Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World - from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HSP3NCW | Format: EPUB
Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World - from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief Description
Tom Zoellner loves trains with a ferocious passion. In his new audiobook he chronicles the innovation and sociological impact of the railway technology that changed the world, and could very well change it again. From the frigid Trans-Siberian Railroad to the antiquated Indian Railways to the futuristic maglev trains, Zoellner offers a stirring story of man's relationship with trains.
Zoellner examines both the mechanics of the rails and their engines and how they helped societies evolve. Not only do trains transport people and goods in an efficient manner, but they also reduce pollution and dependency upon oil. Zoellner also considers America's culture of ambivalence to mass transit, using the perpetually stalled line between Los Angeles and San Francisco as a case study in bureaucracy and public indifference.
Train presents both an entertaining history of railway travel around the world while offering a serious and impassioned case for the future of train travel.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 12 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Tantor Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: January 30, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HSP3NCW
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.
Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World - from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief Preview
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