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Steam engines from earliest days to fond recollection
AN OVERVIEW of the earliest
pioneering railway
days, when locomotives
sped from obscurity to
five continents, is given in The
Grand Experiment: The Birth of
the Railway Age 1820-1845 by Stuart
Hylton (Ian Allan Publishing,
£19.99).
At the start of the period, ideas for
the Stockton and Darlington, and
Liverpool and Manchester lines,
were taking shape. Even as late as
the 1840s, about 50 horse-drawn
carriages still jostled with 19
steam locomotives on the Stockton
and Darlington line.
Apparently this was less dangerous
than the independent drivers, who left signals wrongly set, drove
at night without lights and at
speed, and drank. It seems there
was a complete lack of rules and
regulation, and subcontractors
milled in their hundreds of thousands
with little regard for health
and safety. People would travel on
the roofs of trains, and instead of
banning the practice, nets were
put up to catch those who fell.
Early timetabling was clearly deferential;
a train would just stop for
a two-hour lunch break if an important
passenger, or even the driver,
wanted to. Hylton's smooth
mix of economic, political and social
history lets the momentous
years shudder, charge and crash
along.
Local lines survived until the
1950s, so take a ride on the 10,000
miles closed in the last 60 years in
Along Lost Lines by Paul Atterbury
(David and Charles, £25). The
journey around the regions is
packed with old and new photographs
and information about
timetables, the Beeching Report,
stations and viaducts, name plates
and signals and freight from fruit
to gunpowder.
In East Anglia, the Mid-Suffolk
Light Railway "was cheaply built
across farmland, so it was quickly
and easily returned to that farmland
after it closed". In the Northern
England section is a bridge
near Kettleness that "survives to
show that there was once a railway
from Whitby to Redcar". Fortunately,
great lengths of track
beds are still around to be seen.
Unfortunately, there hasn't been
that much public access to them,
though hereabouts there is the
Whitby track bed that is good for
bikes and walkers, not the aforementioned
connection to Redcar,
but the other way south to Scarborough.
East Coast Main Line at Nationalisation:
A British Railway Pictorial
by Michael Dove (Ian Allan Publishing,
£12.99) pulls along with
evocative black and white photos
taken line-side in the 1940s and
early 1950s. The previously unpublished
collection is by the author
and his brother John. "But
the schoolboy spotters have gone,
and the atmosphere of old, with
simmering engines and steam rising
from carriage-pipe connections,
is no more".
Dove opens with a brief history of
the East Coast Main Line from the
days when the equine Great North
Road was the alternative. But
horses weren't a pushover; apparently,
London to Newcastle could
be done at a charge by carriage
with 25 changes of horse - that's
100 for the journey, with a swift
change done in less than a
minute, "conjuring up scenes akin
to present-day Grand Prix pitstops".
Dove covers the tracks, the machinery,
notably Mallard's 1938
speed of 126mph, and the men,
principally Sir Nigel Gresley, the
chief mechanical engineer from
1923 until his death in 1941. Gresley
engineered his famous locomotives:
"the typical syncopated
beat of a Gresley Pacific" and got
seats in the cabs for drivers. Listen
from the moors between Pickering
and Grosmont, because the
North Yorkshire Moors Railway
has a Gresley.
The Second World War brought
staff shortages, less speed and
more breakdowns. Dove notes
which side of a bridge gave shelter
from the blizzard, but generally
the past glows.
The "southbound Queen of Scots",
the "pottering" A4 William
Whitelaw, the "idyllic scene long
since disappeared - no forest of
posts holding up catenaries hyperbolic
curves of cable and a
mass of other wires, no prestressed
concrete technological
structures, just wonky telegraph
poles and an old iron and brick
bridge".
1:55pm Friday 7th March 2008
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