Transnational Railway Cultures

Since the advent of train travel, railways have compressed space and crossed national boundaries to become transnational icons, evoking hope, dread, progress, or obsolescence in different cultural domains. Spanning five continents and a diverse range of contexts, this collection offers an unprecedentedly broad survey of global representations of trains. From experimental novels to Hollywood blockbusters, the works studied here chart fascinating routes across a remarkably varied cultural landscape.

A World History of Railway Cultures, 1830-1930 is the first collection of primary sources to historicize the cultural impact of railways on a global scale from their inception in Great Britain to the Great Depression. Its dual purpose is to promote understanding of complex historical processes leading to globalization and generate interest in transnational and global comparative research on railways. In four volumes, organized by historical geography, this scholarly collection gathers rare out-of-print published and unpublished materials from archival and digital repositories throughout the world. It adopts a capsule approach that focuses on short selections of significant primary source content instead of redundant and irrelevant materials found in online data collections. The current collection draws attention to railway cultures through railroad reports, parliamentary papers, government documents, police reports, public health records, engineering reports, technical papers, medical surveys, memoirs, diaries, travel narratives, ethnographies, newspaper articles, editorials, pamphlets, broadsides, paintings, cartoons, engravings, photographs, art, ephemera, and passages from novels and poetry collections that shed light on the cultural history of railways. The editor’s original essays and headnotes on the cultural politics of railways introduce over 200 carefully selected primary sources. Students and researchers come to understand railways not as applied technological impositions of industrial capitalism but powerful, fluid, and idiosyncratic historical constructs.

Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails goes beyond textual representations of rail travel to engage an impressive range of political, sociological and urban theory. Taken together, these essays highlight the complexity of the modern experience of train mobility, and its salient relation to a number of cultural discourses. Incorporating traditionally marginal areas of cultural production such as graffiti, museums, architecture or even plunging into the social experience of travel inside the traincar itself, each essay constitutes an attempt to work from the act of riding the train toward questions of much larger significance. Crisscrossing cultures from the New World and Old, from East and West, these essays share a common preoccupation with the way in which trains and railway networks have mapped and re-mapped the contours of both cities and states in the modern period. Bringing together individual and large-scale social practices, this volume traces out the cultural implications of "Riding the Rails."

This 4-volume collection is the first compilation of primary sources to historicize the cultural impact of railways on a global scale from their inception in Great Britain to the Great Depression. Gathered together are over 200 rare out-of-print published and unpublished materials from archival and digital repositories throughout the world. Organized by historical geography, volume 4 considers the Americas

This 4-volume collection is the first compilation of primary sources to historicize the cultural impact of railways on a global scale from their inception in Great Britain to the Great Depression. Gathered together are over 200 rare out-of-print published and unpublished materials from archival and digital repositories throughout the world. Organized by historical geography, this third volume explores the railways through Eurasia.

This 4-volume collection is the first compilation of primary sources to historicize the cultural impact of railways on a global scale from their inception in Great Britain to the Great Depression. Gathered together are over 200 rare out-of-print published and unpublished materials from archival and digital repositories throughout the world. Organized by historical geography, this first volume covers the United Kingdom.

This 4-volume collection is the first compilation of primary sources to historicize the cultural impact of railways on a global scale from their inception in Great Britain to the Great Depression. Gathered together are over 200 rare out-of-print published and unpublished materials from archival and digital repositories throughout the world. Organized by historical geography, the second volume spans the British Empire.