George Bariț on Railways around the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (original) (raw)

2021, Transylvanian Review

The paper focuses on George Bariț (1812–1893), a Romanian historian, national activist, journalist and businessman from Transylvania. He was strongly interested in railways, which were at that time a very new mode of transportation in Transylvania and Hungary. As a lead journalist at the Gazeta de Transilvania, a Romanian newspaper published in Brașov (Kronstadt, Brassó), he wrote many articles on the design and construction of the railway network in the country, regularly informing his readers on the topic. He saw in the railways a way through which transportation, economy and society in general could progress. He was also a theoretician of the construction of railways, pointing to the necessity of involving the ministerial and local authorities, the challenges of the terrain crossed by the “iron road,” and the financial costs involved. An important contribution is his description of the effective construction of a viaduct and a tunnel near Bratislava. Bariț experienced transportation by train in its early decades: in 1847 he took the train from Buda to Bratislava, while five years later he travelled by train through Germany to Belgium and wrote newspaper articles and letters describing those experiences. As a traveler he saw numerous aspects pertaining to train journeys around 1850: the transformation of the art of traveling by train (speed, landscape), the social behavior of the fellow passengers, the train stations and their challenges, without forgetting the technical progress.