Berlin, PrussiaWinter 1854
The trains no longer stopped in Berlin.
Day and night, locomotives rolled through the expanding rail terminals beneath clouds of steam and coal smoke while workers unloaded iron, machinery, timber, and military supplies across crowded industrial yards. Entire sections of the city remained awake long after midnight now. Factory furnaces glowed orange against the winter sky while rail whistles echoed through districts that had once been quiet neighborhoods only a decade earlier.
Berlin was changing.
Fast.
Too fast for some people.
Not fast enough for others.
Snow covered parts of the capital that morning, but the streets near the industrial districts had already turned black from coal ash and mud. Workers moved toward factories before sunrise while military supply wagons crossed intersections beside civilian freight convoys using the same expanding rail infrastructure.
That was the part many foreign observers found unsettling.
