Few technologies have had as profound an impact upon the urban environment as the railway. Allowing the rapid and inexpensive transportation of people, goods and ideas, by the end of the nineteenth century the rail networks had a dramatic influence upon the shape size and architecture of virtually every city and large town in Europe and beyond. In order to further understanding of the complex and dynamic inter-relationship between city and rail, this volume provides a selection of essays that address a variety of themes from a broad international perspective.


Building upon scholarly concepts explored in a previous volume, 'The City and the Railway in Europe' (Routledge, 2003), this new collection expands the geographical focus by including essays that look at examples not only in Europe but also from India, Nigeria, the USA, Mexico, Chile and Japan. This allows many questions raised in the original volume to be positioned and tested within a much larger framework, one that is not limited to the particular social, cultural, economic and geographical considerations of western Europe.