Lost Railway Journeys from Around the World

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Many railways are abandoned now, their memory mourned by all who enjoyed a less stressful travel time and made new friends among carriage companions instead of enduring today’s highway anxiety and solitary texting. But these were not the purpose of the steam-powered locomotives that confronted challenges across daunting stretches of the globe. Their foremost function was to facilitate transportation for local and longer distances and to carry munitions and military personnel where and as needed.

This record of nineteenth- and twentieth-century locomotives will attract readers devoted to the mystique of trains, the people and places encountered and, far from least, the dedicated railroad buffs finding technical details of locomotives, the companies that ran them, and the geographic challenges they confronted. Today, long stretches in Canada and New Zealand are among the places favored by bike riders.

Powerful images show locomotives running on different gauge tracks, heading over awesome – not to say terrifying – rivers and canyons in Europe as well as stretches of Africa and Asia remote enough to intimidate even the boldest highway drivers.

Cameos abound: the widow with nine children who started pouring the tea for passengers and crew when the train’s whistle heralded their approach; church services held in waiting rooms of rural stations; the Australian Central Railway that ran at a loss despite carrying 15,600 steers and 20,000 sheep in 1892, feeding and sheltering hordes of construction workers.

Each segment maps the route and stops along the way of the locomotives in an admirably produced and printed volume.


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Author
Star Count 5/5
Format Hard
Page Count 208 pages
Publisher White Lion Publishing
Publish Date 2018-11-13
ISBN 9781781317471
Bookshop.org Buy this Book
Issue Mar-19
Category Architecture & Photography
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