There was resistance but I would not characterize the bulk of it as frivolous. The people who resisted automation during the Industrial Revolution did so because they believed it would de-skill labor and lead to a drop in wages and lost jobs. ("Oh," the economists point out, "in the long run though this stuff improves everyone's way of life" — often true, but tell that to the person, then or now, whose high-paying job just got handed over to a machine. These things are rough on an individual level.) Railroads caused massive social disruption, economic changes, and had quite a number of fatal accidents to boot in the early days when safety standards (even synchronized time-tables) were fairly nonexistent. The fact that they were also built on the back of massive monopolies, created entire new classes of "barons" who exerted political and economic desires with a heavy hand, and so on, did not help public perception (and indeed, if you look up the anti-railroad cartoons from, say, Punch in the late-19th century, many of them are about the theme of big business sacrificing the life of the "little guys" in the name of profit). These were major issues in the 19th century... and they are still major issues today in many sectors!

Anyone who tells you that people had exclusively frivolous reasons for resisting "progress" is someone trying to convince you not to resist their definition of "progress" today. There is no value-free definition of "progress": in every great shift, some people end up "winners," some people end up "losers," and it's generally the "winners" who want to tell you it's inevitable, all for the best, not worth raising a fuss about, etc.