A silk worm and its cocoon, from illinois.edu.

The Canadian Pacific Railway could be regarded as a technological extension of the Silk Road of China. When this Canadian railway was built, special train cars were created to bring Chinese silk cocoons from the docks in Vancouver, British Columbia, and transport them east to the mills in New Jersey and New York. Silk was extremely rare and valuable, so the train cars were carefully designed to preserve the precious cocoons. So great was the possibility of robbery that the so-called Silk Trains stopped infrequently, speeding quickly to reach their destination with precious cargo intact with armed guards aboard.

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.