German Raiders of the South Seas

"The band had played Watch on the Rhine, the sailors left behind cheered, other men waved their hats, and women cried, as the Emden pulled out of Germany's China colony of Tsingtao for the last time" Thus begins a World War I epic that was, both literally and in spirit, a world away from the trenches and slaughter of France and Belgium. Were it not all real and true, it would make wonderful fiction: the Emden survivors from the battle with the Australian cruiser Sydney sailing a leaking copra schooner from the Cocos Islands to the East Indies, the Wolf sailing undetected in Allied waters for months, the captain of the Seeadler, von Luckner, sailing a small boat halfway across the Pacific to Fiji, and then later making a dramatic escape from a New Zealand prisoner of war camp.

History

Bromby, Robin

Australia & Oceania

Highgate Publishing

The nightmare of three different gauges, the daunting challenge of building railways across vast open spaces often with no water supplies, the follies of railway lines that were rarely used: all this is the saga of Australian railways, the sheer hard work and often suffering of those who gave their life's service to the railways. Brimming with anedotes and colorful stories. Australian Railways: Their Life and Times documents the old, the odd and the now forgotten. Complete with rare historic photographs.

Australian Railways: Their Life and Times

New Zealand railway builders surmounted many obstacles: the terrain, a sparse and scattered population, two islands separated by an often stormy stretch of water, demands from every small settlement for their own railway line. But build a railway system — and a comprehensive one at that — New Zealand did. This is the story of that railway, from its heyday to the day of reckoning as losses had to be confronted. By 1953 the pattern was clear. The era of railways as the mainstay of land transport throughout New Zealand was ending. One by one, most of the rural branches would disappear over the next forty years; passenger train travel — other than commuter services in Auckland and Wellington — would almost disappear to a stage where there are just a handful of tourist services on the most scenic lines; all but the largest towns would lose their railway station. But, until then, the railways of New Zealand were part of almost everyone’s life: you caught the train to visit friends and relatives in other parts of New Zealand, you depended on the trains to carry the bulk of the freight that moved to and from the ports. This is their story. Profusely illustrated with photographs and maps.

New Zealand Railways: Their Life and Times

Engineering & Transportation

Transportation

From the broadcast of the first news bulletin on radio in 1920, daily newspapers have been under pressure from a succession of challenges, ranging from television to suburban weeklies until — finally — the internet. Along the way the industry was beset by industrial disputes, reluctance to embrace the latest technologies, crippling rises in costs of newsprint and labour, traffic gridlock that hampered city newspaper deliveries. By the time it became possible to get your news on a computer, and then on other mobile devices, the newspaper industry was passed its best. Then many papers made the near fatal decision to give away their news for free online, a strategy that was realised too late to be a dreadful mistake. Newspapers: A Century of Decline charts this century-long saga.

Newspapers: A Century of Decline: How the Internet was the Last Straw for Print News

Reference

If you were going to try and pick a point when what we think of as "the Great Railway Age" came to an end, then 1965 would be as good as any. Steam was either gone from railway networks, or it was on its last legs: rail travel was no longer the only viable long-distance (land) transport mode; the proliferation of the motor car and the growth in jet passenger aircraft capability offered attractive travel options. More and more railway stations and lines were being closed in parts of the Western world, meaning that no longer would the bulk of people have regular contact with trains. But the fascination with railways and their history would endure - and this books captures the continuing appeal of trains, looking back over a century to the many stories that need to be told. This is a book for those who love railways.

Railways: Their Life and Times: Facts, Figures and Curiosities about Trains from Steam to High Speed