Siderodromophobia

Siderodromophobia is the clinical term for fear and anxiety connected to trains, railways and rail travel, its name built from the German Eisenbahnangst by way of the Greek roots sideron, iron, dromos, way, and phobos, fear. Public anxiety about rail travel dates to the earliest days of railways in the nineteenth century, driven by fears of derailment and accident and by the sense of being confined in a small compartment with no way to summon help; well publicized disasters, such as the 1842 crash on the Versailles to Bellevue line, sharpened the fear through newspaper coverage. Sigmund Freud wrote about his own anxiety around rail travel, which he called Reiseangst, and proposed a link between the rocking sensation of train travel and repressed sexuality, an idea developed further by Karl Abraham and Wilhelm Stekel in terms of childhood memories of being rocked. When train-related anxiety goes beyond ordinary caution, it is classed today as a specific phobia alongside other vehicle phobias such as fear of boats or airplanes.