He was said to have encyclopaedic knowledge of the railway world, after devoting his life to the subject.
Other government agencies also had serious financial problems out of fifty, auditors found problems with forty-nine but the scale of plunder in the railway world was in a class by itself.
As a result, within a few years China may well have the most advanced railway industry in the world.
"Only in the twisted world of railway regulation could a 10% improvement be damned as a failure, " a senior Railtrack source told the BBC.
Poppy seeds are being sown around a rural Cambridgeshire railway station in time for the World War I centenary.
Basking in the reflected glory of Tony Blair's 1997 general election victory, he promised to make the country's railway system the best in the world, though Virgin's reputation for quality was damaged by his trains' poor record.
It's the world's oldest transcontinental railway, though owing to its small size, it is typically described as transoceanic.
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London's subway, the world's first underground railway network, first opened in 1863.
Sharing part of the same route as the Glacier Express (between Chur and St Moritz), the Bernina Express runs along the World Heritage-listed Rhaetian Railway.
It's the London Underground - the world's first underground railway.
At any rate, the sheikh can console himself with the knowledge that the metro will be the world's biggest computer-operated train system, and its Union Station will have the world's biggest underground railway concourse.
Modernity, they proudly and not uncontroversially say, has arrived in this backward region in the form of an engineering miracle that has laid tracks on land gripped year-round by ice, a railway line at higher altitude than any other in the world.
He said the railway attracts 150, 000 visitors to Leicestershire from around the world every year.
In its life the engine has worked on the Foxdale mines, the Snaefell Mountain Railway and the line to the internment camp at Knockaloe during World War I.
On the road back to Rio, we stop underneath a spectacular old iron railway bridge - "the first curved iron bridge in the world, " Mauricio informs me, with some pride.
At one point a railway station, at another a race course, the theatre becomes an all-encompassing world intended to reflect the characters' obsession with etiquette, decorum and manners.
The road to the town's rubbish dump runs out of the city beside a railway line, before veering uphill, past shacks reminiscent of the shanty towns of a Third World city.
The railway, too, starts to descend rapidly, repeating its routine of hairpin turns, before entering a world of meadows, orchards and vineyards.
The Mallard, famous for breaking the world speed record for steam traction in 1938, will be pulled by Tornado to the National Railway Museum in Shildon.
This tradition goes back at least as far as the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin (the best in the world, a century ago), which was paid for by the builder of the Chicago elevated railway.
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