The drastic railway closures of the 1960s led to the slow decay and re-purposing of hundreds of miles of railway infrastructure. Though these buildings and apparatus are now ghosts of their former selves, countless clues to our railway heritage still remain in the form of embankments, cuttings, tunnels, converted or tumbledown wayside buildings, and old railway furniture such as signal posts. Many disused routes are preserved in the form of cycle tracks and footpaths. This colourfully illustrated book helps you to decipher the fascinating features that remain today and to understand their original functions, demonstrating how old routes can be traced on maps, outlining their permanent stamp on the landscape, and teaching you how to form a mental picture of a line in its heyday.
Many readers will be familiar with Nigel Welbourn’s long running series of books, covering lost railways in Britain and Ireland. This new book Lost Railways of the World is the latest by this author on the subject of disused railways. The material for this volume has been collected and researched over a period of almost fifty years of world travel by the author. Informative text records the fortunes of the world’s lost railways and every country with significant disused railways is included. Lost railways are a unifying theme, being found throughout the world, from the hottest African desert to the coldest steppes of Russia. The book has a surprisingly British flavor as historically many railways throughout the world used British equipment and operating practices. On his first trip in the 1970s the author discovered British signaling equipment in Europe. In 2020 he discovered the same firms’ equipment in South America. The world’s top ten lost lines are listed, from the seven-mile-long sea bridge on a line that ran through the Florida Keys, to the rugged mountain splendor of the Khyber Pass Railway. Some of the oldest, largest, longest, most northerly, southerly, expensive, crookedest, steepest, highest, lowest and most notorious lost railways are included. Quirky and other unique tales from lost railways are included, such as the disappearing phantom bridge, a line destroyed by molten lava, to one that sank under the sea, another that conveyed giant turtles, to a memorial to a brave railway elephant. The author also visited remote areas of Argentina and provides more information on the mysterious disappearance of the ex-Lynton & Barnstaple Railway locomotive Lew. A large number of the 300 color illustrations have not been published before, maps and stories from around the world will delight not only the railway enthusiast, but appeal to a wider cadre of readers with an interest in nostalgia, history, geography and travel. To some the book will be an informative source of information, to others it is written in a way that highlights the most amazing lost railways in the world, but either way it is a fascinating and unique book.
The beautifully restored St Pancras Station is a magisterial example of Britain’s finest Victorian architecture. Like the viaducts at Belah and Crumlin, cathedral-like stations such as Nottingham Victoria and spectacular railway hotels like Glasgow St Enoch's, it stands proud as testament to Britain's architectural heritage. In this stunning book, John Minnis reveals Britain's finest railway architecture. From the most cavernous engine sheds, like Old Oak Common, through the eccentric country halts on the Tollesbury line and the gantries of the Liverpool Overhead Railway, to the soaring viaducts of Belah and Cumlin, Britain’s Lost Railways offers a sweeping celebration of our railway heritage. The selection of images and the removable facsimile memorabilia, including tickets, posters, timetables and maps, allows the reader to step into that past, serving as a testimony to an age of ingenuity and ambition when the pride we invested in our railways was reflected in the grandeur of the architecture we built for them.
This instructive book grew from a lecture given to the School of Military Engineering at Brompton Barracks. At that time the focus was naturally on the railway as it related to military activity, especially defense. The book extends to 17 chapters each dealing with an aspect of railways such as track, rolling stock and so on.
Di Drummond's concise and informative guide to Britain's railways will be absorbing reading for anyone who wants to learn about the history of the industry and for family history researchers who want to find out about the careers of their railway ancestors. In a clear and accessible way she guides readers through the social, technical and economic aspects of the story. She describes in vivid detail the rapid growth, maturity and long decline of the railways from the earliest days in the late-eighteenth century to privatization in the 1990s. In the process she covers the themes and issues that family historians, local historians and railway enthusiasts will need to understand in order to pursue their research. A sequence of short, fact-filled chapters gives an all-round view of the development of the railwaysIn addition to tracing the birth and growth of the original railway companies, she portrays the types of work that railwaymen did and pays particular attention to the railway world in which they spent their working lives. The tasks they undertook, the special skills they had to learn, the conditions they worked in, the organization and hierarchy of the railway companies, and the make-up of railway unions - all these elements in the history of the railways are covered. She also introduces the reader to the variety of records that are available for genealogical research - staff records and registers, publications, census returns, biographies and autobiographies, and the rest of the extensive literature devoted to the railway industry.
