The complete steam news magazine

Off the shelf: 5 August 2010

This month's book reviews by Heritage Railway.

From models to the real thing, you’ll find much to inspire you in our selection of good reads.

We have teamed up with Amazon UK to allow you to purchase many of them on-line at reduced prices.

If you have a title you'd like us to review, please drop the HR team a line from our contact page. 

The Essential Guide to Welsh Heritage and Scenic Railways

By Mervyn Thomas (softback, Oakwood Press, 192pp, £16.95, ISBN 978-0853617020).

If you think Wales is just about narrow gauge and heritage lines, think again. This excellent volume looks at all the railways and railway locations of interest in the principality and the borderlands like Gloucestershire and Shropshire.

Each of the main lines is described, with standout features highlighted, and each section usually concludes with a brief description of nearby places of interest, often unconnected with railways.

As well as the well-known heritage railways like the Ffestiniog and Talyllyn, smaller preservation venues and schemes are also covered, like the Llanelli & Mynydd Mawr Railway and Pontypool Railway Museum. There is a brief history of each railway and a wealth of splendid colour photographs.

It is amazing that the author has packed so much into a handy-sized volume: he even has a glossy of railway-related Welsh language terms. This incredibly useful book is a must if you want to visit Wales to explore any aspect of railways.

The Main Lines of East Anglia

By John Brodribb (hardback, Oxford Publishing Company/Ian Allan, 256pp, £25, ISBN 978 0 86093 629 9).

The author, an authority on the railways of East Anglia with several books to his credit, has produced a new book looking in detail at the changing shape of the network in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, north Essex and parts of Hertfordshire.

An outline of the history of each route is given, along with detailed information on its services, both passenger and goods, on local and main line trains.

As well as today’s routes, those that have been closed are also included. Packed with monochromatic pictures, the highly-readable volume combines key technical information with personal anecdotes of those who worked on the line.

The book may be expensive, but for those who wish to study the subject in more than basic detail, it is the best place to start.

Derbyshire in the Age of Steam

By Steve Huson (softback, Countryside Books, 128pp, £10.99, ISBN 978 1 84674 159 3).

The Midland Railway made Derby its headquarters and established a workshop which became a byword for transport engineering excellence. The county, which contains some of Britain’s most delightful mountain scenery, became bisected with railways in the early to mid-19th century, and the county owes so much of its growth to them.

But what about the people who built them, operated and travelled on them. Railways changed the lives of countless rural communities forever as well as transforming Derby into a sizeable industrial centre of Victorian times.

This book not only explores the history of Derbyshire’s railways but places them in the context of the human impact: the daily life of staff, the railway village built to house staff, the hotels where passengers stayed, the main stations and even the railway servants’ orphanage in Derby. The role that railways played in everyday life in the 20th century, from school trips to turning the wheels of industry, the two world wars and the main line today are all covered.

Highly readable, the author takes a refreshing angle which services to remind us that railways were not all about locomotive power and performance and the liveries that they carried, but about people.

Return From Dunkirk: Railways to the Rescue – Operation Dynamo (1940)

By Peter Tatlow (softback, Oakwood Press, 184pp, £13.95, ISBN 978 08536 1697 9)

This excellent little book has been crying out to be written for a long time. It highlights the pivotal role the railways played in the great evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, and its appearance is timely with regard to the 70th anniversary of what the author describes as the greatest logistical operation ever carried out at short notice.

Locomotives from different ‘Big Four’ had to be rostered to work through to the Kent ports for the first and only time in their history, routes had to be cleared for transporting large numbers of troops across the country in one fell swoop and dispersal points had to be organised.

This book will have far wider appeal than just the railway fraternity. The story of how the little ships risked all to take the troops off the beaches is well known; less so the contribution of the railways back home. The wealth of archive pictures is remarkable.

There is an appendix which includes a log of all troop trains which passed through the key point of Redhil following Operation Dynamo, and a fold-out map of Dover harbour and its lines as it would have been in 1940.

George & Robert Stephenson: A Passion for Success

By David Ross (hardback, The History Press, 318pp, £20, ISBN 978 0 7524 5277 7).

It is always refreshing when new light can be shed on such pivotal figures.

The Stephenson father-and-son team stood head and shoulders above all other engineers, apart from, the author concedes, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Through Rocket they shaped the path that railway traction would take, and therefore to say that their impact on the modern world is colossal is a gross understatement.

Their careers and achievements are outlined in depth but in a highly-readable way that makes this volume pleasingly accessible to all. The seminal moments of the Rainhill Trials, the London & Birmingham Railway and the establishment of the great Newcastle locomotive building firm are placed within the context of the father-son relationship and the many disappointments which were interspersed with the great successes.

The author takes great pains to produce a more rounded and therefore human view of the great inventor George as a character, while examining his boyhood, and even whether he was born at Wylam, one of six children of illiterate parents, as popularly accepted.

Informative, and thought provoking throughout, it may now be considered essential reading for serious students of early railway history.

Devonshire Railways

By Colin G Maggs (hardback, Halsgrove Publishing, 158pp, £19.99, ISBN 978 1 84114 912 7).

This is by no means the first on the railways of Devon to appear, but it does contain a large amount of fascinating and previously-unpublished monochromatic views, which the large A4 portrait format uses to good effect.

The county was dominated by two companies, the GWR and LSWR (SR), and thus we have a huge variety of traction from GWR 517 0-4-2Ts and 4300 class moguls to Bulleid Pacifics and Adams Radial tanks.

The rarer pictures include that of an armoured train on the Barnstaple-Braunton line in July 1940, an ex Plymouth & South Western Junction Railway 0-6-2T at Bere Alston and a pair of London horse trams making up a passenger train on the Marland Light Railway.

Giving a brief history of each of the main line routes and the main freight-only branches and industrial lines, it provides an overview and ideal introduction to the subject.

From Rag to Railway: 50 Years of Preservation on the Middleton Railway

Edited by Ian Dobson, (softback, Middleton Railway, The Station. Moors Road, Hunslet, Leeds LS10 2JQ, 0845 680 1756, 78pp, £10 including p&p, ISBN 978 0 9558264 5 0).

To mark the pioneer standard gauge preservation line’s bicentenary, this splendid little book packed with 160 colour and black-and-white pictures has been produced.

Covering most of the traction that has run on the line, including the Swansea & Mumbles railway tramcar which was infamously scrapped, it showcases the challenges that the preservationists have faced in their battle to keep the world’s oldest railway in continuous operation running.

The foreword is written by Susan Youell, widow of the late Leeds University lecturer Dr Fred Youell, who led his students to a takeover of the line.

For anyone interested in the Middleton or industrial railways in general, it is a bookshelf must.

The Chiltern Railways Story

By Hugh Jones (softback, The History Press, 192pp, £17.99, ISBN 978 0 7524 5454 2).

Chiltern Railways is widely recognised as one of if not the most successful of the post-privatisation train operating companies, and this is a timely appearance in view of the company’s recent feat in running a steam special on to the Chinnor & Princes Risborough Railway for the first time.

The book looks at the growth of the company through the eyes of key personnel, like the company chairman, the managing directors, the operations director, the finance director and so on, along with ‘ordinary’ staff like the drivers and stationmaster not least of all supremo Adrian Shooter, widely known as a steam enthusiast with his own private railway.

It is all there, from the revival of the ‘overlooked’ Chiltern line, the building of Warwick Parkway to the 2005 Gerrards Cross tunnel collapse to the aspirations for future expansion. The overall picture is one of inspiration, and just what can be achieved with British railways today.

For more reviews, see this months issue, available to buy online!