Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World—from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief Author: Visit Amazon's Tom Zoellner Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0670025283 | Format: PDF
Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World—from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief Description
From Booklist
Despite ebbing enthusiasm for passenger rail travel in the U.S. these days, train companies remain major players in transporting consumer goods from coast to coast. Also, as veteran journalist and unabashed train fanatic Zoellner emphasizes in this exuberant celebration of these mammoth wheeled machines, both commuters and businesses overseas are still heavily dependent on trains, especially in countries like China, where rail service continues to expand almost exponentially. As a convenient excuse for research, Zoellner toured several of the world’s most notable rail lines, including a north-to-south trek in Britain, a journey up corkscrewing tracks in the Peruvian Andes, and a jaunt on Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway. In between colorful anecdotes from his travels that include snapshots of contemporary commuters in countries from Scotland to India, Zoellner provides a wealth of fascinating historical details, such as the mood of astonishment that greeted the first trains in nineteenth-century England and the grim duty the railroads undertook during both world wars. An absorbing and lively reflection on an enduring marvel of modern industrial technology. --Carl Hays
Review
Praise for Train:
“Tom Zoellner's writing is never less than engaging; in Train he has made himself a veritable Walt Whitman of rail travel. It's a great read.” —Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb “Train is such a pleasure to read, elegant, deeply informed and smart, full of knowledge-bearing sentences, and prose so companionable and rich in insight that it is as if its author were at your shoulder, taking you along with him. What an enjoyable journey. I will never hear the far off moan of a train in the night without thinking of it, and I know of no higher praise one can give a book. Tom Zoellner is quickly making himself a reputation as a man of wide and eclectic interests, and oh, my! Can he write!” —Richard Bausch, author of Peace
"Entirely terrific....Zoellner gives us an intimate look at some of the innumerable ways in whcih trains have altered the world in which we live."—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"An absorbing and lively reflection on an enduring marvel of modern industrial technology."—Booklist
“Train makes for fascinating reading….The author’s easy, breezy style will keep readers chugging along.”—The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Zoellner illustrates how the modern era was ushered in and strapped in place by railroads, and how trains—the reality and the idea—continue to shape the world as we understand it….Train is by turns lyrical, powerful, romantic, transporting, and rich.”—Phoenix New Times
"[Train], rich with history and local color, is a mesmerizing read for anyone interested in the impact of trains on the environment, politics, economics, and daily life around the world today."—Library Journal
“Enchanting and informative.”—New York Post
“[Train] is an absorbing round-the-world journey.”—BookPage
See all Editorial Reviews
- Hardcover: 384 pages
- Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (January 30, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0670025283
- ISBN-13: 978-0670025282
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
The author takes us along on his rides of half a dozen world-famous long
distance train trips, in each case providing the historical context of
the railroad's role in that country, the cultural/economic/political
significance of that railroad or of that particular route, and so on.
The result is part travelogue and part history, neither part
comprehensive, but certainly entertaining, especially for fans of rail
travel.
Supporting Theroux's assertion that railroads are microcosms of their
countries, part of the interest is that the journeys could not be more
different because of their history and cultural embedding: the
trans-Siberian railway, the new Chinese high-speed line to Tibet, the
Indian Railways, the journey crossing the US from Chicago to LA, etc.
Zoellner pays particular attention to the economic and cultural
significance of these runs.
Without railroads, the extractive industries that drove colonialization
and expansion in the USA, South America, and India would not have been
possible, nor would the efficient movement of millions of prisoners to
concentration camps in Nazi Germany; and the author concludes the
Chinese have similar aspirations to "colonize" Tibet and thereby
permanently end any discussions of its independence. At the same time,
the very trains that were the ultimate symbol of British colonialism in
India now represent unprecedented mobility for its masses, and the
trains that served as symbols of white oppression in the antebellum
American South soon became the vehicles that transported free blacks to
Chicago in search of a new middle-class life.
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