Essays on the history of railways
Short essays on the engineers, lines and machines that built the railways, and on the rules that keep trains apart.
- The first bullet train
Japan opened the Tokaido Shinkansen on 1 October 1964, ten days before the Tokyo Olympics.
- Across Siberia by rail
The longest railway in the world took twenty-five years to build and tied a vast country together.
- The Orient Express
A Belgian engineer thought that passengers would pay for a sleeping car and a dining table on a journey across Europe. He was right.
- The battle of the gauges
Brunel built the Great Western with rails seven feet apart. The rest of Britain had chosen four feet eight and a half.
- The last spike at Promontory
On 10 May 1869 two railway companies met in the Utah desert and the telegraph told the nation.
- The Tay Bridge disaster
On a stormy night in December 1879 a train crossed the longest bridge in the world, and the bridge fell into the river.
- How the railways set the clocks
Until the 1840s every town in Britain kept its own local time. Timetables made that impossible.
- The Rainhill Trials
In October 1829 five locomotives competed on a mile of level track in Lancashire for a prize of five hundred pounds.