The Country Railway
The Country Railway

Author: David St John Thomas

Publisher: Frances Lincoln

Published: 2014-02-06

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1781011648

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Possibly read more than any other railway book, The Country Railway has sold over 170,000 copies. This is a redesigned edition of the original text and photographs. Everyone loved the country railway with its neat stations and colourful gardens, the shining brasswork of its tank engines, viaducts daringly built over gushing rivers, embankments carpeted with flowers, and guards whose appearance and voice as well as the traffic they carried in their vans reflected exactly the character of the terrain being served. Basing his work on deep historical research and rich personal experience, David St John Thomas lovingly portrays the branch and cross-country railway in all its nostalgic, technical and commercial aspects. He tells of the days of high expectation when the local promoters first met and chose the architectural style for their stations, sees the navvies at work hacking through the countryside, reports the arrival of the first trains, recalls the troubled realisation when traffic receipts failed to provide enough for dividends. Stations, signalboxes, engines and their men, coaches and trucks, cattle docks and railway pubs, junctions and termini, varied landscapes, special occasions and disasters... In words and pictures here is a unique study for railway enthusiasts and for those who just miss the passing of the country railway.

Morton
Morton

Author: David Collier

Publisher:

Published: 2017-05-10

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9781772620122

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A graphic novel lamenting the loss of train travel, the grip of family, mortality, art, and the human condition, with many other digressions thrown in for good measure. The book opens in media res as Collier finds out about his grandmother s death. While trying to publish his next book another close death shocks him to act on his dream to travel with his wife and son across the country by rail, before it is too late. Through the passing landscape he introduces his family (and the reader) to his old way of life and tries to track down the many characters he has lost touch with.

The Country Railway
The Country Railway

Author: Tim Bryan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2013-09-20

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 0747814244

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Britain's towns and cities were famously transformed in the nineteenth century by the coming of the railways, turning their fortunes around and giving urban dwellers new opportunities to travel across the country – yet the effect on the rural population was arguably far greater. Whilst some of the initial trunk lines were designed to link major cities, the network of smaller cross-country and branch lines that followed opened up large tracts of previously remote countryside, providing new markets for agricultural produce and ending the isolation of many rural communities, and such was the pace of development during the Railway Mania period that by the end of the nineteenth century there were few areas of country not served by train. This book tells the story of these railways from golden age to decline in the wake of nationalization and the Beeching Report in the mid-twentieth century – and indeed contemporary efforts to restore and preserve them.

Waiting on a Train
Waiting on a Train

Author: James McCommons

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2009-11-06

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1603582592

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During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.

Railway Nation
Railway Nation

Author: David Laurence Jones

Publisher: Heritage House Publishing Co

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1772033502

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A riveting, visually engaging collection of vignettes highlighting the rich heritage of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Since its founding in 1881, Canadian Pacific has made an indelible mark on the lives of Canadians. Most commonly associated with its iconic railway, at its height CP also ran hotels, steamships, and an airline, and had myriad involvements in immigration, irrigation, resource development, war contributions, and international trade. It has been said that no other single corporation has shaped Canadian national identity as much as CP. Railway Nation: Tales of the World’s Greatest Travel System is a compilation of more than fifty thrilling and historically significant stories based on colourful anecdotes and archival sources dating back to the company's golden era. From the construction of the ground-breaking Spiral Tunnels on what was previously the most dangerous and accident-prone stretch of railway track in the Rockies, to the CPR-manufactured Valentine tanks that helped the Soviet Union fight off the Nazis in World War II, to the long and frustrating struggle of CP stewardesses fighting against sexist employment policies, this lively and nuanced portrait of an iconic company is illustrated with fascinating archival photography and will be an essential addition to any Canadian history buff's library.

The Geography of Transport Systems
The Geography of Transport Systems

Author: Jean-Paul Rodrigue

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1136777326

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Mobility is fundamental to economic and social activities such as commuting, manufacturing, or supplying energy. Each movement has an origin, a potential set of intermediate locations, a destination, and a nature which is linked with geographical attributes. Transport systems composed of infrastructures, modes and terminals are so embedded in the socio-economic life of individuals, institutions and corporations that they are often invisible to the consumer. This is paradoxical as the perceived invisibility of transportation is derived from its efficiency. Understanding how mobility is linked with geography is main the purpose of this book. The third edition of The Geography of Transport Systems has been revised and updated to provide an overview of the spatial aspects of transportation. This text provides greater discussion of security, energy, green logistics, as well as new and updated case studies, a revised content structure, and new figures. Each chapter covers a specific conceptual dimension including networks, modes, terminals, freight transportation, urban transportation and environmental impacts. A final chapter contains core methodologies linked with transport geography such as accessibility, spatial interactions, graph theory and Geographic Information Systems for transportation (GIS-T). This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the field, with a broad overview of its concepts, methods, and areas of application. The accompanying website for this text contains a useful additional material, including digital maps, PowerPoint slides, databases, and links to further reading and websites. The website can be accessed at: http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans This text is an essential resource for undergraduates studying transport geography, as well as those interest in economic and urban geography, transport planning and engineering.

Lines of the Nation
Lines of the Nation

Author: Laura Bear

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780231140027

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Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence. The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.

Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations
Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations

Author: Simon Jenkins

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2017-09-28

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0241978998

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The perfect new gift from the bestselling author of Britain's 1000 Best Churches It is the scene for our hopeful beginnings and our intended ends, and the timeless experiences of coming and going, meeting, greeting and parting. It is an institution with its own rituals and priests, and a long-neglected aspect of Britain's architecture. And yet so little do we look at the railway station. Simon Jenkins has travelled the length and breadth of Great Britain, from Waterloo to Wemyss Bay, Betws-y-Coed to Beverley, to select his hundred best. Blending his usual insight and authority with his personal reflections and experiences - including his founding the Railway Heritage Trust - the foremost expert on our national heritage deftly reveals the history, geography, design and significance of each of these glories. Beautifully illustrated with colour photographs throughout, this joyous exploration of our social history shows the station's role in the national imagination; champions the engineers, architects and rival companies that made them possible; and tells the story behind the triumphs and follies of these very British creations. These are the marvellous, often undersung places that link our nation, celebrated like never before.

Lines of Country
Lines of Country

Author: Christopher Andreae

Publisher: Erin, Ont. : Boston Mills Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 9781550461336

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Magnificent & monumental (16x12), the History is obviously very heavily subsidized (at $75.00 list price). Andreae (president, Historica Research) has, over 22 years, gathered common and obscure data and photos (560 here) of transportation in all its physical and other manifestations: its history