Fire & Steam
A New History of the Railways in Britain
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Narrated by:
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Christian Wolmar
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By:
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Christian Wolmar
About this listen
Fire & Steam celebrates the vision of the ambitious Victorian pioneers who developed this revolutionary transport system and the navvies who cut through the land to enable a country-wide railway to emerge.
From the early days of steam to electrification, via the railways' magnificent contribution in two world wars, the chequered history of British Rail and the buoyant future of the train, Fire & Steam examines the importance of the railway and how it helped to form the Britain of today.
©2007 Christian Wolmar (P)2008 SoundingsListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"An excellent book." ( Independent)
"It is written in a brisk, down-to-earth style (a favourite adjective is "daft"), and is enjoyably replete with bizarre details" ( Guardian)
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- The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
- By: Richard White
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The transcontinental railroads of the late 19th century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the US economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, and remade the landscape of the West. As wheel and rail, car and coal, they opened new worlds of work and ways of life.
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Correcting the Myth of the Transcontinentals
- By Keith on 06-23-18
By: Richard White
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Divided Highways
- Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life
- By: Tom Lewis
- Narrated by: Jim D. Johnston
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In Divided Highways, Tom Lewis offers an encompassing account of highway development in the United States. In the early twentieth century Congress created the Bureau of Public Roads to improve roads and the lives of rural Americans. The Bureau was the forerunner of the Interstate Highway System of 1956, which promoted a technocratic approach to modern road building sometimes at the expense of individual lives, regional characteristics, and the landscape.
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Lots of interesting facts. Poor narration
- By Richard on 06-01-21
By: Tom Lewis
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Breaking Rockefeller
- The Incredible Story of the Ambitious Rivals Who Toppled an Oil Empire
- By: Peter B. Doran
- Narrated by: Peter B. Doran
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Marcus Samuel, Jr., is an unorthodox Jewish merchant trader. Henri Deterding is a take-no-prisoners oilman. In 1889 John D. Rockefeller is at the peak of his power. Having annihilated all competition and possessing near-total domination of the market, even the US government is wary of challenging the great "anaconda" of Standard Oil. The Standard never loses - that is, until Samuel and Deterding team up to form Royal Dutch Shell.
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Tale of business, cultures, dances as it teaches
- By Philo on 05-25-16
By: Peter B. Doran
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Faster, Higher, Farther
- The Volkswagen Scandal
- By: Jack Ewing
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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A shocking exposé of Volkswagen's fraud by the New York Times reporter who covered the scandal. In mid-2015 Volkswagen proudly reached its goal of surpassing Toyota as the world's largest automaker. A few months later, the EPA disclosed that Volkswagen had installed software in 11 million cars that deceived emissions-testing mechanisms. By early 2017 VW had settled with American regulators and car owners for $20 billion, with additional lawsuits still looming.
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Excellent recap of VW, its structure and culture
- By Northern IN Mark on 05-27-17
By: Jack Ewing
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Crabgrass Frontier
- The Suburbanization of the United States
- By: Kenneth T. Jackson
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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This first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day.
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There is so much to think about here.
- By Richard McKown on 06-25-23
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The Big Roads
- The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
- By: Earl Swift
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From author Earl Swift comes the surprising history of the U.S. interstate system, a fascinating route through the dreams, discoveries, and protests that shaped these mighty roads.
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Lessons from The Big Roads
- By Joshua Kim on 05-06-12
By: Earl Swift
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Nature's Metropolis
- Chicago and the Great West
- By: William Cronon
- Narrated by: Jonah Cummings
- Length: 18 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.
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Moving
- By JB on 02-09-18
By: William Cronon
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Capitalism in America
- A History
- By: Alan Greenspan, Adrian Wooldridge
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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From the legendary former Fed Chairman and the acclaimed Economist writer and historian, the full, epic story of America's evolution from a small patchwork of threadbare colonies to the most powerful engine of wealth and innovation the world has ever seen.
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Explains a lot
- By Scott on 02-18-19
By: Alan Greenspan, and others
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Drive!
- Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age
- By: Lawrence Goldstone
- Narrated by: Christopher Price
- Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed author of Birdmen comes a revelatory new history of the birth of the automobile - an illuminating and entertaining true tale of invention, competition, and the visionaries, hustlers, and swindlers who came together to transform the world. With a narrative as propulsive as its subject, Drive! plunges us headlong into a time unlike any in history, when manic innovation and consumerist zeal coalesced to forever change the way people got from one place to another.
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Ford Detractor.
- By Eric Johnston on 08-15-22
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A Brief History of Motion
- From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
- By: Tom Standage
- Narrated by: Liam Gerrard
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted fans and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Now, he returns with a provocative account of an overlooked form of technology - personal transportation - and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia. Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel - a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention - Standage zips through the eras of horsepower, trains, and bicycles, revealing how each successive mode of transit embedded itself in the world we live in.
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Great listen
- By CKerb on 11-09-21
By: Tom Standage
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Glory Lost and Found
- How Delta Climbed from Despair to Dominance in the Post-9/11 Era
- By: Seth Kaplan, Jay Shabat
- Narrated by: Joseph Durika
- Length: 25 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Glory Lost and Found: How Delta Climbed from Despair to Dominance in the Post-9/11 Era tells the story of Delta's dramatic tumble into bankruptcy and how it climbed its way back to pre-eminence despite hurricane-force headwinds: high fuel prices, a hostile takeover bid, relentless competition, economic meltdowns, and geopolitical shocks.
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For Aviation Enthusiasts & the Business Industry
- By Striker on 03-24-17
By: Seth Kaplan, and others
What listeners say about Fire & Steam
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Matt
- 03-16-20
Narrator makes it Hard to Follow
While the book is decent, it's hard to follow because of the author slurring his words and moving the story along too quickly. It's recommended to read this story at .90 speed or less, or to go back if you have missed some details.
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Overall
- Brian Cohen
- 09-05-08
A story of how technology impacts society.
A thoroughly absorbing story detailing the history of rail in Britain; how it affected and transformed the social fabric in the Industrial age and how it had to, ultimately, transform itself to deal with modern times, technological advancements (usually through necessity) and the whims of political interference.
A simple thing like the standardization of time from village to village is a consequence of being able to maintain a train schedule! This and other anecdotes show how things that are taken for granted today presented major problems in the mid 1800s. Fresh milk in the city, only if you had a cow in the back yard! What do you imagine life was like when the typical speed of transportation was only 2mph!
If you love technology or even just how it can impact life, there is no better read. This is the 19th century equivalent of the Internet revolution,
Non British readers may be confused by all the place names but they are so well interwoven into the compelling narrative that you will actually want to know where they all are, I would suggest having a small map of the UK handy to pinpoint the locations.
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11 people found this helpful