Thoughts on Railway Journey (blog)

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This is my blog regarding our first class for graduate seminar fall 2011. The first book we read and discussed was called The Railway Journey by Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The book was published in 1977-86 but I found it to be as relevant today as ever. The train itself, if we never knew what it was could serve as the perfect visual metaphor for our mechanized existence. One passage that stood out was one describing the idea that there could be no "play" in the alignment of the train wheel and the track. the slightest mal-alignment could result in catastrophe. I believe this is an adequate symbol for the metaphysical (mostly unseen) consequences of our drive to be first, faster, better, best. We have tried to outmaneuver the whims and timing of nature believing all along that if we are wrong nature will remind us immediately with failure. Nature (so to speak) does not abide by humans misinterpretation of any or all phenomena . 
I was also struck by the idea that the train for the first time was a manifestation of humans entering (physically) the industrial machine in a literal sense (we became parcels and consumers of a product which was the destruction of time and space). Entering, as it were, the industrial umbrella. In ways, if one reads any variety of Marx's ideas about industrialized capitalism, this metaphor (the train) adequately captures the "trap" we've all willingly entered. The larger question is, what is it about the human that has allowed us to willing enter this unknown so quickly for the sake of SPEED? Why must humans outpace" natural" velocity and inertia? Has it made life freer and easier? I'm sure it has not. Where is the real trap? The train or the human?