Baron James de Rothschild, Europe’s leading banker and industrialist and owner of the Northern Railroad, commissioned 25 copies of this album as gifts for the railroad’s board of directors. Reprising a lavish album of photographs by Édouard Baldus presented to Queen Victoria during her state visit in 1855, this version celebrated a shortened route on the line destined to be an essential economic link between Britain and France. The album’s mix of stations, tracks, bridges, and viaducts alongside historic monuments in the towns along its route shows two radically modern technologies—photography and the railroad—still in their early days.