Germany's
calculated aggression caused the
First World War as well as the Second til recently, rival emphases on
miscalculation and premeditation have dominated this historical debate.

Railway construction and operation programmes, because of their long lead
times and heavy expense, are potentially an excellent test of both the
premeditation and the miscalculation approaches. Although historians have
intensively researched the diplomatic and strategic aspects of the war
plans of the belligerents, they have neglected their technical and logistic
underpinning. This article seeks to remedy this deficiency and to
reappraise the contribution made by technology to the 1914 tragedy,
examining developments
over the previous generation as well as at the outbreak of hostilities. It
begins with the role assigned to railways in the Great Powers' pre-war
preparations. 

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