Transportation : Railroads

Tom Perkins had a dream. It wasn't to get rich, acquire power, or marry into fame. As the man most responsible for creating Silicon Valley, he had done all that. His venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, remains the most celebrated money machine since the Medicis. He'd helped found Genentech and fund Google. And in 2006 his resignation from the Hewlett-Packard board triggered the revelation of a spying scandal that dominated the front pages. Along the way, he also managed to get himself convicted of manslaughter in France and become Danielle Steel's Husband No. 5. No, as he hit his seventies, Perkins wanted to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever—the ''perfect yacht.'' His fantasy would be a modern clipper ship—as long as a football field, forty-two feet wide, with three masts each rising twenty stories toward the heavens. This $130 million square-rigger— The Maltese Falcon —would evoke the era of magnificent vessels that raced across the oceans in the nineteenth century. But the Falcon is more than a tribute to the past. Gone are all the deckhands to climb the yardarms. Gone is the intricate rigging that helped give the square-riggers of yore their impressive look. Instead, the Falcon 's giant carbon-fiber masts are entirely freestanding and rotate by computer. The bridge looks like something out of Star Trek. And the fifteen huge sails unfurl at the touch of a screen. In short, this is a revolutionary machine—the most significant advance in sailing in 150 years. With keen storytelling and biting wit, Newsweek 's David A. Kaplan takes us behind the scenes of an extraordinary project and inside the mind of a larger-than-life character. We discover why any sane man would gamble a sizeable chunk of his net worth on a boat; we meet the cast of engineers who conspired with him; and we learn about the other two monumental yachts just built by gazillionaires that Perkins is e more...

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No Way to Go is an edited collection of papers that discuss the links between transport disadvantage and social exclusion in Australia. The book begins by exploring the global context for the Australian experience, with a series of papers from international contributors. In the second section, case studies based on recent empirical research examine the situation from the perspectives of different marginalised groups in Australian society. The book concludes by examining the implications for Australian social and transport policy. more...

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This textbook covers the very wide spectrum of all aspects of railway engineering for all engineering disciplines, in a ‘broad brush’ way giving a good overall knowledge of what is involved in planning, designing, constructing and maintaining a railway. more...

Price: $62.40

This book addresses the role of railways in urban development. The central aim is to inquire into how especially the development of high-speed rail and light rail links will affect European cities. The analyses are carried out with special attention given to the broader institutional environment of the railway system, including the shift toward privatised railway companies, internationalisation, the occurrence of market and government failures in land markets, and private-public partnerships in the development of railway station areas. The essence of the plans to invest in railway stations is that railway stations are not considered merely as nodes where people transfer from one vehicle to another, but also as places where spatial concentrations of high value activity are recognised as having a positive impact on cities. The development of real estate near stations is increasingly seen as a negotiation process in which both public and private actors play certain roles to revitalise central urban areas. more...

Price: $149.00

Loved for their radically new, streamlined look, the Hiawathas Art Deco engines were a hallmark of American industrial design. For Midwestern passengers from Chicago to Aberdeen, the Hiawatha represented speed, comfort, and luxury. From 1935 to 1970 it carried countless passengers and even more memories. Richly illustrated, The Hiawatha Story brings the design and history of this beloved rail fleet to life. more...

Price: $29.95