How did the passengers in a 1700-1908 century horse drawn carriage spend their time?

by JohnCamus

I imagine that it must have taken hours, days, weeks or month, to reach any destination. How did people spend their time sitting in the back of a carriage? What did they complain about? Regarding long distance travel, how was it structured?

mikedash

Ah, this question takes me back - to the very earliest response I offered here at askhistorians, two years ago, in fact.

But to answer your question directly (albeit with reference to the British Isles, where the size of the island and density of population allowed the system to be brought to a high degree of perfection not typical of conditions in Europe and the US):

  • The quality and comfort of horse-drawn transportation varied considerably over this period. It only became fast and comfortable from the late 18th century, as a result of the development of improved suspension, a comprehensive network of coaching inns, and improved road surfaces. By the 1830s the services could be, and were, timetabled as precisely as modern railway journeys. Operators began to lose out in competition to the railways from the 1830s, and commercial inter-city carriage traffic was increasingly uncommon from the 1860s onwards
  • Complaints centred around the discomforts of travel, and to a lesser extent the dangers (despite top speeds of only 10-12 mph, lethal accidents and broken bones were fairly common). Discomforts included overcrowding (larger, slower public carriages might carry up to 16-20 people), exposure to the elements and cold, potholed roads, and, in winter, the occasional need to get out and walk up steep muddy or snowy hills that the horses could not pull fully loaded carriages up
  • Passengers spent their time in much the same way as they would later do in trains and cars: talking, reading, sleeping and eating. Guide books that told passengers what they could expect to see from the windows of their carriages at any given point on the more popular routes were produced and were quite popular.
  • Long distance travel was structured in stages of around 8-15 miles. Coaches would call at coaching inns to change to fresh horses, allowing far better average speeds. Refreshments, toilet facilities and overnight accommodation could all be had at such inns, and by the early 1800s the largest of them were also able to act in the capacity of travel agents, for instance in booking passage across the channel and onwards via equivalent services in France, the low countries, and Germany.
  • The fastest (and most expensive) service was on mail coaches, which used smaller, lighter carriages and had right of way over slower vehicles on the roads. After c.1785 these services were capable of making the 290 mile journey from London to Holyhead (the main port of embarkation for Ireland) essentially non-stop (barring changes of horses, which could be accomplished in under 2 minutes) in under 24 hours.