Abstract
■ This article is concerned with the way people understood socialist modernity in different regions of Poland, and with their responses to the collapse of socialism and with it the unsettling of employment, work and economy generally. The article focuses on stories told in central and southern Poland about technologies and progress associated with socialist industrialization and infrastructure development, and on later stories of technologies and danger associated with the demise of socialism and the advent of capitalism. It considers the way that trains and other technologies may become heavily weighted symbols for both development and unsettlement, in stories which refer obliquely to the fragility of kinship and the state, and to anxiety connected to change.
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