This is literally the story of the nuts and bolts of steam locomotives -- an amazing description of the development of railroads, both mechanical developments and lines, especially in Great Britain and her colonies.

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) was a zealous advocate of material progress based on individual enterprise and free trade. From 1845 to 1866 he was engaged in railway administration, and in 1857 he published a life of the inventor and founder of the railways, George Stephenson. Best known for his didactic work Self-Help (1859), which, with its successors, Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880), enshrined the basic Victorian values associated with the "gospel of work."