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RailroadTreasures offers the following item: Encyclopedia of Trains and Locomotives By David Ross Comprehensive guide to 900 The Encyclopedia of Trains and Locomotives By David Ross Comprehensive guide to over 900 steam, diesel and electric locomotives from 1825 to present day. W/ Dust jacket 2003 544 PagesAMONG THE INVENTIONS that define the modern age, the railway train holds a prime position. The steam engine had already existed for over a hundred years when in 1804, as a locomotive engine, it first moved under its own power on land. By 1825 the train had come into its own, and with its appearance, the modern world truly begins. The era of mass travel, of bulk haulage, of rapid national and international distribution of goods and information had arrived. The transcontinental railway helped to weld the United States into a nation, and later facilitated the Russian Revolution. Railways were the vital infrastructure of trade and industry in the vast colonial domains of Africa and Australasia. Among the rival nations of Europe their strategic value was well understood from the beginning. The potential of the new machine released a flood of daring and ingenuity from engineers and technicians. Tunnels and viaducts, electrical communication, signalling techniques, grand public architecture – all demonstrated the revolution that railways brought to everyday life. Synchronised time was brought to communities that had previously set their clocks to suit themselves, or lived by the passage of the sun. But in less obvious ways too, in precision measurement, metallurgy, statistics, physics and dynamics, and business management, the existence and demands of railways drove experiment and knowledge forwards.For more than a hundred years, steam power was the basis of the railway. Coal was the prime fuel, though other fuels were also used to make steam, from wood to powdered peat, from sugar-cane stalks to cotton waste and corn cobs, and, increasingly from the 1890s, oil. The great age of the railway was from 1850 to 1920 – during this period it dominated land transport. The invention of the internal combustion engine, enabling powered road transport, did not seem a major threat at first. Electric traction was particularly welcomed and developed by coal-less countries like Italy. Though electric trams put some suburban steam lines out of business, they often, as in France and Belgium, provided a complementary service to the railways. The First World War, with its speeding-up of motor car and truck technology, and Henry Ford’s creation of the assembly line and the cheap motor car in the 1920s brought the car, coach and truck to the stage of real rivalry with railways in the industrialised nations. The railways fought back, themselves adopting the new technology and also building bigger, faster, more efficient steam locomotives. Nowhere was this process more apparent than in the United States of America, where the greatest titans of steam were built even as their glory was being eclipsed by the oncoming diesel-electrics.By the 1950s steam traction was diminishing rapidly. Electric and diesel power gave more energy-efficient and cost-effective performance, enabling higher speeds and higher usage of prime routes, with less pollution by smoke and less risk of lineside fires. The locomotive itself became less and less used on passenger trains, as the multiple-unit, incorporating its own motive power, took over long-distance as well aslocal transit. Regression was still the operative word in most countries. Rail systems were cut back as the freeway and the jet plane took over more and more inter-city traffic. Only in China and India did the railways still remain the prime means of national transportation, and these were also the last major countries to have steam haulage. But later in the twentieth century, there was a change. Railways, from being an ashy Cinderella of the transport world, began to take on a new character. Road congestion had become a world-wide problem. A growing concern forthe environment revealed trains as clean and efficient energy users. New technology enabled trains to compete with planes in medium-distance inter-city runs. France and Japan led the way in building new high-speed lines. Computer science helped to make rail freight competitive against road haulage. Great engineering ventures, like the Denmark-Sweden, Britain-France, and Japanese inter-island links, are based on the use of railways. New-built industrial railways like the West Australian ore lines ship vast tonnages in single train-loads several kilometres long. Rapid-transit rail links join airports to major cities like London, Oslo and Hong Kong, among many others.There is no doubt that railways have a promising future as well as a fascinating past. In these pages, you can inspect both, as well as survey the full range of state-of-the-art motive power in each year. From the world’s first steam-powered railway to the projects now in hand to construct magnetic-levitation lines that do away with the need for wheels, less than two hundred years have elapsed. Unique in its scope and range, this encyclopedia describes more than a thousand examples from all over the world as it charts the progress of those most visible and colourful elements of the railway, the locomotive and the train.
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Category: Collectibles:Transportation:Railroadiana and Trains:Paper:Books:1900-Now
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