During his lifetime, Dickens saw the roads around him becoming ‘macadamised’, or paved. He saw stiff lumbering coaches overtaken by fast, light, more comfortable coaching ‘machines’, as they were sometimes called. And, most importantly, he saw the rise to its peak of a stagecoaching public transport system that within living memory tripled the speed of road vehicles between Britain's major towns and regularised those towns' connections, thus bringing the nation three times closer together. The highway corridors and roadside inns filled with a newly mobile people. Then, in the 1830s and 1840s Dickens saw this nationwide long-distance stagecoaching system rapidly disappear and the direct highways around him empty. New railed roads ridden by coal-eating, steam-driven iron horses, pulling coaches trained together reduplicated the whole system with a new celerity of mobility ‘realising the Arabian Nights in these prose days’, as Dickens marvelled. Along with the long-distance regional transport of stagecoach and rail, short-distance, horse-drawn transport flourished on tributary routes and in the bustling cities, and passenger travel over water gradually shifted from wooden sailing ships to iron and steam boats, eventually also revolutionising international ocean crossings. Throughout his career, Dickens engaged, both in terms of content and form, with this rapid development of the transport system unfolding all around him. Some modern readers and critics have taken the fact that Dickens's novels generally gravitate towards the depiction of coaching (often of the 1820s) as indicating a nostalgia on his part for a premodern past.