It all started in 1964 when two friends gave up promising medical careers to embark upon a journey which few hardened truckers would have considered. In so doing, they were solely responsible for creating the first long haul overland route, across Europe and deep into the Middle East to Kabul. The men had started the 'Middle East Run' was to become a phenomenon in the road haulage industry, an image which it still holds today. This book is about the company founded by one of those men, from its fledgling days as Asian Transport to the thriving Astran Cargo Services Ltd that it is today. In this book Ashley Coghill documents the complete history of the company to date with the focus predominantly on the early days when the men were fighting for something and revelling in the adventure. These early long haul drivers would think nothing of a 10,000 mile round trip to Iran or the Arabian Gulf and being stranded at 6,000 feet on a mountain pass with temperatures below -40 was just all in a day's work. Ashley Coghill has an immense enthusiasm for his subject and has given his research total dedication. He has also tracked down past and present employees to gather first hand information which he has illustrated with over 300 carefully selected images. The end result is a detailed, comprehensive and fascinating account of an extraordinary company.

CRST International, a pioneer in the American trucking industry, has transported goods throughout the United States for over 50 years. With more than 5,000 employees, CRST has grown considerably since its early days headquartered in an Iowan chicken coop. Founded by Herald Smith Jr. in 1955, CRST initially filled empty livestock rigs with steel shipments from Chicago to Cedar Rapids. Through adroit acquisitions, the company rapidly expanded its collection of franchises. It is now the leading trucking company in Iowa and one of the largest in the country. CRST is a lesson in the payoffs of calculated risk and the success that a company can attain under creative leadership. Whether challenged by competitors, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), or by market fluctuations, CRST has maintained the entrepreneurial drive necessary to succeed. CRST has taken on struggling franchises, turning them into successful enterprises. It has experienced near-violent confrontation, such as the Teamster Union strike of 1971, surviving to become an even more improved company. When governmental deregulation hit the trucking industry in 1980, CRST increased its revenues by 25 percent despite the overwhelming challenge. Shortly thereafter it became only the third carrier in the history of the United States to receive nationwide transportation authority. Renowned for its safety record and the quality of its drivers, CRST has acquired a reputation for security and reliability. Under the current leadership of Herald Smith's son, John, CRST has continued to grow and earn accolades within the industry. In it for the Long Haul: The Story of CRST is a journey through half a century of American trucking and atestament to the ingenuity, drive, and determination of the CRST team.

Brain Haulage was formed by Charles Edward Brain in 1950 and played a major role in the container revolution in the UK, completely changing the way goods were transported over the world. Peter Sumpter was a driver with Brain Haulage until it closed in 1992 and is an unofficial archivist of the brand, having taken hundreds of photographs and chronicling his adventures in a diary for over 20 years. Brain Haulage Ltd tells the history of Brain and the container revolution as well as the story of Charles Brain; from his early years working for the L.M.S. Railway at Camden Town, to his time in the R.A.F. during the second world war, to eventually starting his own haulage company. The rest of the story is from Peter's own diary and the many ex-drivers and Brains staff he worked with over the years. Including over 300 previously unpublished photographs Brain Haulage Ltd is a unique book, ideal for anyone interested in containers and their revolution, as well as road transport and haulage trade enthusiasts.

Investigations of people in transit across the informal hubs, terminals, and nodes that crisscross Eastern Europe and Vienna. Stop and Go is a research project by architect and artist Michael Hieslmair and cultural historian Michael Zinganel that focuses on the transformation of the informal hubs, terminals, and nodes along Pan-European transport corridors in Eastern Europe and Vienna. Following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the expansion of the EU, the need to improve infrastructure and develop faster connections between places affected the public realm at the margins and even in the center of cities. Stop and Go investigates the people in transit across these transnational networks with descriptive text, images, and maps.

This vivid account tells the story of the truckers who were driving from the UK to the Middle East in the early 1980s. The journey was rough, tough, exhausting, dirty, uncomfortable and dangerous. Journalist Franklyn Wood reports that 'in the course of the one trip we are following, seven Britons died in accidents.' Among the physical hazards were icy mountain hairpins, unmade roads and desert sandstorms. Human hazards included Kamikaze coach drivers, robbers, mind-numbingly slow border controls, rogue police and the temptations of the drivers' favourite watering holes. The route led from Europe, through Turkey, Iraq (during its war with Iran) and on to the wealth and culture shock of Saudi Arabia. The cargoes were often worth a million pounds. Delivering them and returning home for the next load - this was the Olympics of truck driving. "Cola Cowboys" was originally published in 1982 when it proved extremely popular. It has been out of print for many years and has been reprinted by popular demand.

From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.