Thoreau was conflicted about this newfangled technology. On the one hand, the raw power of the locomotive awed him. Yet he feared the railroad disrupted familiar rhythms. Farmers who once gauged time by the sun now set their clocks to the 2:00 p.m. train from Boston. Walden Woods was stripped of trees, fuel for the wood-fired engines. “We do not ride on the railroad,” Thoreau concludes. “It rides upon us.”
