the railway revolutions

This page looks at the railroad as a revolutionary network and a metaphor for the net.

It covers -

• introduction
• the shape of the revolution
• national studies
• growth and regulation
• UK industry and entrepreneurs
• the US
• Canada
• the Continent and elsewhere
• Australia and New Zealand
• discontents
• imagination
• visualisation
• the railway and the law
• architecture

     introduction

The notion of the railway as the primary driver of the Victorian economy (or as a precursor of the dot-com bubble) remains contentious, with revisionist studies by Fogel, Miller and others questioning dogma about steam-age irrational exuberance and hyperbole about dramatic productivity growth.

However, it is clear that establishment of rail networks in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere -

• facilitated the development of regional, national and transnational markets
• underpinned population growth and a broadly higher standard of living in many areas
• required significant direct and indirect investment (strengthening trends to greater sophistication in capital raising and investment assessment)
• offered a model for large-scale, rational corporate structures
• underpinned reduced production/distribution costs elsewhere in the economy
• enabled the emergence of phenomena such as mass tourism
• were acclaimed, like the telegraph, for the 'death of distance' and the enrichment of humanity
• were similarly decried as a source of social change, exposure to vice and producer of sundry physical/psychological disorders ranging from narcolepsy to neurasthenia and 'railway spine'
• were seen, as a precursor of contemporary status anxiety about teledensity and broadband rollout, as a mark of each country's vigour
• were weighted with rhetoric and expectations about nation-building

In considering optimism about national rollout of digital infrastructure it is worth remembering the ironies of Australian railway development. Although political pressure to build railway lines into the interior (via a financial transfer from coastal areas) came from rural communities, the overall effect of the new networks was to reinforce the primacy of major metropolitan centres, facilitating -

• an 'internal colonisation' of the Bush by urban financial interests (in their own right or on behalf of offshore 'global capital')
• a century of migration from rural/regional areas to the metropolis, a movement paradoxically strengthened by subsidy under agrarian auspices of regional network development/maintenance
• a consequent centralisation of economic and institutional power in the capital cities.

Australian railway history also highlights questions about network standards and externalities.

Lines were developed on an ad hoc basis, with few coordinated plans, little attention to probable use and a range of incompatible rail gauges that reflected institutional inertia and parochial interests. Following passage of the 1846 Gauge Act the UK government called on Australian developers to adopt a uniform gauge of 4 foot 8.5 inches. In NSW the chief engineer claimed that the 'Irish gauge' (5 foot 3 inches) was superior, resulting in its establishment under an 1852 Act and adoption by South Australia and Victoria. Replacement of the chief engineer by a Scot in 1854 saw NSW adopt the UK gauge, conflicting with Victoria and South Australia's 'Irish' gauge. Queensland, on separation from NSW in 1859, adopted a 3 foot 6 inch gauge for its first railway in 1865. Western Australia used a 3 foot (later 3 foot 3 inch) gauge. It was not till after 1939 that the mail line from Sydney to Melbourne was standardised and not for a further thirty years that the line from Perth to Melbourne was standardised.

Three of the most interesting recent works on the railway revolution' as a model for the 'ICT' (or merely broadband) revolution are Robert Miller's study railway.com: Parallels between the early British Railways and the ICT revolution (London: IEA 2003), the 2003 paper by Andrew Odlyzko on The Many Paradoxes of Broadband and Allan Mitchell's incisive The Great Train Race: Railways & the Franco-German Rivalry, 1815-1914 (New York: Berghahn 2000).

     the shape of the revolution

Walter Benjamin commented that

Marx says revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But perhaps it is quite different. Perhaps revolutions are what happens when the humanity travelling in this train snatches at the emergency brake.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time & Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1987) is a provocative account of the world the railways made, complete with insights into contemporary bugaboos that sound much like anxieties about the internet as a sewer from hell. It is complemented by Nicholas Faith's elegant The World the Railways Made (London: Bodley Head 1984).

The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technology & Change (Cambridge: MIT Press 1990) edited by Leo Marx is suggestive and extends his superb The Machine in the Garden: Technology & the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1967). The Philosophy of Railways: The Transcontinental Railway Idea in British North America (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1997) by A A Den Otter and Across the Borders: International Railway Investments in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007) edited by Ralf Roth & Günter Dinhobl are of significance in considering rhetoric about the info highway and nation building.

The US Consortium for National Research Initiatives has published an excellent series of papers on railways and other models for global digital networks. Bruce Mazlish's The Railroad & the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy (Cambridge: MIT Press 1965) has a period flavour but is salted with insights.

For rail as an engine for tourism see works such as History of Tourism: Thomas Cook & the Origins of Leisure Travel (London: Routledge 1998) by Paul Smith and The Impact of the Railway on Society in Britain: Essays in honour of Jack Simmons (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003) edited by A K Evans & J V Gough. Gender impacts are highlighted in Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press 2005) by Amy Richter and The City and the Railway: A European Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003) edited by Ralph Roth & Marie-Noelle Polino.

Ian Carter's superb Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester Uni Press 2001) offers insights into the fascination with locomotives from Dickens to Auden. As yet there is no comprehensive study of the 'yellow back' railway novel, the airport novel of the 1880s. WH Smith is examined in Charles Wilson's First With the News: The Story of WH Smith 1792-1972 (Garden City: Doubleday 1985); there has been no major study of Baedeker and the railway guide industry.

Glenn Yago's The Decline of Transit: Urban Transportation in German & US Cities, 1900-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1984) is of particular value. John McKay's Tramways & Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1976) is a cogent exploration of the growth of suburbia.

Christian Wolmar's The Subterranean Railway (New York: Atlantic 2004), Subways - The Tracks That Built New York City (New York: Potter 2004) by Lorraine Diehl, New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City (New York: Routledge 2004) by Julia Solis, Zachary Schrag's The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 2006) and Rails Through the Clay (Harrow: Capital Transport Publishing 1993) by Desmond Croome & Alan Jackson consider subways.

     national studies

The North American Railroad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1995) by James Vance, Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life (Hanover: Uni Press of New England 1997) by Maury Klein and Politics & Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States & Prussia (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1994) by Colleen Dunlavy are valuable for its exploration of the interaction between markets, private funding and government support.

Albert Schram's Railways & the Formation of the Italian State in the 19th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1997). Terence Gourvish's Railways & the British Economy 1830-1914 (London: Macmillan 1980), The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1999) edited by Jack Simmons & George Biddle, Jack Simmons' The Railway in England & Wales, 1830-1914 (Leicester: Leicester Uni Press 1978) and Christian Wolmar's Fire & Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain (London: Atlantic 2007) offer insights into development in the UK. Gourvish's British Railways: A Business History (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1986) is of particular value.

There is a trans-atlantic comparison in Geoffrey Channon's Railways in Britain and the United States, 1830-1940 (Aldershot: Ashgate 2001) - to us somewhat unfair on Chandler - and in Walter Licht's Working for the Railroad: The Organisation of Work in the 19th Century (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1983).

The Canadian terrain is mapped in Pierre Berton's The National Dream: The Great Railway 1871-1881 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1970) and The Last Spike: The Great Railway 1881-1885 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1971).

For Russia see in particular Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917 (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 1991) by Steven Marks and Jacob Metzer's Some Economic Aspects of Railroad Development in Tsarist Russia (New York: Arno 1977).

     growth and regulation

Gabriel Kolko's exemplary Railroads & Regulation (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1965), Alfred Chandler's Railroads, the Nation's First Big Business (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1965) and Thomas Cochran's Railroad Leaders, 1845-1890: The Business Mind in Action (New York: Russell & Russell 1965) offer a point of reference for those favouring the railway as a metaphor for the web. Chandler's Strategy & Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge: MIT Press 1962) and Henry Varnum Poor - Business Editor, Analyst & Reformer (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1956) are also suggestive.

Frank Dobbin's Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain and France in the Railway Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991) is a thoughtful study of precursors to the national information infrastructure initiatives favoured during the 1990s.

A History of the ICC: From Panacea to Palliative (New York, Norton 1976) by Ari & Olive Hoogenboom, Richard Stone's The Interstate Commerce Commission & the Railroad Industry: A History of Regulatory Policy (New York: Praeger 1991), and The Market that Antitrust Built: Public Policy, Private Coercion, and Railroad Acquisitions, 1825-1922 (PDF) by Frank Dobbin & Timothy Dowd give a perspective on ICANN. Lee Benson's Merchants, Farmers and Railroads: Railroad Regulation and New York Politics, 1850-1887 (New York: Russell & Russell 1969) has a narrower focus.

For the UK Henry Parris's Government & the Railways in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge 1965) is of value.

Robert Fogel's Railroads & American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1964) and Albert Fishlow's American Railroads & the Transformation of the American Economy (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1965) are persuasive studies that question the notion of railways as the primary engine of US economic development.

They are complemented by Wray Vamplew's 1971 'Nihilistic Impressions of British Railway History' in Essays on a More Mature Economy: Britain After 1840 (London: Methuen 1971) edited by Donald McCloskey and Dorothy Adler's British Investment in American Railways, 1834-1898 (Charlottesville: Uni of Virginia Press 1970).

A sidelight is offered by John Clark's Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni Press 2001) and Robert Angevine's The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, & Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2004).

Gary Hawke's Railways and Economic Growth in England & Wales 1840-1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990) and Anthony Heywood's Modernising Lenin's Russia: Economic Reconstruction, Foreign Trade & the Railways, 1917-1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999) are less revisionist. Innovation and Technical Change in American Railroading: 1840-1920 (New York: Cambridge Uni Press 2002) by Steven Usselman explores issues highlighted by Chandler.

     UK industry and entrepreneurs

Brian Bailey's George Hudson, The Rise and Fall of the Railway King (Alan Sutton 1995), Tony Arnold & Sean McCartney's outstanding George Hudson - The Rise and Fall of the Railway King: A Study in Victorian Entrepreneurship (London: Hambledon & London 2004) and Robert Beaumont's The Railway King: A Biography of George Hudson, Railway Pioneer & Fraudster (London: Review 2002) consider a leading entrepreneur.

They are complemented by Anthony Burton's The Railway Builders (London: John Murray 1992), Adrian Vaughan's uneven Railwaymen, politics and money: the great age of railways in Britain (London: John Murray 1997) and Terry Coleman's The Railway Navvies (London: Pimlico 2001). For Brunel see Brunel: The life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (London: Hambledon & London 2002) by Angus Buchanan and Lionel Rolt's Isambard Kingdom Brunel: a biography (London: Longmans 1957)

For the major UK groups see Michael Bonavia's The Four Great Railways (Newton Abbot: David & Charles 1980), R J Irving's The North Eastern Railway Company, 1870-1914: An Economic History (Leicester: Leicester Uni Press 1976), Derek Aldcroft's British Railways in Transition: The Economic Problems of British Railways Since 1914 (London: Macmillan 1968) and Terrence Gourvish's masterly British Rail, 1974-97: from integration to privatisation (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1998).

     the US

For US railroad and Western Union telegraphy magnate Jay Gould see Edward Renehan's Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons (New York: Basic Books 2005) or the more nuanced The Life & Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1997) by Maury Klein, author of The Life & Legend of E H Harriman (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 2000) and Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life (Amherst: Uni Press of New England 1994).

James Dilts' The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore & Ohio, The Nation's First Railroad, 1828-1853 (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 1993), Stephen Salsbury's important The State, the Investor & the Railroad: The Boston & Albany, 1825-1867 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1967) and David Vrooman's Daniel Willard & Progressive Management on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (Columbus: Ohio State Uni Press 1991) are also recommended.

For Gould adversary Big Jim Fisk see Jubilee Jim: From Circus Traveler to Wall Street Rogue - the remarkable life of Colonel James Fisk Jr (New York: Texere 2001) by Robert Fuller and John Steele Gordon's The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Erie Railway Wars & the Birth of Wall Street (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1988). Cooke is profiled in Jay Cooke's Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, The Sioux, And the Panic of 1873 (Uni of Oklahoma Press 2006) by M. John Lubetkin. Albro Martin's James J Hill & the Opening of the Northwest (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1997) supersedes earlier biographies such as Michael Malone's James J Hill - Empire Builder of the Northwest (Tulsa: Uni of Oklahoma Press 1996). It is complemented by The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California (New York: Norton 2008) by Richard Rayner on Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Collis Huntington.

For an insider account see Chapters of Erie (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 1966) by Union Pacific president Charles Francis Adams and Henry Adams. It is complemented by Thomas McCraw's Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D Brandeis, James M Landis, Alfred E Kahn (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1984).

Albro Martin is also responsible for Railroads Triumphant: The Growth, Rejection & Rebirth of a Vital American Force (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1991) and Enterprise Denied: Origins of the Decline of American Railroads, 1897-1917 (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1980). A later generation of conglomerateurs features in Herbert Harwood's Invisible Giants: The Empires of Cleveland's Van Sweringen Brothers (Bloomington: Indiana Uni Press 2003), perhaps too indulgent to the rather creepy Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen.

Robert Fogel's The Union Pacific Railroad: A Case in Premature Enterprise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1960) is a revisionist landmark. Alexandra Villard De Borchgrave's Villard: The Life & Times of an American Titan (New York: Doubleday 2001) is a disappointingly thin account of the Northern Pacific, streetcar and General Electric entrepreneur. We preferred Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes (Urbana: Uni of Illinois Press 2006) by John Franch.

John Larson's Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's Railway Age (Iowa City: Uni of Iowa Press 2001) questions some dogmas about rails across the prairie. Other studies include Robert Mohowski's The New York, Susquehanna & Western Railroad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 2003), Richard Orsi's intelligent Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad & the Development of the American West, 1850-1930 (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2005), Peter Lewty's To the Columbia gateway: the Oregon Railway and the Northern Pacific, 1879-1884 (Pullman: Washington State Uni Press 1987), John Gaertner's North Bank Road: The Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway (Pullman: Washington State Uni Press 1991), Muriel Hidy's The Great Northern Railway: A History (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1988) and Roger Grant's "Follow the Flag": A History of the Wabash Railroad Company (Carbondale: Northern Illinois Uni Press 2004).

For recent declines see Stephen Salsbury's lucid No way to run a railroad: the untold story of the Penn Central Crisis (New York: McGraw-Hill 1982), Richard Saunders The railroad mergers and the coming of Conrail (Westport: Greenwood 1978), Joseph Daughen's The Wreck of the Penn Central (New York: Little Brown 1971), and H Roger Grant's Erie Lackawanna: Death of an American Railroad, 1938-1992 (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 1994).

John Brown's The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831-1915 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1995) questions dogmas about standardised mass-production techniques.

Perspectives on the finance-transport complex are provided by Saul Engelbourg & Leonard Bushkoff's The Man Who Found the Money: John Stewart Kennedy and the Financing of the Western Railroads (East Lansing: Michigan State Uni Press 1996), Vincent Carosso's Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1970), Dolores Greenberg's Financiers & Railroads, 1869-1889: A Study of Morton, Bliss, & Company (Newark: Uni of Delaware Press 1980), Ron Chernow's The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Atlantic 1990) and Merging Lines: American Railoads, 1900-1970 (DeKalb: Northern Illionois Uni Press 2002) by Richard Saunders.

     Canada

For Canada see in particular John Lorne McDougall's corporate history Canadian Pacific (Montreal: McGill Uni Press 1968) and the more stolid History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (New York: Macmillan 1977) by archivist W Kaye Lamb, Canadian National Railways, Vol I: Sixty Years of Trial and Error, 1836-1896 (Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin 1960) and Canadian National Railways, Vol II: Towards the Inevitable, 1896-1922 (Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin 1962) by G R Stevens, A Thousand Blunders: The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and Northern British Columbia (Vancouver: Uni of British Columbia Press 1996) by Frank Leonard and John Eagle's The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Development of Western Canada, 1896-1914 (Kingston: McGill-Queen's Uni Press 1989). Harold Innis's 1923 A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway was reprinted in 1971 (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1971).

Canadian entrepreneurs feature in The Railway King of Canada: Sir William Mackenzie, 1849-1923 (Vancouver: Uni of British Columbia Press 1991) by RB Fleming, Lord Strathcona: A Biography of Donald Alexander Smith (Toronto: Dundurn Press 1996) by Donna McDonald and Heather Gilbert's The Life of Lord Mount Stephen (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Uni Press 1977).

     the continent and elsewhere

For the Netherlands see Augustus Veenendaal Jr's Railways in the Netherlands: A Brief History, 1834-1994 (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2001).

Insights into national networks under stress are provided in Alfred Mierzejewski's The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway Vol 1: 1920-1932 (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 1999) and The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway Vol 2: 1933-1945 (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 2000), complemented by his The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944-1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 1988). For the USSR see Stalin's Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh: Uni of Pittsburgh Press 2001) by Matthew Payne.

For Japan see in particular Steven Ericson's The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan (London: Harvard Uni Press 1996). For Brazil see William Summerhill's Order against Progress: Government, Foreign Investment, and Railroads in Brazil, 1854-1913 (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2003).

     Australia

Australia alas lacks the synoptic railway histories of other nations: recourse must be made to narrower corporate studies. Major works are John Gunn's Along Parallel Lines, a History of the Railways of New South Wales, 1850-1986 (Melbourne: Melbourne Uni Press 1989), Robert Lee's The Greatest Public Work: the New South Wales Railways, 1848-1889 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger 1988) and Colonial Engineer: John Whitton (1819-1898) and the building of Australia's Railways (Sydney: UNSW Press 2000), Richard Raxworthy's The Unreasonable Man, the life and works of J.J.C. Bradfield (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger 1989), John Kerr's Triumph of the Narrow Gauge: a history of Queensland Railways (Brisbane: Booralong Press 1998).

     discontents

Motion & Means: Mapping Opposition to Railways in Victorian Britain, a paper by Leigh Denault & Jennifer Landish, offers a perspective on contemporary distress about technology.

For rail-induced neurasthenia and 'railway spine' see Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry & Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) edited by Mark Micale & Paul Lerner, Mind Games: American Culture & the Birth of Psychotherapy (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1999) by Eric Caplan, his 1995 'Trains, brains, and sprains: railway spine and the origins of psychoneuroses' in 69 Bulletin of the History of Medicine 387-419, Ralph Harrington's paper on The railway accident: trains, trauma & technological crisis in nineteenth-century Britain and 1996 'The "Railway Spine" diagnosis and Victorian responses to PTSD' in 40(1) Journal of Psychosomatic Research 11-14, Barbara Welke's Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (New York: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) and Milton Cohen & John Quintner's 1996 'The Derailment Of Railway Spine: A Timely Lesson For Post-Traumatic Fibromyalgia Syndrome' in 3 Pain Reviews 181-202.

For labour and regulation see works cited above and David Stowell's Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1999) and Licht's Working for the railroad: the organization of work in the nineteenth century (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1983).

     imagination

For the Victorians see Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1999) by Michael Freeman and Ian Carter's insightful Railways & Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester Uni Press 2001).

For the picturesque see Alfred Runte's Trains of Discovery: Western Railroads and the National Parks (Niwot: Roberts Rinehart 1990), The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2008) by Ian Kennedy & Julian Treuherz and Jim Harter's American Railroads of the Nineteenth Century: A Pictorial History in Victorian Wood Engravings (Lubbock: Texas Tech Uni Press 2004). Works on rail and urbanism include John Stilgoe's Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape (Uni of Virginia Press 2008) and Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1983).

For rail and the conceptualisation of the state see Frank Dobbin's 2004 How Institutions Create Ideas: Railroad Finance and the Construction of Public and Private in France and the United States (PDF).

Stefan Flückiger commented that changing the Swiss national railway timetable in 2004 was

a national emotional act, affecting Swiss life at its roots ... In extremely anti-centralist Switzerland, trains have always been the physical equivalent of the constitution: one of the few things everyone agrees on.

Among the literature on model trains see Sam Posey's Playing With Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale (New York: Random House 2004).

     visualisation

Janin Hadlaw's 2003 The London Underground Map: Imagining Modern Time and Space (PDF), Owen Massey's Mapper's delight: The London Underground diagrams page and Mark Ovendon's Metro Maps of the World (London: Capital Transport 2003) provide a point of reference for the visualisation of cyberspace discussed here.

     the railway and the law

A persuasive case can be made for the railway as a catalyst for the development of modern legal regimes regarding corporations and state intervention in areas as diverse as risk management (eg public safety and securities regulation) and industrial relations.

Four starting points are R W Kostal's Law & English Railway Capitalism 1825-1875 (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1994), James Ely's excellent Railroads & American Law (Lawrence: Uni of Kansas Press 2001), William Childs' The Texas Railroad Commission: Understanding Regulation in America to the Mid-Twentieth Century (College Station: Texas A & M Uni Press 2005) and David Moss' When All Else Fails: Government As The Ultimate Risk Manager (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2002). Kostal is criticised in 'Nineteenth-Century Lawyers and Railway Capitalism: Historians and the Use of Legal Cases' by Sybil & Adrian Jack in 24(1) Journal of Legal History (2003) 59-85.

There is a broader compass in Mark Aldrich's Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828-1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2006), Jamie Bronstein's Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2008), Peter Bartrip & Sandra Burman's Wounded Soldiers of Industry: Industrial Compensation Policy, 1833-1897 (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1983), Barbara Welke's Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) and William Thomas' Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni Press 2000).

     architecture

The outstanding social study of stations - the cybercafes of the 1880s - is The Railway Station: A Social History (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1986) by Jeffrey Richards & John MacKenzie.

For the architectural genre see Railroad Station: An Architectural History (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1956) by Carroll Meeks, Railroad Stations (New York: Metro Books 1998) and America's Railroad Stations (New York: Gramercy 2002) by Brian Solomon, Still Standing: A Century of Urban Train Station Design (Bloomington: Indiana Uni Press 2005) by Christopher Brown, The Modern Station: New Approaches to Railway Architecture (London: Spon 1996) by Barry Edwards, Railway Stations: From the Gare De L'est to Penn Station (London: Phaidon 2005) by Alessia Ferrarini.

Works on individual edifices include St Pancras Station (London: Profile 2007) by Simon Bradley, Grand Central Terminal: Gateway to New York City (New York: Mondo 2003) by Ed Stanley, Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels (New York: Viking 2007) by Jill Jonne, Great Railway Stations of Europe (London: Thames & Hudson 1984) by Marcus Binney.

For bridges and other structures see Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century (v 4, Bridges and Tunnels) (Newark: Uni of Delaware Press 2003) by Anthony Bianculli and Landmarks on the Iron Road: Two Centuries of North American Railroad Engineering (Indianapolis: Indiana Uni Press 1999) by William Middleton.



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