It would be a truism to say that the functions of trains in modern history have been diverse and multifarious. Steam engines were drivers of the British industrial revolution, and the motors of internal westward expansion in North America. Railways were instruments of imperial expansion, as exemplified in Cecil Rhodes' Cape-to-Cairo fantasy, and instruments of extermination, carrying Holocaust victims to their awful fate.
A railway map of South Africa reveals much about the course of the country's economic history since the 1880s, with lines converging on the Rand, the industrial and mining metropolis. Meanwhile rural branch lines were constructed to serve the interests of white capitalist farmers, totally excluding the needs of black rural areas.
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