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Here is a tale of armies of men travelling halfway round the world to shovel foreign soil into English wheelbarrows, a story of high finance with millions raised in London for such exotic sounding enterprises as the Ferrocarril al Oeste, or the Bombay, Baroda and Central Indian Railway. The first 'railways' were used in mines in Germany with trucks running on plain wooden tracks with a groove down the middle. The development of steam engines paved the way for the locomotive. This special book tells the story of how the British were responsible for the construction and management of a large proportion of the railways constructed in Africa, South America and Australasia, not to mention many thousands of miles of mileage in Asia, India, Malaya, Burma, China and Japan. The book looks at the political, economic and technical aspects of this development. 264 glossy white pages with over 100 colour and archive images and woodcuts for example of Robert Stephenson the great engineer, photos of American railroads, navvies at Balaklava and a McIntosh Caledonian Railway locomotive built by North British for the Belgian Stage Railway circa 1908.