In their seminal study, Richards and Mackenzie (1986) argue that the social, cultural, and economic shifts embodied by the spread of the railway system from the early 1800s onwards were not just produced through railway routes and rolling stock, but also in and through the railway stations. In towns and cities around the world, the station was a "gateway" for untold numbers of people going about their daily business, performing both exceptional travels and routine habits of going to and from work. It was "a place of motion and emotion, arrival and departure, joy and sorrow, parting and reunion."  Railway stations were critical public spaces of modern cities, the setting of daily personal, even intimate, experiences that were also shaped by the massive flows of people on an ever-broader scale.

Movement by train involved moving through the neighbourhood in which the train station was situated. This panel follows the flow of people in and out of the station to explore the ways in which the motion and emotion generated by the railway station transformed the neighbourhoods surrounding them. Papers may broach the issues through some of the following questions:

• How did the movement, activities, personal dramas, political conflicts, and social relations that played out in stations spill out into neighbouring districts and reconfigure the urban experience? 
• How did the sights, sounds, smoke and other perceive nuisances associated with train traffic affect life in surrounding urban spaces?
• How were these highly localised encounters and interactions shaped by the transnational movement of people, goods, and, ideas that railway travel embodied?
• How did these intimate connections and global flows produce the social and economic geography of the railway neighbourhood?
• How were the ideas of modernity and progress often associated with railways challenged by perceptions of danger, criminality, and illicit activity in station neighbourhoods? How can we explain chronological shifts in emotional experiences, practices and associations?

We encourage paper proposals that examine these questions in a range of global contexts, form the earliest railway stations in the first half of the nineteenth century to the present. 

• Spokesperson: Anneleen Arnout, Radboud University Nijmegen
• Co-organizer(s): Nicolas Kenny, Simon Fraser University
• Keywords: Railway stations | Emotions | Space
• Time period: Modern period
• Topic(s): Cultural | Social
• Study area: More than one continent