Railway History Research Articles

Chinese Eastern Railway in 1920s: Perspectives from ‘Izvestia’ Newspaper

This article explores the history of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which spans over 120 years and has significantly influenced the development of Northeast China. The focus of this study is on materials from Soviet press outlets in the 1920s that address Soviet-Chinese relations surrounding the railway. It is noted that following the October Revolution of 1917, the railway became a central point of interaction between Russia and China. The Soviet leadership aimed to establish friendly and equal relations with China while simultaneously seeking to bring the railway’s exclusion zone under Bolshevik control. The objective of this article is to trace how events related to the Chinese Eastern Railway were reported during the transitional period of the 1920s by one of the most authoritative domestic publications — ‘Izvestia’, which has been published since March 1917 and became the official organ of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR after the October Revolution. Through analysis, the article reveals the significant role of ‘Izvestia’ in shaping public perceptions of Soviet-Chinese relations during this period and in conveying Soviet Russia’s Far Eastern policy as a whole.

The Synchronisation and Standardisation of Time (1830-1970): Technological Innovation and Public Policy

Clock-making has represented a fundamental sector for industrialisation, al-lowing a more precise division of labour and developing the competences for au-tomation, which was well understood by Charles Babbage. Besides precision, the problems of synchronisation and standardisation have characterised the creation of the uniform time dimension. This paper proposes the history of these processes with a glance at their protagonists. Scientific progress, technological innovation, institutions and cultural frames co-evolved assuring a favourable frame to indus-trialisation. That was possible thanks to a synergy between astronomers and clock-makers as well as between inventors and railways. Even when exact time was made a public good, access to it was quite demanding in technological terms. The history of railways let us understand how reliability and trust have been the crucial variables in the making of the industrialised society. Conventions and the passion of technicians with a faith in progress have been more relevant than the often disorienting action of governments or the uncertainty of market competition.

Railroad Luxemburg: Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Infrastructure and its Consequences for a Public Service Internet

Infrastructures of circulation, transportation, and communication play a central role in Luxemburg’s work in political economy as well as revolutionary strategy. This paper seeks to reconstruct and develop a theory of capitalist infrastructural expansion drawing from a variety of Luxemburg’s writings. In Accumulation of Capital, infrastructural expansion – namely of railroads – plays a central role at all stages of capitalist accumulation. Railroads act as a site of military and state investment for introducing the commodity economy to non-capitalist sectors and eventually for the “capitalist emancipation of the hinterland.” At the same time Luxemburg rejects the progressive character of these infrastructural endeavours, and she argues that they will not be a genuine “stamp of progress in an historical sense” until capitalism has been destroyed. It is no coincidence then that her political writings prominently feature figures such as railway and postal workers, who are strategically positioned to strike at the infrastructures of imperialism. A Luxemburgist theory of infrastructure has important relevance for contemporary debates around the expansion and ownership of Internet infrastructures. The past decade has been marked by various calls for new models of Internet ownership. These include The Public Service Internet Manifesto, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Internet for All Campaign, Tarnoff’s Internet for the People, Téwodros Workneh’s “Case for Telecommunications Commons in Ethiopia,” and netCommons Project’s vision for community networks. Such calls for a publicly owned and funded Internet risk reproducing some of the dynamics Luxemburg describes in her account of the history of railroads, canals, telegraphs etc. Namely, such calls parallel the state subsidising of an infrastructure that seeks out new sites of accumulation and extraction. This is not to say that such endeavours should be wholly abandoned, but must fit into a broader anti-capitalist political program, otherwise such infrastructural expansion can be seen as continuing the expansion of capitalist accumulation. Luxemburg deters us from looking for a technical fix. For this reason, Luxemburg’s political writings and her critique of the non-progressive nature of capitalism are also useful as she indicates how the destruction of capitalism can alter and redeem such large infrastructural projects.

Railing through reality: Trains and mobility in Victorian ghost stories

This paper explores the multifaceted cultural history of ghost trains in Victorian fiction by situating three little-known ghost stories in the publishing and social history of the second half of the nineteenth century. The figure of the ghost train offers a route into the entangled history of publishing and railways by contextualising the anxieties presented in railway ghost stories with the real-world experiences of passengers. Taking ideas of mobility as a focal point, this paper brings together discussions of virtual travel and the supernatural to demonstrate some of the impact railways had on reading and writing about train travel. More so than tales of other haunted transport technologies, it is the ghost train's unnatural capacity for movement that disturbs both passengers and readers. By both enhancing and warping reality, railways are ripe source material for Victorian ghost stories to entertain and demand questions of spatio-temporal experience from their reading passengers.

Two centuries of Russian railway history

The history of the creation of one of the oldest scientifi c and technical museums in the world — the Central Museum of Railway Transport, which is 210 years old — is considered.The Central Museum of Railway Transport collection began with models made under the leadership of Augustine de Betancourt, the founder and first inspector (rector) of the Institute of the Corps of Railway Engineers, chief director of railways, and the founder of engineering in Russia. These include models of spiers used in the construction of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, the Manege in Moscow, the pontoon of a floating bridge across the Oka River in Nizhny Novgorod, etc. This is the only collection that has survived in the world to this day, reflecting the developments of an outstanding scientist. Using the museum’s stock materials, one can trace all the main stages of the development of railway transport in Russia: from the opening in 1837 of the Tsarskoye Selo Railway, the first public railway in Russia, to the achievements of modern railway transport. Today, the Center for Railway Transport of the Russian Federation is the only state museum of the industry. The museum’s collections contain more than 70 thousand items refl ecting the history of the development of Russian railways over the entire period of their existence. The large-scale exhibition “Gallery of the Heads of the Department of Railways for 225 Years” is dedicated to the festive date, which displays the only collection of portraits in Russia of all the heads of the Department of Transport.

A green extractivist railway? Exploring the political ecology of Europe’s largest infrastructure project

'Environmentalists' tend to enthusiastically embrace new railway projects as desirable alternatives to more carbon-intensive aviation and road infrastructures. Yet, across Europe and beyond, communities and campaigners have resisted the building of high-speed railway projects and the violence they entail. The UK government's High-Speed Two (HS2) trainline, currently under construction, is one such project – Europe's biggest infrastructure project since World War II. While the British government continues to defend HS2 as 'green' and necessary, the project comes at enormous ecological and social costs, cutting through over one hundred ancient woodlands, exceeding its budget, and necessitating the eviction and resettlement of human and nonhuman communities along the line. Drawing on recent work in (anarchist) political ecology, (green) extractivism, and infrastructural colonization, and embedded in the history of colonial railways and extractivism, this article argues that the project should be conceptualized as green extractivist megaproject. In the face of determined opposition, HS2 serves to profit the British construction industry, political (economic) elites, wealthy commuters, and the City of London, and to uphold 'zero-carbon' imaginaries while expected to exacerbate the North-South divide and degrade environments. Green extractivist megaprojects, this case study shows, can reproduce the same injustices, violences, and social and ecological harms as other types of industrial developments.

De Eendaagsche Express: Kereta Api Cepat di Pulau Jawa, 1929–1942

This study discusses about the history of railway in the early 20th century. At the time, the existence of transportation that offered speed and accuracy became a necessity for most people, including in big cities in Java. This is related with massive mobility activities. The number of high speed transportation is limited. Staatsspoorwegen as the state railway company has a idea to operate a high speed railway that can cover a distance of up to 827 kilometers in one day, which became known as the Eendaagsche Express. This article uses historical research methods. In the process, this research uses primary and secondary historical sources, including colonial government documents, magazines, newspapers, advertising catalogs, and other contemporary references. This study founds that the train became a symbol of modernization of transportation in Java, because it was able to revolutionize distance, time, and movement.

Railways' Economic Impact on Uttar Pradesh and Colonial North India (1860–1914): The Iron Raj by Ian D. Derbyshire

Reviewed by: Railways' Economic Impact on Uttar Pradesh and Colonial North India (1860–1914): The Iron Raj by Ian D. Derbyshire David Arnold (bio) Railways' Economic Impact on Uttar Pradesh and Colonial North India (1860–1914): The Iron Raj By Ian D. Derbyshire. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022. Pp. x + 601. Of all the innovative technologies introduced into India under colonial rule, the impact of the railways has been the most widely discussed and hotly debated. Controversy has raged over whether they were beneficial, not merely to the British who built, financed, and ran them but to the population at large; or, conversely, whether they were hugely detrimental and a salient factor in rural impoverishment, environmental degradation, and the recurrent famines of the mid to late nineteenth century. In a substantial reworking and updating of a doctoral thesis presented in 1985, Ian Derbyshire examines in singular detail, with the aid of more than a hundred maps, figures, and tables, the evidence relating to the North-Western Provinces, subsequently known as the United Provinces and now Uttar Pradesh. He opens his discussion not with the railways themselves but with conditions in the province before their construction began, emphasizing the constraints that poor transport and limited networks of commercial communication imposed on the economy of most of the region, apart from the eastern areas served by the Ganges and the riverine route to Bengal. He then discusses over the course of several chapters the creation [End Page 643] and expansion of the rail system, its operational and management systems, the undercutting of alternative modes of transportation, and the significance of the feeder lines and road links that, by the end of the period, had greatly augmented the railways' impact. Of particular interest is the reiteration of an argument Derbyshire first made in the 1990s about the "syncretic" nature of the construction techniques employed by railroad engineers, including the adaptation of indigenous well-sinking methods, rather than pile driving, to support the foundations for the bridges that spanned the region's wide and unstable riverbeds. More generally, Derbyshire examines the changing cycles of peasant production, tracing significant shifts in the cultivation, pricing, and sale of specific commodities from food grains to opium and oilseeds, noting in particular how the railways (and the concurrent expansion of irrigation canals) benefited the previously backward and relatively arid western districts, giving them increased access to external markets and the ports of Bombay and Karachi. While many of the eastern towns, like Mirzapur on the Ganges, declined or stagnated, those in the west tended to prosper and to exploit crops with greater market value. Many obstacles remained, or indeed were created by the unsystematic nature of railway construction, such as the failure to agree on a single gauge of track, but Derbyshire has no doubt that the impact of the railways was profound, far-reaching, and, ultimately, advantageous. On the central issue of famine, he argues that once the railways had become fully established, they helped to save the province from extreme subsistence crises and to facilitate the remedial movement of foodstuffs within and from beyond the immediate region. By the end of the period, famine was no longer the widespread and destructive force it had formerly been. There is much to appreciate in Derbyshire's account. The examination of the statistical evidence is painstaking, especially with respect to individual cash-crop commodities and significant subdivisions within the United Provinces. Although the author's principal concern is with economic change, he does address the technological opportunities and constraints of railway construction and operation and the social consequences of the railways, for instance in terms of different caste communities and the emergence of Kanpur as a railroad town and industrial center. To some degree, Derbyshire's discussion remains rooted in the scholarly controversies of the 1970s and 1980s, some of which have lost their urgency forty years on, but he constructively engages with the more recent historiography and the widening social and environmental discourse around India's railway history. That said, though, the book has some significant lacunae: the sheer volume of data and the repeated division of the text through numerous subheadings makes this more a...

Higashi ajia no naka no mantetsu (The South Manchuria Railway in East Asia)

In the past few years, Lim Chaisung has published major works on the history of railways. In this ambitious book, he takes on explaining the railway management of the South Manchuria Railway (SMR), the sprawling enterprise at the centre of East Asian railway history. However, Lim’s book is not simply an SMR case study. He also explains SMR’s involvement in the process of turning the Empire of Japan into a distinctive railway empire. As a result, this book is spurring discussions among scholars of imperial history and colonial economic history, as well as among railway historians. The following paragraphs will introduce the book’s chapters, along with a little commentary. The book’s preface, ‘Railway empire and the SMR’, begins with a discussion of the framing of prewar Japan as a railway empire. It also recounts how SMR has been portrayed as emblematic of Japan’s absorption of Western technology and as an intermediary in transferring technology to its colonies. SMR overcame its technological disadvantage against its European counterparts and is credited with exceeding the transport capacity of Japan’s domestic railways. While noting the value of viewing SMR as a case study of Japanese settler colonialism and colonial management, Lim explains how the history of SMR is important to the history of the metropole as well.

Historical Interrelationship of Railways and Cities from an Urban Viewpoint.

This paper offers a conceptual overview of the state of the art relating to the historical interre­lationships between railways and cities from the point of view of town planning, covering the good century and a half that there have been railways in the Iberian Peninsula. It addresses both urban and railway history, reconsidering major issues in this relationship. These are: 1) the tracks of lines as they cross cities and the role they play in urban life, 2) the passenger buildings of stations, seen as a focus of urban centrality, 3) the developing complexity of cities and rail­ways, together with the installation of new road and port infrastructures, and 4) the problems emerging from urban ex­pansion in the final third of the twentieth century, mostly after the restoration of democracy, specifi­cally the question of the limited permeability of rail tracks and the interpretation as a social barrier of the physical barrier thus constituted by the railway. An idea that railways are a problem grew up within this historical interrelationship.

Analisis Sejarah dan Perkembangan Perkeretaapian di Jepang

This research discusses the history of Japanese railways and the factors causing the progress of railways in Japan. The research method used in this research is descriptive qualitative. The data collection technique used in this research is a literature study or literature review. The data in this research were taken from journals, books, documentation, internet and literature that discussed the topic being researched. The results of this study are the history of Japanese railways starting in 1872 at the beginning of Japan's new era, namely the Meiji era. Japan learned the rail system from England. Initially, the railroads in Japan were under the auspices of one company, namely JNR, due to go into liquidation, Japan was forced to make JNR a private company, JNR changed its name to JR and is divided into 9 companies to this day. While the factor for the advancement of Japanese railways is Japan's long experience in the world of railways, which is more than 150 years, Japan dares to take risks in the development of railways, Japan is able to overcome competition with private railroad companies, and finally, the Japanese people are disciplined and punctual.

Commemorating the past, shaping the future: the jubilee and centenary celebrations of the Stockton and Darlington Railway

This paper examines how and why communities connected to the railways celebrated anniversaries of important moments in the industry’s history. It focuses on the jubilee (1875) and centenary (1925) anniversary celebrations of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (established 1825) by railway companies, workers and local communities. While these anniversaries were used to symbolically affirm a continuity in railway history, they occurred under different organisational conditions – 1875, during the heyday of multiple smaller companies and 1925, during the consolidated control of the amalgamated ‘Big Four’. A comparative study of these commemorative events reveals continuities and changes in the construction of railway history, and corporate and community identities. To demonstrate this, the analysis will focus on narrative construction, temporal interplay between the past, present and future, and the role of agency. Conveyed through a series of commemorative ‘components’ (Papadakis, 2003), these elements converge to establish the shape and function of the events, and highlight the motivations of different groups for celebrating the past, how commemorative narratives were developed for select audiences, and what vehicles were used to carry said narratives. These core narratives concertinaed elements of the industry’s past, present and future, and were deployed to validate cultural values, draw together communities and consolidate political or economic loyalties. Overall, the paper will demonstrate how and why different stakeholders create and foster commemorative cultures, and critique and measure the efficacy of the forms and functions of this performative engagement with railway history.

Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train by Jessamyn R. Abel

Reviewed by: Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train by Jessamyn R. Abel Morris Low (bio) Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train By Jessamyn R. Abel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 289. Brad Pitt's latest film, Bullet Train (Sony, 2022), reinforces what Jessamyn Abel contends are the contradictory images of Japanese high-speed rail: futuristic but also hiding some of the social problems, power plays, and politics at work in the larger society. Pitt's film is based on Bullet Train: A Novel (2021) by Japanese author Kōtarō Isaka, who portrays the train as the thrilling site of intersecting stories. Abel in her [End Page 269] own way also examines how the idea of the bullet train was used by various actors to promote their own agendas and the affective power of the train in helping the Japanese to reimagine their sense of identity as individuals, as well as at the level of city and nation. Readers of this journal will likely know Takashi Nishiyama's Engineering War and Peace in Modern Japan, 1868–1964 (2014) and Christopher Hood's Shinkansen: From Bullet Train to Symbol of Modern Japan (2006) before it. Abel builds on these studies. Steering largely clear of the technical matters that Nishiyama and others have written about and going beyond the chronological history that Hood helps provide, she regards the bullet train not as representing a major technological leap; her interests lie elsewhere. While readers may be familiar with Abel's recent articles on the topic, versions of which are included in the book, the total is greater than the sum. Each chapter provides insights combined with thoughtful analysis and offers a range of perspectives backed up by careful archival research that provides us with some sense of official narratives and disputes. We are also introduced to the scholarly literature in both Japanese and English, as well as to relevant magazine and newspaper articles, films, novels, and art. The latter sources allow us to gain some insight into the popular imagination surrounding the train and all its social and political baggage. Those who are interested in the history of railways and know Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey (1986) will be familiar with some aspects of what Abel covers: the ways in which trains transform the landscape, changing ideas of time and space, and regional identity (ch. 2). But Abel goes beyond this. While cultural representations of the bullet train for both domestic and international audiences are part of what she examines, we also are privy to the policy-making process surrounding the bullet train in the planning stages, the fraught decision-making and politicking around the location of stations, and the displacement of residents to make way for the train (ch. 1). The train was linked to the future in terms of Japanese aspirations to become an information society (ch. 3). It also created a moment of nostalgia for Japan's former empire during the 1930s, when the Asia Express ran through Manchuria and there were hopes for a bullet train to be built in Japan itself (ch. 4). These hopes would later be realized, just in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, changing perceptions of trains and providing the Japanese government with a symbol of Japanese technological prowess that could be showcased at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair (ch. 5). While the prospect of a superconducting maglev train running between Tokyo and Osaka has been relegated to the distant future (conclusion), the Japanese people continue to embrace high-speed rail for the many reasons that Abel outlines. She makes the simple but profound statement that "people used physical infrastructures to build conceptual ones that would help them make sense of their world and reshape it in ways they hoped would make it better" (p. 19). I [End Page 270] recommend the book to all readers interested in the history of technology. It provides a useful framework for scholars to employ when considering other technologies. We need to pay close attention to how they emerged and were contested, while acknowledging the many meanings that can...

Відновлення соціальної інфраструктури і матеріально-побутове забезпечення залізничників Вінницької магістралі у 1944-1945 рр.

The purpose of the article is the analysis of reconstruction processes in the social sphere of railway transport, based on the materials of the history of the Vinnytsia railway, the tracks of which served the territory, enterprises, subjects of agricultural production in Vinnytsia, Kamianets-Podilska (now Khmelnytska), Zhytomyr , Kyiv regions after their liberation by the Soviet army in 1943-44. The object of the study goes beyond the regional framework and allows to project the processes that took place within the boundaries of one business entity and on other railways in the regions of Ukraine. This article is an attempt to find effective methods of researching the social history of the region. The research methodology is based on source science methods, principles of objectivity, historicism, analysis and generalizations. Scientific novelty consists in the introduction into scientific circulation of new sources, facts from the social history of Vinnytsia and the Vinnytsia railway line as a separate, large business entity, which was a key element of Podillia's economy. Conclusions. The material losses of railway transport on the scale of Ukraine were significant - more than 10 billion rubles. Damages to the Vinnytsia highway amounted to more than 340 million rubles. For the restoration of the war-ravaged national economy, the state allocated only seven percent of the amount of losses that Ukraine suffered as a result of the war and occupation. It is logical that under such conditions, railway tracks, hub stations, and enterprises were the first to be rebuilt. Railway workers were faced with a great burden of problems and trials, the overcoming of which required not only the reconstruction of the industrial, but also the social sphere of transport. As archival documents testify, the restoration of the social sphere was started not after the end of the bloody German-Soviet war, but simultaneously with the rebuilding of the main assets of the railway industry.

지하철역사 에너지성능 평가를 위한 클러스터링 분석기법을 활용한 지하철역사 대표모델 선정에 관한 연구

In order to realize the government’s plan to increase zero energy early and play a leading role in the low carbonization of railway facilities, Since 2025, the National Railroad Corporation has established a Zero Energy Roadmap for railway stations to promote zero energy building certification. However, currently, standards and tools for evaluating various railway history, including subways, are insufficient in Korea. In particular, railway history has characteristics that are distinct from general buildings, such as the presence of peak loads, continuous erosion, and the possession of safety and functional elements that must be equipped Accordingly, an alternative is needed to overcome the limitations of existing domestic energy performance evaluation tools developed for general building evaluation. Therefore, this paper uses the clustering technique as the first step to develop a decision-making tool that presents the energy performance evaluation and improvement direction of railway history It can represent the characteristics of subway history. In order to select a representative model, data collection and clustering analysis of all 291 subway stations in the Seoul area were performed using Open Data provided by the public data portal. K-means and GMM algorithms were used as clustering analysis methods. As a result of clustering analysis, the K-means algorithm was difficult to use as a result of classification because the data columns were diverse and were not in the form of circular distribution by cluster. Compared to K-means, GMM algorithms can significantly distinguish characteristics such as area, completion year, and platform type the results were shown.BRThe representative standard stations selected based on the results of GMM clustering were Konkuk University Station (Line 2), Suraksan Station, and Hongdae Station. After that, through simulation of representative models and multiple regression analysis using results, the standard model is developed and used as a tool for initial decision-making such as zero energy construction plan and remodeling plan for subway stations.

In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism by J. P. Daughton (review).

Reviewed by: In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism by J. P. Daughton Friedrich N. Ammermann (bio) In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism By J. P. Daughton. New York: W.W. Norton, 2021. Pp. 384. This is a book about colonial violence. J. P. Daughton tells the story of the Congo-Océan Railway, the construction of which cost between 20,000 to 60,000 lives and left thousands more laborers undernourished, sick, and traumatized. The 500 km railway, connecting Brazzaville with the Atlantic port Pointe-Noire (both in present-day Republic of the Congo), first envisioned in the 1880s, was built between 1921 and 1934. Although officially relying on volunteers, the construction sites became known as exceptionally violent workplaces both in French Equatorial Africa and the imperial center, France. How is it possible then, Daughton asks, that despite the knowledge of horrendous working conditions, the project was carried out over thirteen years—and after the completion of the railway, the suffering and deaths of African laborers were completely forgotten about in France? Daughton sets out to bring justice to this neglected human suffering on the Congo-Océan Railway and embeds his story of the railway in a larger history of French colonial violence in equatorial Africa. This is therefore not your classic railway history focusing on heroic surveying and brilliant engineering, or reporting locomotive classes, engine miles run, and amounts of goods transported (although interested readers can find some of that information in Chapter 11). Daughton unerringly addresses a painful gap in most colonial railway accounts: the suffering of the (mostly) African laborers that moved incredible amounts of earth, cleared bushes, dug tunnels, and laid the tracks. Tragically, those laborers left very few traces for historians to reconstruct their lives and work. Daughton has an exceptional body of sources at hand—created by the Société de Construction des Batignolles and the French administration—which he masterfully uses not only to demonstrate the pain inflicted on laborers, but also to reinstate their agency. Given the general lack of sources on African workers on such construction sites, In the Forest of No Joy is a must read for anyone interested in colonial infrastructure projects. Daughton emphasizes the forceful recruitment of "volunteers," their arduous journeys to the construction sites, and the working conditions there. A key chapter investigates the particularly difficult conditions in the eponymous "forest without joy," the Mayombe (Chapter 5). Daughton does not shy away from recounting anecdotes of shocking atrocities and contrasts them in later chapters with the local colonial administration's attempts—personified by Governor-General Raphaël Antonetti—to justify, downplay, and deny the violence committed on the construction sites. Antonetti, as Daughton argues, was driven by a strong belief in bureaucratic measures to bring "humanity" and progress into the [End Page 1187] colony. In his "circular logic," Antonetti upheld that the violence committed on the Congo-Océan Railway would eventually lead to a reduction of violence in the colony. Antonetti's belief in bureaucracy was shared in imperial Paris, and his strategy of deflecting criticism to "individual rogues," coupled with his superior institutional knowledge and vigor, successfully secured support for the railway throughout its construction period. In his final chapter, Daughton seeks to explain the particular brutality and high death rates on the Congo-Océan Railway. He contends that overwhelming racism on different levels met with the devastating hubris of the French colonial administration, which commenced railway construction without even having surveyed the territory properly. Ultimately, the high death rates were a sign of the French inability to keep its workforce alive, and hence a sign of imperial weakness. The results of this failure were then justified as either negligible or unavoidable in a project of such magnitude. However, if violence inflicted by humans on humans is the main concern of this book, one wonders why the author is not drawing more from the existing literature about human cruelty. The lack of engagement with other literature is perhaps more broadly the only shortcoming of this book for academic readers, as there...

Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space and the Trans-Iranian Railway by Mikiya Koyagi

Iran in Motion is an important contribution to the history of railway construction and its wider socio-political impact in a non-colonial context. At a related level, the volume also adds to our understanding of the diverse impetus behind railway building in the twentieth century. Broadly speaking, the history of railway building and its wider influence is largely a nineteenth-century story. But by focusing on the twentieth century, this book shows how the technology transfer related to railway construction and operation was adapted in Iran and was deployed to suit the changing needs of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s Iran.The book has seven chapters, excluding the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction sets out the analytical and methodological parameters of the book, including a “roadmap” with handy chapter summaries. The first two chapters underline how different visions—those of the late-imperial British and Iranian state in the early decades of the twentieth century—coalesced in imagining railways as a solution for creating a nation and national space. Chapter 3 develops this theme by illustrating how the Pahlavi state produced through imagery and actual construction a railway network (or the beginnings of one) that was expected to engender “national territorial space” (16). The fourth chapter focuses mainly on the construction of the trans-Iranian network, and the remaining three chapters analyze the ways in which the commencement of railway operation “produced new mobilities and new subjectivities” (16).The book’s scope is ambitious. At one level, it tells the story of the planning, building, and operation of the Trans-Iranian railways; at another, it tells what happens after railways become operational. Did it create a new nation space underpinned by diverse mobilities? Given this wide scope, the book methodologically straddles two distinct disciplinary boundaries, history and mobility studies. This interdisciplinarity, most notably evident in the conceptualization of the chapters, is largely successful. The flavor of the book, however, is primarily unembellished history. Though this approach is not necessarily a drawback, the volume, which explicitly claims to tell the history of Trans-Iranian railway as “stories of mobilities that the project facilitated” (14), does not draw substantially from the theoretical and analytical framework developed by mobility studies. Moreover, despite its use of traditional historical methodologies, the book’s empirical evidence is thin, as is clearly evident in the range of petitions and travelogues that it examines (Chapters 4–7). The copious newspapers, contemporary magazines, and similar other printed sources that document elite sensibilities cannot compensate for the striking dearth of empirical evidence about how railways affected non-elite mobilities and attitudes. Admittedly, mining archives for non-elite engagement is a daunting task, but the few petitions and other sources about railway workers, the traveling public, and the like are too sparse to justify Koyagi’s claim to cover “all sorts” (14).Nonetheless, the book theorizes and interprets its evidence well, showing that railway-induced mobilities were both diverse and instantiated in ways not intended by the Pahlavi state. The main achievement of the book is its ability to underline the wide and varied effect of technology transfer on different groups and individuals. Nowhere is this effect more obvious than in how people in contemporary Iran envisage their railways as a vehicle for pilgrimage and as an extension of the nation’s religious basis, beyond what it was projected to be when built under the Pahlavi regime. Overall, the volume adds to the expanding literature on technology transfer and its socio-cultural afterlife in Asia and beyond.

The growth of a research field: A systematic analysis of Brazilian theses and dissertations on railways (1974–2020)

This paper aims to conduct a critical review of the academic works on railway history in Brazil. We read and analysed 492 theses and dissertations by graduate students in Brazil (published from 1974 to 2020). A qualitative and quantitative approach was used over time to characterise the increasing production of academic theses and dissertations on railway history in Brazil and which authors, bibliographies, archives, and historical sources have become essential for railway researchers. The results of this review indicate that several academic areas are interested in the theme and some authors have become references to the most varied railway studies. In recent decades, authors who research more specific subjects have gained greater visibility in graduation essays. The bibliography of their studies should be interpreted according to how sources change with time. Authors of the reviewed papers had to use alternatives to research railways due to archival issues and instability of access to documents.

Modernism on the Line

The invitation to this symposium refers to "the baby boom, which "boosted the market for children's toys."" This paper explores the extent to which the toys of that era in New Zealand could be seen to have actively promoted and encouraged Modernist architecture. The particular focus will be on toy trains and model railways and how their manufacturers, both off-shore and local, produced model railway buildings that were decidedly Modern in form and quite unlike the largely nineteenth-century buildings seen by the majority of travellers on New Zealand Railways. This paper argues that 1950s New Zealand was an outpost of non-Modernism when it comes to railway buildings, both full size and toys. By tracing the history of model railways and how they engaged with Modern design it posits that the only OO scale model railway buildings that were mass produced in New Zealand were traditional in form, although made of plastic, the quintessentially modern material.

THE LOSS HERITAGE: SAMSUN RAILWAY CAMPUS

In this study, which focuses on the railways, a sign of the Early Republic, the Samsun campus of the Samsun-Sivas Railway was the subject of the study. Samsun Railway Campus, which is one of the first examples of the railway policy in the province, which marked the first twenty years of the Republic, was opened to discussion within the scope of its location in the city and building stock. It is aimed to record the original existence of the campus, which has developed and changed with political, urban and technological discourses since 1926, when it was opened for business. The study is based on literature review, archive research and field studies. Considering the effects of the Samsun Railway Campus, the architectural heritage of the Early Republic, on the urban memory and railway history, it has been argued that a few remaining original structures and physical traces should be preserved.