Loss of the Road (in 1847) and the arrival of the railways

Illustrated London News 13 February 1847

What is the road now, and its merry incidents of life? Is there no Chelsea or Greenwich for the old pimple-nosed coachman? I wonder, where are they, those honest good fellows?  Is old Weller alive or dead? and the waiters, yea, and the inns at which they waited, and the cold rounds-of-beef inside, and the stunted ostler with his blue nose and clinking pail, where is he, and where is his generation? To those great geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved reader's children, these men and things will be as much legend and history as Ninevah, or Couer de Lion, or Jack Sheppard. For them stage coaches will have become romances, a team of four bays as fabulous as Bucephalus, or Black Bess. Ah, how their coats shone, as the stable-men pulled their clothes off, and away they went - ah, how their tails shook, as with smoking sides at the stage's end they demurely walked away into the inn-yard. Alas! we shall never hear the horn sing at midnight, or see the pike-gates fly open any more. Vanity Fair