The passage of the Staggers Rail Act in 1980 led brought a renaissance to the freight rail industry. In the decade following, economists documented the effects of the Act on a variety of important economic metrics including prices, costs, and productivity. Over the preceding years, and with the return of the industry to more stable footing, attention to the industry by economists faded. The lack of attention, however, has not been due to a dearth of ongoing economic and policy issues that continue to confront the industry. In this volume, we begin to rectify this inattention. Rather than retread older analyses or provide yet another look at the consequences of Staggers, we assemble a collection of ten chapters in four sections that collectively provide fresh and up-to-date analyses of the economic issues and policy challenges the industry faces: the first section sets the context through foundational discussion of freight rail; the second section highlights the role of freight rail in an increasingly interrelated economy; the third section examines industry structure and scope in freight rail; and the fourth section assesses current regulatory challenges that confront freight rail. This book will be of great value to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students interested in the fields of freight rail economics and policy, transportation, business history, and regulatory economics.

The key aim of this volume is to demonstrate ways in which an understanding of history can be used to inform present-day transport and mobility policies. This is not to say that history repeats itself, or that every contemporary transport dilemma has an historical counterpart: rather, the contributors to this book argue that in many contexts of transport planning a better understanding of the context and consequences of past decisions and processes could lead to more effective policy decisions. Collectively the authors explore the ways in which the methods and approaches of historical research may be applied to contemporary transport and policy issues across a wide range of transport modes and contexts. By linking two bodies of academic research that for the most part remain separate this volume helps to inform current transport and mobility policies and to stimulate innovative new research that links studies of both past and present mobilities.

This book explores the impact of railways on colonial Indian society from the commencement of railway operations in the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. The book represents a historiographical departure. Using new archival evidence as well as travelogues written by Indian railway travellers in Bengali and Hindi, this book suggests that the impact of railways on colonial Indian society were more heterogeneous and complex than anticipated either by India's colonial railway builders or currently assumed by post-colonial scholars. At a related level, the book argues that this complex outcome of the impact of railways on colonial Indian society was a product of the interaction between the colonial context of technology transfer and the Indian railway passengers who mediated this process at an everyday level. In other words, this book claims that the colonised 'natives' were not bystanders in this process of imposition of an imperial technology from above. On the contrary, Indians, both as railway passengers and otherwise influenced the nature and the direction of the impact of an oft-celebrated 'tool of Empire'. The historiographical departures suggested in the book are based on examining railway spaces as social spaces - a methodological index influenced by Henri Lefebvre's idea of social spaces as means of control, domination and power.

Having been state-owned for decades, the railway reform in China confused many people, particularly in terms of its ownership and property rights arrangements. Western literature always prescribes that the best model for railway reform is privatization. China's leadership has also enunciated the state's determination to re-arrange property rights and rejuvenate corporate governance. But is China's railway reform really a story of convergence and will the Chinese government follow the western model of railway reform? Addressing these questions, this book provides a positive explanation of the reform in China's railway sector between 1978 and the dissolution of the Ministry of Railways. It bridges the socialist reform and transport policy literature, and studies the empirical changes of the property rights arrangements in China's railway system. Refuting the convergence theory, it concludes that the cyclical reform policies of decentralization and re-centralization were actually an exploratory and interactive mechanism of "assets discovery" and "assets recovery". This in-depth study is based on 21 face-to-face interviews with railway cadres as well as field trips to collect first-hand information in Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Wuhan. As one of the only empirical studies on the reform of the railway sector in China, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of China studies, Transport studies and Political Economy.

The British railway network was a monument to Victorian private enterprise. Its masterpieces of civil engineering were emulated around the world. But its performance was controversial: praised for promoting a high density of lines, it was also criticised for wasteful duplication of routes.
This is the first history of the British railway system written from a modern economic perspective. It uses conterfactual analysis to construct an alternaive network to represent the most efficient alternative rail network that could have been constructed given what was known at the time - the first time this has been done. It reveals how weaknesses in regulation and defects in government policy resulted in enormous inefficiency in the Victorian system that Britain lives with today.
British railway companies developed into powerful regional monopolies, which then contested each other's territories. When denied access to existing lines in rival territories, they built duplicate lines instead. Plans for an integrated national system, sponsored by William Gladstone, were blocked by Members of Parliament because of a perceived conflict with the local interests they represented. Each town wanted more railways than its neighbours, and so too many lines were built. The costs of these surplus lines led ultimately to higher fares and freight charges, which impaired the performance of the economy.
The book will be the definitive source of reference for those interested in the economic history of the British railway system. It makes use of a major new historical source, deposited railway plans, integrates transport and local history through its regional analysis of the railway system, and provides a comprehensive, classified bibliography.

The European railway sector has gone through profound, yet mostly institutional, changes over the past 20 years, owing mainly to the initiatives of the European Commission. This book constitutes a first systematic account and assessment of the recent transformations of the European railway sector, whilst also covering the main segments such as passenger transport, high speed and freight. The expert contributors have been charting these developments over the past five years. They provide a critical analysis of relevant, yet contentious, issues such as competition, unbundling, regulation, access charging, standards and interoperability, and public-private partnerships. Practically-minded academics, as well as academically-oriented practitioners, interested in the railway sector and other public transport sectors will find this book to be a crucial read. It will also be of use to postgraduates studying infrastructure economics, policy and regulation. Contributors: N. Baron, A.S. Bergantino, J. Dehornoy, M. Dillon, N. Fearnley, M.Finger, R. Gevaers, T. Holvad, A. Jan, N. Keogh, G. Knieps, J. Maes, A. Meaney, P. Messulam, F. Mizutani, C. Nash, S. Olsen, J. Runde Krogstad, M. Sanchez-Borras, D. van de Velde, E. Van de Voorde, T. Vanelslander

Nothing Like It in the World gives the account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad -- the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.

The U.S. government pitted two companies -- the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads -- against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes vibrantly to life.

Between 1783 and 1860, more than 100,000 enslaved African Americans escaped across the border between slave and free territory in search of freedom. Most of these escapes were unaided, but as the American anti-slavery movement became more militant after 1830, assisted escapes became more common. Help came from the Underground Railroad, which still stands as one of the most powerful and sustained multiracial human rights movements in world history. This work examines and interprets the available historical evidence about fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad in Kentucky, the southernmost sections of the free states bordering Kentucky along the Ohio River, and, to a lesser extent, the slave states to the immediate south. Kentucky was central to the Underground Railroad because its northern boundary, the Ohio River, represented a three hundred mile boundary between slavery and nominal freedom. The book examines the landscape of Kentucky and the surrounding states; fugitive slaves before 1850, in the 1850s and during the Civil War; and their motivations and escape strategies and the risks involved with escape. The reasons why people broke law and social convention to befriend fugitive slaves, common escape routes, crossing points through Kentucky from Tennessee and points south, and specific individuals who provided assistance - all are topics covered.

The passage of the Staggers Rail Act in 1980 led brought a renaissance to the freight rail industry. In the decade following, economists documented the effects of the Act on a variety of important economic metrics including prices, costs, and productivity. Over the preceding years, and with the return of the industry to more stable footing, attention to the industry by economists faded. The lack of attention, however, has not been due to a dearth of ongoing economic and policy issues that continue to confront the industry. In this volume, we begin to rectify this inattention. Rather than retread older analyses or provide yet another look at the consequences of Staggers, we assemble a collection of ten chapters in four sections that collectively provide fresh and up-to-date analyses of the economic issues and policy challenges the industry faces: the first section sets the context through foundational discussion of freight rail; the second section highlights the role of freight rail in an increasingly interrelated economy; the third section examines industry structure and scope in freight rail; and the fourth section assesses current regulatory challenges that confront freight rail. This book will be of great value to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students interested in the fields of freight rail economics and policy, transportation, business history, and regulatory economics.

Numerous countries have attempted to improve the performance of their railways by introducing more competition, but there is fierce debate and no consensus on how this is best achieved. This book reveals how railways were an obvious target for reform because they were often losing traffic and money, and because the government was typically deeply involved as either owner or regulator. This book summarizes and assesses the evidence from the experiences of rail reform in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In short, the book reveals that no one approach has proven to be best across a wide variety of circumstances. It highlights how unbundling (separating infrastructure from train operations so that independent train operators could compete over common tracks) although attractive in theory, has so far proved complex to implement and delivered only some of the promised benefits. Privatization and deregulation have had more demonstrated success in the freight systems of North and South America, but are still largely untested in the more complex railway networks of Europe. The evidence is arguably slightly stronger for privatization and deregulation than for unbundling, but the jury is still out. Competition in the Railway Industry is invaluable in that it compares the strategies and experiences of different countries in introducing competition in railways, rather than simply focusing on one country and its approach. As such, it will appeal greatly to those in industry and government interested in railway policy and performance, and privatization and deregulation of utilities more generally. It will also appeal to academics and researchers of public sector, transport and industrial organization.

North America faces a transportation crisis. Gas-guzzling SUVs clog the highways and air travelers face delays, cancellations, and uncertainty in the wake of unprecedented terrorist attacks. New Departures closely examines the options for improving intercity passenger trains' capacity to move North Americans where they want to go.

While Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada face intense pressure to transform themselves into successful commercial enterprises, Anthony Perl demonstrates how public policy changes lie behind the triumphs of European and Japanese high-speed rail passenger innovations. Perl goes beyond merely describing these achievements, translating their implications into a North American institutional and political context and diagnosing the obstacles that have made renewing passenger trains so much more difficult in North America than elsewhere.

New Departures links the lessons behind rail passenger revitalization abroad with the opportunity to recast the policies that constrain Amtrak and VIA Rail from providing efficient and effective intercity transportation.

Originally published in 1968, and using official records, this book charts the history of the Railway Clearing House and shows the vital role it played in the development of British railways and the growth of the economy. The Clearing House established a common classification of goods; standardized signalling systems and telegraphic codes among the 120 railway companies which operated in Britain before the First World War. It was the nerve centre of the railway for nearly a century and at one time more than 2,500 clerks were employed in its huge offices near Euston Station in London.

This book investigates China's railway transformation through history, along with culture changes and urban development. The book begins by looking at the background of China and the history and growth of railway development in China through five key phases, followed by assessing the cultural changes in the railway carriage and exploring how these are linked to social equality and national provisions. The core of this book aims to analyse the Chinese urban transformation through the development of the high-speed rail (HSR) infrastructure in China. Eleven important new HSR stations in mainland China, plus the new Hong Kong West Kowloon Station, have been selected to contextually explore how HSR infrastructures have affected the development of the Chinese urban context. The selected case studies are the stations of Beijing South, Wuhan, Shanghai Hongqiao, Guangzhou South, Xi'an North, Nanjing South, Chengdu East, Tianjin West, Zhengzhou East, Hangzhou East and Hong Kong West Kowloon. All of these were built between 2008 and 2018. In these case studies, the location and the intentions and success of promoting urban development are analysed and assessed. Following this, the book further investigates the peculiarities of the new HSR stations in China in comparison with stations in Europe. An assessment framework is established to evaluate the Chinese case studies comparatively with significant cases in Europe, attending to the urban structure of the area, the architectural quality, the functional diversity and the quality of the public space generated in the surrounding area.

In this first comparative study of Chinese and Zimbabwean railway experiences, Gao examines the role played by technological progress in generating significant social change. His principal concern is with indigenous people whose efforts to meet this technological advance has been neglected or underestimated. Gao shows how different cultural traditions, political situations, and individual interests create an attractive variety of local responses to the challenges and opportunities afforded by technology. He not only describes the final consequences of railway development, but emphasizes the dynamic process by which indigenous people first derived, then gradually lost, most of the gains from modern transport advances. In addition, Gao explores a number of permanent impacts of railways on the two areas, including demographic and structural changes, and divisions of race and class. An intriguing study for researchers and students of imperialism, and Chinese and African history.

High Speed Rail's (HSR) main objective is to attract air passengers between big metropolitan areas however the main territorial implications in many cases occur not in these metropolitan areas but in the intermediate cities. These implications open up new spatial planning possibilities such as decentralization, new regional centres and urban renewal projects. This book presents the experience of 20 years of HSR in Spain including some explicit information, arguments and conclusions derived from HSR in other European Countries. It debates the HSR territorial implications at three scales: national, regional and local, thus being of interest for strategic debates at those scales, such as the decision of new national lines, the pros and cons of deviating the line to reach minor intermediate cities or the selection of precise locations for new stations and the development projects in their surroundings. Comparisons with the recent changes in accessibility, spatial distribution of population and activities, are made with mobility for working purposes and with the characteristics of the HSR passengers. This book also examines the actions, strategies and urban projects that medium size cities can use to make best use of HSR opportunities, synthesising the experience of HSR medium cities in Spain and Europe. The book's conclusions will be of interest, over and above scholars, to transport infrastructure decision makers, city and regional planners and managers, and transport companies.

The governments of several countries are in the process of reforming their regulatory regimes for the railways, and there is much debate about the appropriate regulation of transport in general and railways in particular--especially in light of environmental concerns about traffic congestion and air pollution and economic concerns about the financing of infrastructure and services. This volume investigates how Britain and Germany regulated their railways at three different points in time over the past century: after the First World War, after the Second World War, and in the 1990s. Its central focus is the design of regulatory regimes and the impact of institutional factors on the selection of design ideas and on processes of isomorphism. By placing a comparative analysis of regulatory design in a historical context and an institutional framework, the author contributes to the current debate on the emergence of the regulatory state in the late 20th century.

High-speed Rail (HSR) is a technological transportation advance that has raised the interest of policy makers and researchers worldwide. The study of High-speed Rail is a recent phenomenon but has received increasing attention due to the extension of this mode of transportation around the globe. Evaluating High-Speed Rail contains some of the most recent and cutting edge studies on HSR from different disciplines. The book is organized around a variety of key topics related to the evaluation of High Speed Rail projects and experiences. These topics include: the economic appraisal and evaluation of High-Speed Rail projects; the evaluation of indirect and direct effects of High-Speed Rail; its territorial, redistributive and environmental impacts; its contribution or limitation to urban growth; and the management of challenges created by the arrival of High-Speed Rail lines to core cities. It also covers the contribution of High-Speed Rail to tourism and its impact on intermodal competition, with especial consideration to air transportation. Chapters analyse the expected effects of introducing on-track competition and designing public-private contracts to develop new lines. This cutting-edge volume offers rigorous analysis from top researchers in the field with a clear intention to deliver policy implications and provide the latest analysis on the impact of High Speed Rail. This book is suitable for students and academics interested in transportation infrastructure, economic impacts of public investments, mobility, planning and urban affairs, as well as researchers and policy makers in the transportation and infrastructure sector.

This book provides a critical overview of the relationships between planning and railway management and development during the key period in the 20th Century when the railway was in public ownership: 1948-94. It assesses the strength of the relationships when working in collaboration with the private sector. The book then focuses on the interplay between planning and railway since privatization in 1994 and points to best practice for the future in institutional structures and policy development to secure improved outcomes.

The book, first published in 1977, contrasts new and older approaches to the history of transport and outlines a critical exposition of the methods used to quantify the contribution of railways to economic growth by means of counterfactual speculation and the measurement of social savings. The author also outlines and appraises an alternative measure of the impact of railways, namely the social rate of return on capital invested in railways. The final chapters are concerned with the effects on growth generated by the construction and diffusion of railways through expenditure on labour, capital goods and industrial inputs and through their effects on the integration of markets, and patterns of location.

The Indian railway network began as a liberal experiment to promote trade and commerce, the distribution of food and military mobility. Sweeney's study focuses on Britain's largest overseas investment project during the nineteenth century, offering a new perspective on the Anglo-Indian experience.

One of the most colorful yet neglected eras in American transportation history is re-created in this definitive history of the electric interurbans. Built with the idea of attracting short-distance passenger traffic and light freight, the interurbans were largely constructed in the early 1900s. The rise of the automobile and motor transport caused the industry to decline after World War I, and the depression virtually annihilated the industry by the middle 1930s.
Part I describes interurban construction, technology, passenger and freight traffic, financial history, and final decline and abandonment. Part II presents individual histories (with route maps) of the more than 300 companies of the interurban industry.
"Reviews"
"A first-rate work of such detail and discernment that it might well serve as a model for all corporate biographies. . . . A wonderfully capable job of distillation."
--"Trains"
"Few economic, social, and business historians can afford to miss this definitive study."
--"Mississippi Valley Historical Review"
"All seekers after nostalgia will be interested in this encyclopedic volume on the days when the clang, clang of the trolley was the most exciting travel sound the suburbs knew."
--"Harper's Magazine"
"A fascinating and instructive chapter in the history of American transportation."
--"Journal of Economic History"
"The hint that behind the grand facade of scholarship lies an expanse of boyish enthusiasm is strengthened by a lovingly amassed and beautifully reproduced collection of 37 photographs."
--"The Nation"

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book was first published in 1969. This volume includes essays on the development of the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway network; the early Railway Capital Market and tables n expenses, capital and gross revenue and expediture.