When, in the late 1980s, the federal government initiated a plan to deregulate the Canadian railway system, lobby groups protested the betrayal of a national mandate. They asserted that the railway was founded to promote a sense of national identity, to provide access to isolated regions of the country, and to ensure a transnational exchange of goods and ideas. In The Philosophy of Railways, A.A. den Otter considers the relationship between nationalism and technology, and shows how the popular rhetoric surrounding the evolution of the Canadian Pacific Railway has mythologized the...