High Speed Trains: Fast Tracks to the Future.

The Stockholm School of Economics in this book is bringing a collection of papers to as wide an audience as possible.

There is much in this book to interest many different groups of people. Rail enthusuasts will find here arguably the most comprehenisve collection to date of writings on the subject of high speed trains, with a historical perspective on developments in all those countries which have, as it were, gone the high speed track.

Those to whose interest in railways can be added a concern for the general concept of publicly-owned transport infrastructure may well bristle at the thoughts of Mendoza on the role of the train in the burgeoning Spanish economy, or at Hawke's perhaps cursory dismissal of the argument that railways rarely compete for funds with roads on a 'level playing field'. But they will surely find inspiration in Whitelegg and Holzapfel's thought-provoking championship of the cause of local and regional rail services.

Equally, as much as the above may choose to skip some of the more theoretical chapters, it is precisely these which make this collection a work of considerable importance to academics in a variety of disciplines - economists, historians, economic historians and others.

And those whose interests touch the romance of rail travel, or the great buildings which railways have created, will surely delight in the enthusiasm of Richards and MacKenzie and their vision of the railway palaces of the future.

John Whitelegg is Head of Geography at Lancaster University, and a world authority on public transport. Staffan Hulten is Assistant Professor at Stockholm School of Economics, where Torbjorn Flink ia a researcher.