Faster than ever before

Text 1: My First Railway Journey, by Caroline Treherne

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

My dearest Anne, I have done it at last: I have travelled upon the railway, and I am alive to tell you of it. Aunt Lydia was persuaded that we should all be blown to atoms, and she sat in the carriage with her eyes shut and her smelling salts in her hand for the whole of the first mile. I confess my own heart beat very fast when the engine shrieked and the carriage gave a great jerk and began to move.

But oh, Anne, the speed of it! We went at thirty miles in the hour. The hedges and fields flew past in a green blur, the cows had no sooner appeared than they were gone, and I felt as I imagine a swallow must feel in its flight. Clouds of white steam rolled past the window, and once a cinder flew in and burnt a little hole in Aunt Lydia’s shawl. The gentleman opposite read his newspaper throughout as though nothing remarkable were happening.

We were in Manchester in an hour and a half, a journey which used to take the better part of a day. I cannot help thinking that the world has grown smaller this morning, and that I have seen the beginning of a new age.

Text 2: Riding the Bullet, by Oliver Thane

An original contemporary travel writing.

I had wanted to ride a bullet train since I was eight years old, and when I finally stepped aboard in Tokyo I was as nervous as a child on a fairground ride. My partner, who hates flying, kept asking whether trains that fast ever came off the rails. The doors slid shut, there was a soft chime, and we began to glide.

Within minutes we were doing nearly three hundred kilometres an hour. Rice fields and villages streamed past the window in a blur, houses vanished almost before I had seen them, and I felt as though we were flying a few feet off the ground. Once, through a gap in the cloud, Mount Fuji appeared and was gone in a flash. Around us, businessmen dozed, ate their packed lunches or tapped at laptops as if nothing extraordinary was going on.

We reached Kyoto, nearly three hundred miles away, in just over two hours. Stepping off onto the platform, I had the dizzy sense that distance had been folded up like a map, and that I had briefly glimpsed what the future feels like.

Both writers describe their first journey on a new kind of fast train.

What are the similarities between the writers’ experiences of the journey?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.