Commissioned to produce an album for the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée (PLM) railroad company, Édouard Baldus drew on a decade of work to present the products of Second Empire technology and engineering as the natural descendants of France’s architectural past. Stations, tunnels, tracks, and viaducts intermingled with Roman aqueducts and medieval cloisters. At a time when some argued that the railroad interrupted the landscape, erased local customs, and doomed the small towns that it bypassed, this album, with its blend of historic architecture, modern engineering, and natural landscape, celebrated the railroad as a powerful vehicle of political, economic, and cultural unification.