THREE things stand out after reading Christian Wolmar’s latest book – how many tens of thousands lost their lives creating railways in inhospitable parts of the word, how much freedom railways brought to mankind and how great a contribution they made to the world.

Mr Wolmar makes it clear his job is not to tell the reader about all the world’s railways, an impossible task in a book of 330-plus pages, but to give a taste of the immensity of the task the engineers took on.

In his world-wide tale, some of the death rates were astonishing with one estimate that 25,000 lives were lost in the construction of the Ghat inclines and an estimated 6,000-plus lost building the Panama line. Terrifying.