Viaduct at La Voulte

Standing on the banks of France's Rhone River, Édouard Baldus photographed an old town and historic building framed within the arch of a modern iron railroad bridge. Photographs regularly recorded the engineering feats that went hand-in-hand with railroad building, often illustrating links between the past and the future. Just as twenty-first-century train passengers now delight in speeding across France at almost two hundred miles an hour, record speeds of thirty to forty miles per hour exhilarated travelers in the 1800s.