"The effects of the railways on society are too universal and long-lasting to be compressed within a single volume. Like some many-headed Hindu god they contain life and death, creation and destruction, squalor and magnificence. All I can do is to sketch some of the more interesting aspects, to provide my readers with food for thought, to enable them to look more closely, not so much at the railways they use, as at the townscape and landscape around them, and to detect their still all-pervasive influence."
Written alongside a BBC2 series, Locomotion examines the extensive impact of railways on the modern world.
From opening up new connections and opportunities for commerce, their influence was vast, pervasive and exhilarating – propelled by industrial innovation and heralding the beginning of a new era in trade and expansion of empires across the world.
Workers were moved and older industries declined, transformed by steam engines and electricity. New cities sprang up across India, Russia, Africa and Latin America, becoming the territories that we recognise today.
The novelty of the trains experienced by Victorian passengers are a world away from the trains we use today, but the potential those early travellers saw is still being built on.
