Engaging whistle-stop journey around the railways that changed the world

BOOK OF THE DAY: Blood, Iron Gold: How the Railways Transformed the WorldBy Christian Wolmar, Atlantic 398pp, £25

FOLLOWING HIS book on Britain’s railways, Christian Wolmar now tackles a broader canvas in this whistle-stop tour of the world’s railways. Inevitably the brush strokes are broad, with lots of human stories and whole continents covered in a few pages. He makes it clear at the start this is not a book for rivet counters.

Commerce usually followed the iron horse and Wolmar lists the social and economic benefits of railways. Before the 1830s few people wandered outside their parish until railways gave mobility, distributed manufactured goods and changed diet through the speedy delivery of perishables such as meat, fish and milk. The affluent could now choose to live a distance from their work, one of the world’s first commuter lines being the Dublin and Kingstown. Railways also shaped maps, uniting Italy and Germany and helping the north to victory in the American civil war. US marine Robert E Lee, later a Confederate general, used the Baltimore and Ohio RR to move troops to Harper’s Ferry to deal with a certain John Brown.

Gen Ulysses Grant took the same route to bolster the siege of Chattanooga. In peacetime Chinese and Irish navvies (many of them civil war veterans) built much of the transcontinental route, which united the US at Promontory Point, Utah. It’s no coincidence many city termini are still called Union Station.

On the other side of the world Russia employed convict labour to drive its Trans-Siberian line through the harshest terrain, connecting Russia to the Far East and reducing an eight-week sea journey to Japan and China to a couple of weeks.

Colonisers in Africa and elsewhere greatly favoured railways to extract minerals and cash crops with little concern for the human cost. Tasmania dispensed with locomotives altogether, using convicts who ran along the track propelling a two-man carriage, while in the jungles of Panama Irish labourers replaced the hundreds of Chinese workers who died from disease and opium addiction. Deaths were frequent on most lines: one in India claimed 25,000 lives.

Railways also played their part in two World Wars, most notoriously in transporting Jews to extermination camps. Many of these wretched trains passed almost invisibly through Switzerland, the Clapham Junction of Europe.

One contribution of railways is the superb architecture they produced. St Pancras in London is outstanding, Stazione Centrale in Milan is modelled on the Louvre and Grand Central in New York on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Our own Heuston Station, not quite on the same scale, is still a very fine building. Railways even aided wine producers, helping those of the Chianti region to market their produce, for example. Railways also standardised time.

One of the most interesting sections of this book discusses the railway renaissance and the impact of high-speed trains such as France’s TGV and the AVE in Spain. Apart from Eurostar, privatisation has left Britain without such trains and Ireland is nowhere in the running. The Enterprise trundles up to Belfast in two hours while Dublin-Cork takes two hours 50 minutes, the same as 40 years ago. Amtrak is similar: riding the Adirondack from New York to Montreal is a pleasant journey but it takes 10 hours to meander 380 miles. Going to London by ferry and train is no mad dash either but greener and much more civilised than enduring the chaos that can be Dublin airport.

Did railways really transform the world? Wolmar makes a convincing case that they did indeed change everything. For a rapid, engaging dash around the world’s railways, this is a readable and enjoyable book.

Fergus Mulligan is a historian and the author of The Trinity Year, published by Gill Macmillan earlier this year and a forthcoming biography of William Dargan.