This book examines how, from the early days of steam, railways have driven the development of countries around the World.

The history of railways is not always one of success, such as in the Congo where even today railways operate on three different gauges run by separate companies.

Expanding from 20,000 miles of railway lines in 1865 to about a million 150 years later, scale is often a theme in railway history.

Railways played a key part in the First World War, transporting goods to the battlefields and the munitions across them.

In this volume, Jeremy Black examines how rail can be compared with Roman roads and Chinese canals in helping to develop countries’ economic links.

Published in December 2023 by Amberley Publishing and written by Jeremy Black, this hardback book measures around 152 mm x 229 mm and has 288 pages and 20 illustrations.

It has a published price of £22.99, but at the time of writing, it can be purchased for £20.69 from Amberley Publishing and for £17.99 from Amazon.

In ten chapters, the author asks the questions of why and how they developed and what their future looks like.

Chapter 1, titled What Was At Stake?, is followed by The Early Days of Steam, and Spanning the Continent and Other Adventures of Rail.

Chapter 4 looks at The Strategies of Rail, followed by The First World War, Politics to the Fore 1919-38, The Second World War, and Postwar Flux.

The last two chapters describe Changes over the Last Half Century and considers What Next?

The photo at the top-left below dates from 1885, but the elevated structures on which the train is running are still a common sight in New York.

However, the opening of the subway in 1904 was met with objections from some railroad owners.

Railways have often been the perfect setting for tales of murder, as depicted on the right-hand page below showing a woman being thrown off a train, and Agatha Christie in her best-selling novel, Murder on the Orient Express.

The importance of railways to the war effort can be seen in the top left image below, with a train included in the cover of a War Atlas published in the USA in the Second World War.

The transition from steam to diesel is illustrated at the bottom left, where a diesel-hauled freight train is passing under a tower for coaling steam locomotives.

Progress is shown in the top right photograph where an Indian Railways train is being hauled by a diesel instead of a steam locomotive, but time moves on and now virtually all of Indian railways are electrified.

Nothing could sum up the development of railways than the three images below.

At the top right. a team of men surrounded by steam and grime are preparing a steam locomotive for its duties, while at the top left, the age of steam is largely forgotten with the lines of diesel locomotives not needing to be coaled and fired hours before their tours of duty.

At the bottom left, steam still seems to be a modern development with a steam locomotive giving way to a cart loaded with timber pulled by a pair of oxen.

Technology advances have often been driven by the need for railways to innovate, such as illustrated in the pages below.

The top left image shows the southern portals of the Simplon Tunnel from Switzerland to Italy, which for 76 years was the longest railway tunnel in the world.

The station at the bottom left stands over 5,000 metres above sea level, and special techniques would have been necessary to construct the line at such altitudes.

Builders would have faced different challenges constructing the railway at the top right, which would have been too steep for a conventional line.

Instead, it ascended the hill by a series of spirals that crossed over themselves. At the bottom right is a tunnel beneath the Bosporus Strait in Turkey that fulfilled the dream of centuries by linking Europe and Asia.

To write a history of the world’s railways in a single volume is a challenge that Jeremy Black has succeeded admirably.

He takes the reader on a chronological journey from the earliest days of railways to the present day and considers what the drivers will be for future developments.

The book tells how large numbers of workers travelling into cities were the driving force for many commuter routes, how the need to bring British Colombia into the Dominion of Canada helped to drive the building of the transcontinental line across Canada, and how enormous stockyards in Chicago helped to establish it as a major railway hub.

From start to finish, the book never drags, and every page brings surprises. Jeremy Black’s eye for detail while excluding irrelevant facts and figures is to be congratulated.

This is an astounding volume, well written, and of interest to historians as well as every railway enthusiast’s bookshelf. It fully deserves a rating of 5/5.

The book is available to purchase from Amazon and from Amberley Publishing.

We would like to thank Amberley Publishing or providing us with a copy of the book for review.