What problems were there while traveling in the 1900s?

Answer 1

It's best to set this in context by comparison with modern transport.

If you were travelling more than a few miles or so in the 1900s, the railways offered the speediest, most reliable and most comfortable of the few options - and still do - but you still had to travel between home and station at each end of the journey. And still have!

For most people in the 1900s the only road options were cycle, horse (on its back or in a carriage) or on foot - unless you were rich enough to buy one of these new-fangled motor-cars. Travelling long distances by car then was neither fast, reliable nor very comfortable, and garages (filling-stations now-called) were rather few and far between. They are going that way again, in rural areas anyway.

The Edwardian railways were more difficult to operate in bad weather then they are now. Heavy snow obviously blocks the lines, and ice blocked point and signal mechanisms; but fog was the much more common obstacle. It made it very hard for the drivers to see the signals, forcing much reduced speeds hence long delays. Nowadays, although bad Winter weather can still play havoc with schedules, the High-Speed Trains on Britain's main-line network can still maintain 100+mph running even on foggy nights.

A problem peculiar to the early American railways was the timber trestle viaduct. They were relatively easy and cheap to build with plentiful local wood, but suffered badly from fires, flood damage or decay. (The early British railways did use timber viaducts in a few places, but these were replaced fairly quickly by the much more commonly-used brick, masonry or steel structures.)

Air travel is obviously now the fastest means of actually moving - about an hour to an hour-&-a-half for roughly 400 miles from Southern English airports to Glasgow or Edinburgh depending on aeroplane type; but a law of diminishing returns sets in with decreasing flight distance, thanks to the travelling to and from the widely-scattered airports, and the requirement to arrive at the airport at least an hour before take-off.

For most journeys now, as in the 1900s, rail often gives the fastest overall journey time for most journeys of much less than perhaps 400 miles by road, rail and now air; and despite considerable negative publicity from the Press; is probably the most reliable.

For international travel, and in many cases for long distances within continents, the only way available in the 1900s was by ship; but the steam-ship by then was well developed and certainly quicker, more reliable, more comfortable, healthier and safer than their all-sail predecessors.