The Railway Conquest of the World

There is an unfathomable fascination with the romance connected to the construction of great railways, yet little is known of the beginning and growth of the pioneering railways of the world, of the heavy tax that their construction imposed on the ingenuity, skill and resources of their builders. Speeding swiftly along a railway with a road-bed as smooth as an asphalt pavement conveys no impression of the perils and dangers faced, or of the infinite labour extended in the making of that steel li