It had long been common for certain of the more exclusive bawdy houses to have suites of rooms furnished and decorated in various novel themes, the better to satisfy the customer's fancies. These included such settings as a Turkish harem, classical Rome, ancient Egypt, etcetera, with the ladies of the brothel decked out in the appropriate costumes, and an effort made to maintain a suitable atmosphere. Such "special apartments" were expensive to create, but invariably reclaimed their cost and more as they were a great draw for a certain class of customers who wished for something more exciting than a simple tumble with a lady of the night.
All these fantasical themes had one common factor: they looked to the past. Some customers wished rather to enact fantasies set firmly in the modern day, and the most common of these was to make love on a moving train. Doing so granted one membership of the highly exclusive "50 Miles Per Hour Club", which had certain factors in common with the 20th century's "Mile High Club", in that both had the same titillating thrill derived from making love in a semi-public place, while at the same time travelling at high speed. Of course, making love in a Victorian railway carriage was less liable to unwelcome discovery than doing so in an airliner's cramped restroom; railway carriages of the period were divided into separate compartments and had no corridor; one could only leave or enter one's compartment when the train was halted at a station, thus there was little likelihood of discovery and public embarrassment.
And so, in 1892, Mrs Miller, owner of one of the largest and most exclusive brothels in London, commissioned the construction of what was named "The Railway Room". A contemporary observer, Mr Jack Fordham of Butte, Montana, paid a visit to the establishment and recorded a description of this singular attraction which appeared in the first edition of his "Travels in the Old World" 1, but was expunged from the second and third editions 2:
[The Railway Room] was fitted out to resemble a compartment of an English railroad carriage. It was perfect in every detail: there were the uncomfortable horsehair seats, the badly-reproduced scenic prints, the wire mesh baggage racks, the pull-down window, and even a cleverly devised mechanism by means of which the entire room could be induced to rock and sway in a completely convincing manner. I was informed that the finishing touch was furnished by a phonograph cylinder which emitted the noises of a railroad journey, to lend that necessary touch of versimilitude to the experience.
The expense was colossal3 but the market could bear it. Mrs Miller's customers were an exclusive set, moneyed gentleman from the aristocracy and the merchant classes, with a taste for the new and bizarre. Indeed, one customer was reported to be so particularly excited by the thought of being caught in flagrante delicto that an arrangement was made whereby a member of the establishment's staff, dressed as a railway conductor, would lean in at the simulated carriage's window at the appropriate moment with gruff cries of "What the devil is the meaning of this?" so as to assure the customer's complete satisfaction.
In 1903 the Railway Room was reportedly purchased for the then-astronomical sum of £10,000 by an American consortium, and the entire apparatus was dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic to Chicago, where it was reconstructed and modified to present an appearance more in keeping with American railroad practices. In its new home it reportedly earned a sum in excess of half a million dollars for its owners before being destroyed in the Great Fire of 1908. Contemporary photographs of the setup in the USA are reported to exist, also a great many pornographic images created during its time in London, including a set entitled "Ravished on the Scotch Express", featuring possibly the least convincing Scotsman ever captured on film 4.
1. Published by Slackworth & Mott, Portland, Oregon, in 1895. 259 pp. plus 16 engravings.
2. Supposedly a lawsuit for obscenity was brought against the publisher, but available details are scarce. Copies of the third edition are readily discoverable, but only 2 copies of the unexpurgated first edition are known to exist, as the entire print run was destroyed.
3. The total cost of construction, including the hydraulic mechanism which moved the room, is supposed to have come to a cool £6,300 - a veryconsiderable sum at the time.
4. Allegedly a faithful adaptation of "Raped on the Railway: A True Story of a Lady Who Was First Ravished and Then Chastised on the Scotch Express" (1894); if any reader of this page can supply scans or further information regarding these photo sets I would be very grateful.
Dr. Kilmarnock's Obscure World of Victorian Erotica
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