Railway History Research Articles

Final destination

The paper discussed the history of London's Necropolis Railway, the world's one and only railway for the dead.

The creosote content of used railway crossties as compared with European stipulations for hazardous waste

Through the history of railways, wooden crossties impregnated with potentially hazardous creosote tar have supported the rails. With impregnated crossties having a lifespan of approximately 50 years, their creosote content is considered as quite safely stored while in dug-down usage. This situation of relative safety does, however, change into acute risk upon replacement and destruction. Carrying a highly flammable content, creosote crossties discharge a pulse of carcinogenic PAH compounds if burnt as ordinary waste. Safe destruction is therefore required if concentrations exceed a critical limit stipulated by the European Union. Since safe destruction is a process of considerable expense, there is a tendency among financial stakeholders to underestimate the creosote content of used railway crossties. In order to actually test whether concentrations generally exceed the critical limit, a set of used creosote ties was therefore sampled while still situated in the railway embankment. With a standard sum of sixteen PAH compounds used as an expression of their total creosote content, the generic concentration was formally inferred and found to significantly exceed the critical limit. The same applies to the fraction of seven carcinogenic PAH compounds, that alone exceed the stipulated limit for hazardous waste. It was also found that the material of railway embankments, whether or not the crossties were used in switches and/or railway yards, and sample depth within the crosstie, has a significant effect on creosote concentrations. Regardless of the status of these factors, the concentrations significantly exceed the critical limit that defines hazardous waste within the European Union.

Applying the Life-Cycle Theory

The paper focuses on the market share decline of railway transport in developed countries. The paper starts with a basic analysis of economic history of railways. The idea of product life-cycle is then applied to interpret a long term economic development of railways. The decline of railways is understood as a period in a structural life-cycle of the industry. The key determinants of the decline are identified as road transport competition, changing patterns of the economy and railways internal inflexibility.

Pacific Rim Russian Librarianship: Forgotten Collectors for the Hoover Institution on Manchuria

ABSTRACT Collecting efforts by the Hoover Institution among Russian émigrés in China is a little-known story, told in this article through the biographies of Harold H. Fisher, Elena A. Varneck, Ivan I. Serebrennikov, and Robert V. Smith. The collection of documents, diaries, reports, books, and periodicals focuses on two broad topics: the Russian civil war in Siberia and the Far East, and the history of the Chinese Eastern Railway. The problems involved in collecting materials connected to events that recently occurred largely centered around money (especially the lack of it) and trying to decide whose materials were the most valuable.

The Productivity of Australia's Railways in the 20th Century

Railways offer significant potential to provide sustainable transport solutions, particularly for freight. To do this, however, they need to remain competitive with other modes of transport, and this requires productivity growth. The more productive railways can become, the better their competitiveness with other transport modes and the better they can perform their role in sustainable transport for the future. The Planning and Transport Research Centre is currently constructing a database covering the economic aspects of Australia's railways from Federation to the present day. This paper draws upon an early version of this database to calculate total factor productivity indices for Australia's railways, highlighting an important aspect of railway history in Australia. Two indices, allowing comparison within railways across time, and across railways, are constructed. From an analysis of productivity growth through the century and its causes, the paper draws some initial conclusions about policy directions to assist in ensuring the future sustainability of the industry.

Company, State, and Region: Three Approaches to Railroad History

Railroad history has survived a near-death experience. Once at the leading edge of business history and the Chandlerian synthesis, this sub-discipline largely fell out of favor with academic audiences, becoming the province of the railfan. In recent years, however, a new generation of historians has reawakened interest in the railroads, often by adopting perspectives alien to the traditions of first-generation railroad history. A prolific Don Hofsommer has not only contributed to this reinvigoration of an academic discipline, he has also incorporated some of the best recent railway history into volumes targeted at amateur historians. Each book embodies a different approach to the construction of railroad history and although their level of relevance to academic historians varies considerably, they offer compelling insights into the diversity of approach and audience that characterizes modern railroad history. This variety reflects the

The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka by Walter H. Sokel The Cambridge Companion to Kafka by Julian Preece (review)

MLR, 100.2, 2005 559 ings on the war with his autobiographical travel writings, Kriegsgefangen and Aus den Tagen der Okkupation, works which are quite differentin scope, substance, and style. Following Lothar Kohn, Hebekus places Fontane's rejection of French modernism at the heart of the war texts. Symptomatic of this rejection is the critique of the de? velopment of modern warfare, exemplified?to take two examples?in the activity of partisans and the deployment by the French of troops from their North African colonies. However, the choice of illustrations and the analysis of the text employed to extend Kohn's firmlycircumscribed argument are often unconvincing. Fontane's war texts are declared to be replete with references to actions by partisans (p. 142), but, with one exception (Bazeilles), the only examples provided are from Kriegsgefangen, where they occur, self-evidently, in the accounts of the capture of the author and his fellow prisoners. The treatment of the 'afrikanisch-orientalisch' [sie] troops is seen in terms of a strategy of national stereotyping and polarization. Here Hebekus refers to the account of a Prussian 'officer' (actually a sergeant) in an '"Einzelkampf mit einem Turco", welcher aus dem Hinterhalt agiert' (p. 160); but this contradicts the text, quoted only two pages previously: 'Er hatte einen Einzelkampf mit einem Turco gehabt, der in eine Schmiede retirierte und sich hier mit auBerordentlicher Bravour verteidigte' (p. 158). Hebekus does give good contemporary examples of this strategy in the formof illustrations fromcontemporary journals, asserting thatthe 'Turcos' ap? pear as paradigmatic representatives of the barbarism of French modernity. He omits to mention, however, that, at Fontane's insistence and unlike his previous war books, Der Krieg gegen Frankreich contained no such illustrations, indeed no illustrations at all; that is to say, Fontane consciously chose not to exploit the combination of image and text, so that his relationship to the newly emerging media is more complex, and his similarity to contemporaries such as Freytag less marked, than Hebekus assumes. It is difficultto suppress a similar unease at the treatment of the late novels. Cer? tainly they are illuminated contextually when seen from Hebekus's angle, but one senses that their essence might lie more in their individuality than is allowed here. Under the weight ofthe author's exegeses it is hard to recognize Die Poggenpuhls, for instance, as the urbanely amusing novel one feels one has read. On the other hand, the book has about it something of the spirit of Fontane; like all those meals and pony-rides in Vor dem Sturm, the digressions into travel-writing, iconography, railway history,wireless telegraphy, photography, and many subjects besides , are invariably fascinating. It is only a pity that, with its thirteen-line sentences and thirty-five-letterwords, the style is so rebarbative and so far removed from that of its subject. University of Warwick John Osborne The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka. By Walter H. Sokel. (Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies) Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2002. 336 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-8143-2608-0. The Cambridge Companion toKafka. Ed. by Julian Preece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. xx + 254pp. ?40 (pbk ?14.85). ISBN 0-521-66314-8 (pbk 0-521-66391-1). So much has now been written and published on Kafka's life and work that one must feel a certain degree of sympathy for the scholar approaching his oeuvre for the first time. Endless studies covering equally endless themes, theories, and interpretations are the legacy of a worldwide fascination with a writer whose difficultlife and intense artistic self-doubt seem to have captured the imagination of subsequent generations. Indeed, so much has been said about Kafka that it is difficultfor the new reader to 560 Reviews know where to begin. Equally problematic is the choice of the tutor when asked fora recommendation. It is, then, perhaps no surprise and also rather gratifying that the volumes under discussion here seem to have been conceived in response to this very dilemma. They are in many ways guides to accompany the reader through the life,work, and reception of this enigmatic author. Each offersa helpful and authoritative overview of Kafka's...

War of the Wires: A Curious Chapter in Street Railway History

The street railway industry searched for a reliable and efficient motor to replace the horse for decades. By 1890 electricity was adopted for this purpose by transit operators. The new technology was in fact adopted with enthusiasm and most of the horse cars were gone by 1900. The universal plan included a single overhead wire charged with 600-volt DC current. The ground return was aided by bonded rail joints to complete the circuit. Only one major U.S. city , Cincinnati, chose to use a double-overhead trolley wire system. It had one power and one return wire separated by insulators. There was no substantial technical reason to justify this peculiar way of handling the power collection system. It was adopted because of a legal battle over interference with telephone service because of the ground return and efforts to consolidate the local street railways into a single system. Other factors included a city ban on disrupting street pavements and the opinion of a senior street-railway Titan that the double-wire plan was somehow superior.

The Birth of California Narrow Gauge: A Regional Study of the Technology of Thomas and Martin Carter (review)

Reviewed by: The Birth of California Narrow Gauge: A Regional Study of the Technology of Thomas and Martin Carter Carlos Schwantes (bio) The Birth of California Narrow Gauge: A Regional Study of the Technology of Thomas and Martin Carter. By Bruce MacGregor. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. x+673. $79.95. One fascinating episode in the history of railroads is the battle of the gauges waged in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, with the standard gauge of 4 feet 81/2 inches emerging victorious against Isambard Kingdom Brunel's massive 7-foot gauge. In the United States the quest for standardization took far longer and was much more complicated, especially in the South, where diverse gauges and lack of interchangeability between railroad cars proved a logistical nightmare for the Confederacy. But in the early 1870s, ironically, when standard-gauge tracks seemed likely to prevail over several different broad gauges in the United States, advocates of narrow-gauge common carriers sent the technological debate in a new direction. Narrow-gauge lines (most of those in the United States measured three feet between the rails) represented more than a passing fad. The technology had genuine appeal to railroaders seeking to extend lines through mountainous terrain in which standard-gauge track would be ruinously expensive or to construct low-cost connections, as Salinas Valley wheat farmers did when they extended a narrow-gauge line to tidewater at Monterey to undercut the Southern Pacific/Central Pacific rail monopoly. Another of Stanford University Press's substantial books—George Hilton's magisterial American Narrow-Gauge Railroads (1990)—exhaustively chronicles this technology. Perhaps for that reason, Bruce MacGregor says relatively little about the [End Page 208] gauge issue in general before plunging into his topic, a regional study of the construction and operation of narrow-gauge lines in California. The main focus is on the activities of the brothers Thomas and Martin Carter, who built several California narrow-gauge lines and supplied a substantial portion of their rolling stock. MacGregor argues that their situation was unusual in that California's physical isolation from major car builders, located primarily on the Atlantic Coast, gave local entrepreneurs a chance to prosper within the niche market for narrow-gauge technology. MacGregor's massive book seems to offer something for everyone, from railroad historians to model builders. In addition to the main text, it includes a wealth of illustrations—more than six hundred drawings and photographs—and sidebars on a wide variety of topics that strike MacGregor's fancy, everything from basic car anatomy to the making of a timetable. All of this information is nicely indexed. Yet, despite its wealth of detail, including a large number of historical maps, there are some surprisingly conspicuous omissions. Readers not familiar with California's geography and topography will yearn for at least one rail map of the entire state with the historical narrow-gauge lines properly located. The historical maps are a nice touch, but too often their details are not easy to read. Students of technology will find much of value in this book, especially MacGregor's description of the narrow-gauge railroad support structure, such as the Carter brothers' fabricating shop, or the practice of often sending cars to purchasers in kit form. However, I suspect that most purchasers of this book will use it mainly as a reference tool. Model builders and preservation-minded rail aficionados, for example, will find numerous detailed drawings of freight and passenger cars. The Birth of California Narrow Gauge is physically too big a book to take to bed for leisurely enjoyment. Nonetheless, it is truly a book as beautiful as it is comprehensive, and the author and publisher deserve praise for the impressive result of their collaboration. Carlos Schwantes Dr. Schwantes is St. Louis Mercantile Library Professor of Transportation and the West at the University of Missouri—St. Louis. Copyright © 2005 The Society for the History of Technology

Regulation and Contracts for Utility Services: Substitutes or Complements? Lessons from UK Railway and Electricity History

It is frequently suggested that regulation by contract can effectively substitute for regulation by a specialist regulatory agency for utility service industries. We examine these arguments and consider legal aspects and the historical experience of the UK as regards railways and electricity. We conjecture that regulation and contracts are complements for network industries rather than substitutes so that a regulatory agency allows for better and simpler contracts, which are easier to monitor, enforce and revise. This is what would be expected from the theory of incomplete contracts. We demonstrate that UK historical experience is strongly consistent with this view.

The Japanese Shinkansen

This article outlines the history of railways in Japan and discusses the conditions leading to the bold decision to build a new type of line dedicated to high-speed passenger transport. Since opening of the high-speed Shinkansen line in 1964, speeds, frequency, and loadings have increased markedly, encouraging the development of similar systems in other countries. It is doubtful whether such schemes would have materialized without the Japanese lead. Railways have now emerged from decline and are seen as able to make a vital contribution to meeting the growth in transport demand expected in the future.

Constructing the Past

Focusing on railway workshops, this paper highlights the importance of working-class autobiographical accounts written by those employed in the railway industry. Historians' criticisms of popular railway history are outlined; in particular, that it is often overly romantic and nostalgic. While some of this criticism is justified, the enthusiast audience stimulates the publication of writing by former railway workers that is of great value to academics. The paper also examines accounts of working life in railway factories, discussing the characteristics of such literature. Lastly, it locates the literature in wider debates on oral history and autobiography.

An introduction to China's rail transport Part 1: History, present and future of China's railways

In this paper an introduction is given to the history, current situation and future plans of China's railway industry. The history of China's railway is divided into four development phases: the phase in Imperial China, the phase in the Republic of China and the phases before and after the economic rejuvenation of the People's Republic of China. An introduction to the current situation and future plans includes the major projects under construction and development trends of China's railways. The environment of China's railways is also presented. This is the first of two papers on the railway scene in China.

The Works National Railway Museum, York

The National Railway Museum in York is the world's largest railway museum. Its collections include 103 locomotives and 177 other items of rolling stock, 3,300 models, 6,500 items of silver and crockery, more than 300 nameplates, 350,000 tickets, 1,800 buttons, 350,000 engineering drawings, 7,500 posters, 200 original works of art, and 1.4 million photographic negatives. It exhibits not only trains and locomotives but also corresponding system components, providing a good context for the main attractions, such as the Royal Trains and the locomotive collection. It explains the course of British railway history from its origins to modern train systems such as the Eurostar. In July 1999, the museum opened a new extension housing The Works, a permanent exhibit divided into three main sections: workshop, working railway, and warehouse.

The Railways and Sport in Victorian Britain

The contribution of railways to the spread of sport in Victorian Britain has often been overemphasized by railway history, which has also concentrated too much on London. This article argues that railways affected mass spectatorship of most sport only to a limited extent in the Victorian era. Most evidence suggests that in terms of attendance at the majority of popular sporting events, the railways simply facilitated existing trends. In a minority of national events, the impact was significant, and greater income and leisure time towards the end of the century encouraged more railway-borne away support for team games. Although top sportsmen traveled long distances even before the arrival of railways, it was on participation that the effect was more marked, both in terms of middle- and upper-class sporting involvement, and in opportunities for competition and earnings that rapid, cheap transport offered top professional sportsmen.

»Reisen im neuen Styl«. Die Eisenbahn im Werk Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländers (1816–1877)

Friedrich Wilhelm Hacklander, a succesful 19th century German writer — he published more than twenty thousand printed pages — was 19 years old when the Nuremberg-Furth railway was opened in the winter of 1835. His first report on the new means of transport dates back to the year 1842, he dealt with the theme for the last time in 1875. Twenty-six texts written by one single author thus give a literary insight into more than thirty years of railway history. Hacklander was an ardent traveller, and for this reason the railway first appears in travel reports wich are initially characterized by adventure and technology but then take on the form of poetic travel pictures. But the railway plays a role in his other prose works too. It surfaces as a peripheral, secondary or central theme in many of Hacklander’s novels, narratives, short stories, humourous sketches etc. The station and the railway compartment are favourite topoi, the figure of the railway engineer coins a new type of hero.

The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway. Volume I: 1920-1932

The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway. Volume I: 1920-1932

Traveling between Delos and Berlin: Heidegger and Celan on the Topography of "What Remains"

Look at the road, one Jew says to another, it links past to future and, the other way round, future to past-as if there were still a past after the future-- but look also at the hope tougher than life that one day there could reappear out of the black bottom of misery a corner, a bit of blue sky. (Jabes 69) I. The Bahnhof in the Space of Berlin's Present As the first major long-distance railway line to open in a German state, the Bahnhof has always had more than just an incidental connection to the city of Berlin and its liminal geography as a point of entry to eastern, western, and southern Europe. Walter Benjamin certainly recognized this when he immortalized the railway station's greatness, scale, and technological significance in recollecting his childhood in Berlin: Der Anhalter laut des Namens Mutterhohle der Eisenbahnen, wo die Lokomotiven zu Hause sein and die Zuge anhalten mussten. Keine Ferne war ferner, als wo im Nebel seine Gleise zusammenliefen. (Berliner Kindheit 94) To Benjamin, the was the material reality of a marvelous nineteenth-century dream and the historical possibility of connecting to a faraway place. It was where Kafka arrived from Prague when he visited Felice Bauer in Berlin; it is also where Celan arrived on his way to Paris from Cracow in 1938. For more than a century, the station became a transformative symbol of Berlin's modernity; and even in its present ruin, it is still a witness to both the volatility of the twentieth century and the hopes and fears of the nineteenth. On September 1, 1840, the first part of the railway line that would connect Berlin to the German state of Anhalt was opened between Dessau and Kothen by the directors of the Berlin-Anhaltische Eisenbahn Gesellschaft (Bley; Knothe). By September of the following year, the construction of Berlin's Bahnhof was completed and daily service began running to Kothen via Wittenberg, Coswig, and Dessau. The line, which connected Prussia and Anhalt, was the longest railway line in any German state at the time, stretching more than 150 kilometers. Shortly after German unification, the original station, designed and built between 1838 and 1841, was rebuilt on a colossal scale and reopened to the public in 1880. At the time, the new building was one of the largest terminal railway stations in the world, measuring 170 meters long, 60 meters wide, and nearly 35 meters high at its apex (Bley 51-53). The cost of rebuilding the entire station was unprecedented in railway history, totaling more than fourteen million marks (Bley 52). Adding to its mythological proportions, a gigantic underground passageway connecting the train station to the luxurious Hotel Excelsior across the street was opened in 1928. Guests arriving at the station could walk to a doorway at the end of the platform, take an elevator downstairs, stroll through the grosste[r] Hoteltunnel der Welt, shop around the clock in the underground retail stores, and emerge 80 meters away in the lobby of the largest hotel on the continent, the Excelsior. Analogous to the arcades of Paris in the 19th century, this 20th century passageway was a hub of capitalist culture, a dream place of modernity. But by the 1930s, the Bahnhof had turned into an Abschiedsbahnhof with a Tranengleis because more than 3,000 Jewish children were sent south out of Germany by their parents from this station (Roik-Bogner 63-65). After 1939, Jews still remaining in Berlin were thereafter unable to flee. Beginning on October 18,1941, a total of 180 Sonderzuge left Berlin, almost all from Bahnhof and Grunewald Bahnhof to gathering points in Germany and concentration camps in the East. Trains last serviced the station nearly five decades ago and it was permanently closed on May 17, 1952. After much debate, with the exception of part of the Anhalter's north portal, the station was finally razed in 1961. …

George Hudson's financial reporting practices: putting the Eastern Counties Railway in context

George Hudson was the most important railway promoter of his time. He had a particular aptitude for visualizing and arranging spectacular company and line amalgamations and his activities helped to bring about the beginnings of a more modern railway network. In 1849 he exercised effective control over nearly 30 per cent of the rail track then operating in the UK, most of it owned by four railway groups, the Eastern Counties Railway, the Midland, the York, Newcastle and Berwick, and the York and North Midland, before a series of scandalous revelations forced him out of office. The economic, railway and accounting literatures have treated George Hudson as an important figure in railway history, although concentrating largely on the financial reporting malpractices of the Eastern Counties Railway, while Hudson was its chairman, which were incorporated into the influential Monteagle Committee Report of 1849. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to events at Hudson's other major companies. This paper analyzes the available evidence, particularly that produced by the Committees of Investigation established at all four railway groups, in order to provide a more balanced assessment of George Hudson's approach to financial reporting and thereby place events at the Eastern Counties Railway in a broader context.

The History of the Nigerian Railway

The History of the Nigerian Railway