Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World - from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief - Softcover

Zoellner, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0670017175 ISBN 13: 9780670017171

Verlag: Penguin US, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

A revelatory, entertaining account of the world's most indispensable mode of transportation

Tom Zoellner loves trains with a ferocious passion. In his new book 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.

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TRAIN

INTRODUCTION

Twenty years after I saw her, I still remember the young woman across the aisle from me on a train through a snowstorm in Pennsylvania. She was half visible in the overhead lamp, wearing a college sweatshirt and holding an open book on her lap. Whatever she was reading was making her cry softly. I couldn't see the title and I was too shy to ask, but the sight of her wiping away tears-emotionally transported into one world as she was physically transported in another-made me feel my individuality dissolving.

Snowflakes struck the dark windows without a sound, but unseen wheels hummed, and outside realities could be subsumed for a while in this linear realm of motion and warmth, five hours from Pittsburgh and nowhere in particular. We were standing perfectly still, yet moving over parallel lines of steel, and she seemed like a ghost in the dim light. I can't ride on a train at night without remembering her, wishing I had talked to her, strangely grateful that she remained a cipher.

Railroads anywhere, but especially in America, have the power to invoke odd spells like this, a feeling that might be called Train Sublime: the tidal sway of the carriages, the chanting of the wheels striking the fishplates (to me it sounds like dear-boy, dear-boy, dear-boy) , the glancing presence of strangers on their own journeys and wrapped in private ruminations. These secret pleasures of a railroad summon forth a vision of a sweet pastness, a lost national togetherness. The train is a time traveler itself, the lost American vehicle of our ancestors, or perhaps our past selves.

We live in a society that was made by the railroads in ways we never think about anymore: our imported food, the beat of our music, our huge corporations and their methods of stock financing, our strong labor unions, our abstract notion of time and our sense of everyday connection with people who may live far out of sight but are made neighbors through mechanical means. Under the skin of modernity lies a skeleton of railroad tracks.

But in the light of the modern world, trains are not nostalgic playthings-not by any measurement. They serve unromantic needs and hard economies.

On an average weekday morning, approximately 100 million people across the world are boarding trains: from Paddington station in London, from the magnificent Victoria Terminus in Mumbai, from the tawdry and run-down Tirana Railway Station in Albania, the Baltazar Fidelis platform on the Jundial line outside São Paulo, the flying saucer of Beijing's sparkling new South Station, tiny one-room depots or lonely platforms scattered in the countryside all over Argentina, Belgium, South Africa and Japan and eighty-six other nations, to say nothing of the 13 trillion tons per kilometer of cargo they haul each year. Global commerce would instantaneously crash without them.

And passenger trains are still alive and breathing even in America, though we have sacrificed most of them in favor of the long-haul plane ride and interstate car travel. A quasi-federal agency called Amtrak has kept overland trains in a state of reliable mediocrity since 1971, and it was on the creaky old Pennsylvanian when I first spotted the woman in the snowstorm. At least two dozen major cities have working commuter rail tentacles out to their suburbs-about 3 percent of Americans use them to get to work, mainly in the Northeast. I am one of those 100 million who ride the train as a matter of routine. And I do it from the famously car-happy city of Los Angeles.

My trip to my workplace takes a reliable forty-seven minutes, and I don't do it as an act of rebellion against the oil companies or as an ideological protest against my car. I do it because it is relatively cheap and it saves me from the freeway. And while I usually tote a book, I more often stare out the window at one of the truly anci

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0670017175
• ISBN 13: 9780670017171
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Zeitfracht Medien GmbH; info-medien@zeitfracht.de; ; Ferdinand-Jühlke-Straße 7; Erfurt; 99095; Deutschland