The literature on this is enormous and starts with Leo Marx's classic, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964).
Henry T. Williams, ed., Pacific Tourist: Adams and Bishops Illustrated Trans-continental Guide of Travel, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean: A Complete Travelers Guide of the Union and Central Pacific Railroads (New York: Adams & Bishop, 1881), 6-7.
Pacific Tourist, 172.
This kind of rhetoric was common;
see Yellowstone National Park, Railway Age, Oct. 23, 1879, p. 511.
Van Horne to Harry Abbott, Oct. 7, 1886, LB, 18, v. 3.
For the experience of travel, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986).