The original Great Western Railway was the longest-lived mainline railway company in Great Britain and has attracted generations of admirers over its 112 years of existence. The reasons are manifold - for example, the unparalleled civil engineering feats of Brunel, the handsome locomotives with their copper-capped chimneys and brass safety valve bonnets and nameplates coupled with their superior efficiency and performance designed some 25 years in advance of rival companies and its attractive holiday/leisure destinations such as London, Bath, the Thames Valley, Cotswolds, Cambrian Coast and West Country. It was a much-loved railway company with its own individuality, determined to be different from the others. The result was a unique style which this book aims to portray.

England used to enjoy one of the most comprehensive railway networks in Europe. By the last decade of the 19th century there was hardly a hamlet in the land which could not be reached by train itself or after a brief ride in a pony and trap from the nearest station. However, the improved reliability and sheer convenience of internal combustion engined road vehicles brought competition to the railways which caused a steady and persistent decline in freight and passengers throughout the second half of the 20th century. By then the railways, initially funded by private enterprise, had been nationalized as a state asset. This left the state paying for trains which ran at a loss for lack of goods and people to fill them. During the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, successive governments sought to staunch this outflow of funds by closing thousands of miles of railway lines and hundreds of stations.Many of these were branch lines, that is a track leaving the main line to serve a specific place but going no further. At a stroke, large parts of the huge 19th-century civil engineering effort which went into building the network were redundant and, once any salvage of value was removed, duly abandoned. By and large, it was not economic to reinstate the cuttings, embankments and bridges built to give the most straight and level route possible for each line.What is left of these abandoned lines can offer rewarding walks through the heart of the countryside, away from roads and traffic, rich in flora and fauna and littered with dramatic examples of Victorian civil engineering. In short, there is something to the taste of the routine walker and the railway enthusiast. For either type they are best done twice, once in summer and once in winter. The summer will show what grows where the plow and the sprayer to not go, while the winter will show the detail of what was built, well over a century ago. This book features 12 of these walks throughout Gloucestershire and Wiltshire.

Supply and Demand Management in Ride-Sourcing Markets offers a fundamental modelling framework for characterizing ride-sourcing markets by spelling out the complex relationships among the key endogenous and exogenous variables in the markets. This book establishes several economic models that can approximate matching frictions between drivers and passengers, describes the equilibrium state of ride-sourcing markets, and more. Based on these models, develop an optimum strategy (in terms of trip fare, wage and/or matching) that maximizes platform profit. While the best social optimum solution (for maximizing the social welfare) is generally unsustainable, this book provides options governments can use to encourage second-best solutions. In addition, the authors establish models to analyze ride-pooling services, with traffic congestion externalities incorporated into models to see how both new platforms and government designs can optimize operating strategies in response to the level of traffic congestion.

The bus service we now have in London results from the momentous events described in this book. Many people consider these events to have been a necessary series of steps to get to where we are today. London Transport changed from a monolithic state owned bus operator to a tendering authority with competing operators owning buses and employing front-line staff to run a public service. It is a very political story. The early stages were at a time when a radical Conservative government was determined to bring great change. Privatisation became one of their key policies, and what happened in London has been unique, as deregulation of buses in the rest of the country has brought a very different set of experiences.

Urban High-Technology Zones offers essential planning insights for our increasingly high-tech economy and society, looking at the role the built environment plays, the policy factors that contribute to their formation and growth, quality-of-life impacts of high tech clusters on their surrounding communities, and economic geography. Using a combination of advanced geospatial data-driven techniques with evidence-based insights, the book provides quantitative measures on high tech cluster’s social, environmental and economic impacts. While findings are from drawn cities in the US, the book’s spatial analyses, methodology, research conclusions and literature reviews are generalizable to cities around the world. Users will find numerous insights and guidance on the role high-tech clusters play in how cities reach their economic growth and social equity goals, making it a useful resource for academic research and policy guidance.

A comprehensive account of the Charleston & Hamburg's history from its inception through Reconstruction, "The Charleston & Hamburg," with its forgotten stories of America's premier railroad, is a necessary addition to the bookshelves of historians and rail fans alike!

Handbook of Mobility Data Mining, Volume One: Data Preprocessing and Visualization introduces the fundamental technologies of mobile big data mining (MDM), advanced AI methods, and upper-level applications, helping readers comprehensively understand MDM with a bottom-up approach. The book explains how to preprocess mobile big data, visualize urban mobility, simulate and predict human travel behavior, and assess urban mobility characteristics and their matching performance as conditions and constraints in transport, emergency management, and sustainability development systems. The book contains crucial information for researchers, engineers, operators, administrators, and policymakers seeking greater understanding of current technologies' infra-knowledge structure and limitations. Further, the book introduces how to design MDM platforms that adapt to the evolving mobility environment, new types of transportation, and users based on an integrated solution that utilizes sensing and communication capabilities to tackle significant challenges faced by the MDM field. This volume focuses on how to efficiently pre-process mobile big data to extract and utilize critical feature information of high-dimensional city people flow. The book first provides a conceptual theory and framework, then discusses data sources, trajectory map-matching, noise filtering, trajectory data segmentation, data quality assessment, and more, concluding with a chapter on privacy protection in mobile big data mining.

Handbook of Mobility Data Mining, Volume Two: Mobility Analytics and Prediction introduces the fundamental technologies of mobile big data mining (MDM), advanced AI methods, and upper-level applications, helping readers comprehensively understand MDM with a bottom-up approach. The book explains how to preprocess mobile big data, visualize urban mobility, simulate and predict human travel behavior, and assess urban mobility characteristics and their matching performance as conditions and constraints in transport, emergency management, and sustainability development systems. The book introduces how to design MDM platforms that adapt to the evolving mobility environment and new types of transportation and users. This helpful guide provides a basis for how to simulate and predict mobility data. After an introductory theory chapter, the book then covers crucial topics such as long-term mobility pattern analytics, mobility data generators, user information inference, Grid-based population density prediction, and more. The book concludes with a chapter on graph-based mobility data analytics. The information in this work is crucial for researchers, engineers, operators, company administrators, and policymakers in related fields, to comprehensively understand current technologies' infra-knowledge structure and limitations.

All aboard the puzzle train! This book is fully loaded with 200 railway-themed puzzles, perfect for aficionados as well as inquisitive commuters More than just a means of transport, trains have changed the world. Across centuries and continents, they've been unstoppable. But when you're sitting back in your seat on a long rail journey, why not pause for a puzzle or two? From quick quizzes and riddles to more leisurely crosswords and sudoku, whether you're a locomotive obsessive or just enjoy the occasional trip, there's plenty in these pages to fire up your mental furnace and keep you going full steam ahead to the end of the line. Inside you will find a rich variety of puzzles, including these: Find the names of world-famous locomotives within word searches Shuffle the letters of anagrams to identify essential railway paraphernalia Guess the meaning of some technical train-related terms Figure out what happened during strange-but-true incidents from railway history

Between soaring mountains, across arid deserts, parched plains and valleys of fruit orchards and olive groves, down glittering coastlines and along viaducts towering above plunging ravines... there is no better way to see Spain than by train. Rail enthusiast Tom Chesshyre, author of Slow Trains to Venice, Ticket to Ride and Tales from the Fast Trains, hits the tracks once again to take in the country through carriage windows on a series of clattering rides beyond the popular image of "holiday Spain" (although he stops by in Benidorm and Torremolinos too). From hidden spots in Catalonia, through the plains of Aragon and across the north coast to Santiago de Compostela, Chesshyre continues his journey via Madrid, the wilds of Extremadura, dusty mining towns, the cathedrals and palaces of Valencia and Granada, and finally to Seville, Andalusia's beguiling (and hot) capital. Encounters? Plenty. Mishaps? A lot. Happy Spanish days? All the way.