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Books > Sport & Leisure > Transport: general interest > Trains & railways: general interest
Tim Parks s books on Italy have been hailed as "so vivid, so packed
with delectable details, they] serve as a more than decent
substitute for the real thing" (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a
charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains
from Verona to Milan, Rome to Palermo, and right down to the heel
of Italy.
Parks begins as any traveler might: "A train is a train is a
train, isn t it?" But soon he turns his novelist s eye to the
details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale
station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a
uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters
with ordinary Italians conductors and ticket collectors, priests
and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants Parks
captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with
speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward
brutal architecture amid grand monuments; and an undying love of a
good argument and the perfect cappuccino.
Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how
their development reflects Italians sense of themselves from
Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all,
Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of
modern Italy. As Parks writes, "To see the country by train is to
consider the crux of the essential Italian dilemma: Is Italy part
of the modern world, or not?""
This is the story of a quarter-century struggle to rebuild from
scrap condition a unique locomotive, it being an essential part of
the British engineering heritage.It covers the unusual and
efficient Caprotti valve gear in depth and solves the mystery of
why the locomotive did not work properly in service. It was never
improved until it was restored and its secrets revealed with a
surprising conclusion.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the newly formed country of
Czechoslovakia built an ambitious national rail network out of what
remained of the obsolete Habsburg system. While conceived as a
means of knitting together a young and ethnically diverse
nation-state, these railways were by their very nature a
transnational phenomenon, and as such they simultaneously
articulated and embodied a distinctive Czechoslovak
cosmopolitanism. Drawing on evidence ranging from government
documents to newsreels to train timetables, Iron Landscapes gives a
nuanced account of how planners and authorities balanced these two
imperatives, bringing the cultural history of infrastructure into
dialogue with the spatial history of Central Europe.
The West Riding of Yorkshire boasted the most complex railway
network in Britain, comprised at various times of seven railway
companies, with an eighth trying to secure a foothold, eleven
significant joint lines and several minor systems. With no overall
strategic pattern of territory or route, the companies seemed to
vie incessantly for supremacy, often at the expense of efficiency
with the significant duplication of facilities: over twenty-five
towns and villages had two passenger stations, while some even had
three or four! This book reviews the local history, including its
economy and key industries. It describes the need for the railways
and the political and geographical challenges they faced. It
discusses the impact on the region of 'railway mania' experienced
throughout Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. The many
locomotives that worked these lines are celebrated, with a
behind-the-scenes look at their yards, sheds and roundhouses. The
lost branch lines and stations are remembered. Finally, there are
individual chapters covering Leeds, Doncaster, Barnsley and the
coalfields, Sheffield and Rotherham, Airedale and Wharfedale, the
Aire and Calder watershed, the Calder Valley and Huddersfield.
Experience the world by train alongside best-selling travel writer
Tom Chesshyre, as he takes a whistle-stop tour around the globe in
49 unique journeys Why do people love trains so much? Tom Chesshyre
is on a mission to find the answer by experiencing the world
through train travel - on both epic and everyday rail routes,
aboard every type of ride, from steam locomotives to bullet trains,
meeting a cast of memorable characters who share a passion for
train travel. Join him on the rails and off the beaten track as he
embarks on an exhilarating whistle-stop tour around the globe, on
journeys on celebrated trains and railways including: India's famed
toy train Sri Lanka's Reunification Express The Indian Pacific
across the Australian outback The Shanghai maglev And the
picturesque rail journeys of the Scottish Highlands Plus trains
through Kosovo, North Macedonia, Turkey, Iran, Finland, Russia,
America and France, with short interludes in North Korea, Italy,
Poland, Peru, Switzerland, England and Lithuania. All aboard!
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