Railway Station

When The Railway Station was exhibited in London, 21,150 visitors paid to see it during its seven week exhibition.

An engraving of The Railway Station by Francis Holl was published in an edition of more than 3,000 (1866)

Tony Judt notes the social significance of train stations in the 19th-century:

"As the design of the station made quite explicit, railways were never just functional. They were about travel as pleasure, travel as adventure, travel as the archetypical modern experience. Patrons and clients were not supposed to just buy a ticket and go; they were meant to linger and imagine and dream....That is why stations were designed, often quite deliberately, on the model of cathedrals, with their spaces and facilities divided into naves, apses, side chapels, and ancillary offices and rituals. As the locus classicus for such winks and nods to neo-ecclesiastical monumentalism, see St Pancras Station (1868) in London. Stations had restaurants, shops, personal services. They were for many decades the preferred site of a city's primary postal and telegraph offices. And above all, they were the ideal space in which to advertise themselves."

Tony Judt, "The Glory of the Rails," The New York Review of Books, vol. LVII, no. 20, (23 December 2010-12 January 2011): 61.

Similar works by other artists

James Tissot, Waiting for the Train, 1871-73 (Dunedin Public Art Gallery)

Karl Karger, Arrival of a Train at the Northwest Railway Station in Vienna, 1875 (Belvedere Museum, Vienna)

George Earl, Going North, Kings’s Cross Station, London, 1893 (National Railway Museum, York)

George Earl, Perth Station, Coming South, 1895 (National Railway Museum)