Francois Caron, ed. Les grandes Compagnies de chemin de fer en France, 1823-1937. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 2005. 411 pp. ISBN 2-600-00942-6, {euro}41.61 (paper).

This is a book that is hard to describe and hard to review.It is certainly not an ordinary study of railway history buta kind of broad survey, based on a series of financial reportsconcerning the great French private railway companies, as drawnup between 1882 and 1936 by financial analysts of the CreditLyonnais Bank and preserved in the "Archives Historiques duCrédit Lyonnais." François Caron, dean of Frencheconomic and railway historians, has selected large parts ofthe original reports and has added his own comments and explanations.It