Before the widespread popularity of automobiles, buses, and trucks, freight and passenger trains bound the nation together. The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience explores the role of local frontline workers that kept the country's vast rail network running. Virtually every community with a railroad connection had a depot and an ......
The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability
In the immediate decades after World War II, the French National Railways (SNCF) was celebrated for its acts of wartime heroism. However, recent debates and litigation have revealed the ways the SNCF worked as an accomplice to the Third Reich and was actively complicit in the deportation of 75,000 Jews and other civilians to death camps. Sarah ......
Narrow Gauge in the Tropics is the first comprehensive history of railways and tramways in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) from breaking ground in 1864 to the invasion of the Japanese during World War II. During the mid-19th century under colonial rule, the Dutch East Indies experienced enormous increases in production of sugar, coffee, ......
Reveals the legacy of the train as a critical site of race in the United States Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, and vastness. For almost two centuries, the train has served as the literal and symbolic vehicle for ......
A Personal Recollection of Coal Trains in the 1990s
The 1990s were a decade of change on the railways with colliery closures and privatisation. This is a potted history of Worksop train crew depot, with photos of collieries, trains and power stations. There are maps, descriptions of each colliery and power station featured, diagrams, tables and coal plans to show where power station coal ......
Transportation's Orphan and Its Struggle for Survival
Discover the story of Amtrak, America's Railroad, 50 years in the making. In 1971, in an effort to rescue essential freight railroads, the US government founded Amtrak. In the post-World War II era, aviation and highway development had become the focus of government policy in America. As rail passenger services declined in number and in quality, ......
Sir Robert Reid, how he transformed Britain's railways to be the best in Europe
Bob Reid’s Railway Revolution describes the life and career of the first Bob Reid, always known as Bob Reid One, and the
history of the railways since nationalisation. It shows how the organisational changes he forced through when Chief Executive
from 1980 to 1990 turned British Rail into one of the best railways in Europe. His reforms, described ......
From the Photographic Archive of Ellis James-Robertson
A photo-book covering railways around North Wales from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s consisting mainly of unpublished images in both colour and black & white together with an informative commentary. All were taken by railway enthusiast Ellis James-Robertson who died in 2015, and this book has been written by film-maker and author Michael Clemens.
When this story begins passengers then as now were the main business of the railways in southern England. Since then electrification has been the priority. Diesels appeared in the 1950s, steam ended in 1967, branch lines closed with Beeching, but in compensation the south has a remarkable network of preserved steam and diesel operated railways.
