The railway as an institution with social, economic, cultural and political functions
If you have read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, first published in 1957, you will know that the protagonist Dagny Taggart is vice president of Taggart Transcontinental Railways, described as one of the most important assets for the “engine of the world”. According to the fantastic plot of the book, when they stop working, along with the electricity grid and the mining industry, the economy collapses. I don’t know if Rand’s novels and philosophy are popular in China (when they were first published in the USA between 1957 and 1962, sales of her books were second only to the Bible). However, it is a fact that today China has one of the most highly developed, busiest and fastest rail networks in the world. Since 2024, it is also the largest. Railways emerged in China during the last decades of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In 1949, the total length of railways in China was only 21,800 km. At the end of 2024, China now has more than 159,000 km of railways.
