Anthologies of railway writing and poetry
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Christmas thoughts 2016 (Kevin): one of his four dear daughters gave him yet another anthology and this has (1) shown that this webpage has serious deficiencies (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa) which need to be corrected before it is too late and (2) inspired thoughts of yet another poem (built atround the names of the LNER Pacifics, which in turn were based on racehorses: Spearmint (Toram Beg's favourite); Trigo and Honeyswell and so on and on: this will be sent to some  outer galaxy of cyberspace. 

The arrival of Lambert's railway miscellany prompted the creation of this page. Now Train songs compiled by Sean O'Brien and Don Paterson (Faber & Faber, 2013) has completely changed the concept of railway anthologies: it is so excellent. Lambert's work was excluded from this webpage as it failed to identify its sources and in fairness did not claim to be an anthology. Strictly, the term is intended for poetry or work of literary merit. Train songs must now be the paradigm and contains a rich collection extending back to William Wordsworth's protests, and the work of many ladies who are great users, and secret lovers, of trains. The compilers are remarkably modest as not a single poem of their own is included: in the case of Sean O'Brien this is a serious failing.

Both Morgan and Simmons include poetry and both pass this test. Whitehouse excludes poetry and is limited to Ian Allan publications or publications for which Ian Allan held the rights. In the introduction it states that it was a sort of bedside book (this threatens to open a whole can of worms). Simmons is not faultless, but there is a great depth to some of the entries as exemplified by John Stuart Mill's statement on the great utility of a railway link between London and Brighton, but not at the risk of despoiling the vale of Norbury at the foot of Box Hill (Mill thou shold'st be in the Chilterns now). I, Kevin, am inclined to think that if I had begun with Simmons this page would not have been created as Simmons created a can of worms: some of the entries are quotations (excellent ones), and some are too long,  Should one cite an item in an anthology? What is the place of fiction within a world dominated by fact? Even Simmons' Introduction (reproduced in full) is both interesting and yet wholly unsuited to forming part of a webpage which invites the question what is the place of an anthology in the world of electronic text. Will the Kindle reader add anthologies to their collections? Finally it is worth noting that Simmons produced three other anthologies. The Wikipedia entry on anthologies (28 August 2011) shows the limitations of the genre within a technological context.

It is tempting to start an online railway anthology which may be initially limited to motive power: it would have to include something from George Dow's British steam horses, something from Michael Rutherford's articles in Backtrack, something from Brian Reed, Riddle's account of approaching Crewe far too fast on the press run of Coronation Scot, and no anthology could exclude Hamilton Ellis or Bulleid, father and son..

Bryan Morgan
The railway-lover's companion. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963. 555pp.
Very well arranged; generous extracts; sources quoted; carefully selected non-photographic illustrations. Reviewed by H.S. in Rly Wld., 1963, 24, 399 who generally concurred, but noted the absence of Kipling.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: The Enthusiasts

Watching the trains go by. Roger Lloyd (The fascination of railways, 1951) 25-7
The collector. Alvin F. Harlow (A treasury of railroad folklore, 1953). 27-34
The modeller. E. Beal (The craft of modelling railways, 1937). 34-6
Romantic and classic L.T.C. Rolt (Lines of character, 1952). 37-9.
The old Great Western. W.A. Tuplin (Great Western steam, 1958). 39-41
Journey into childhood. C. Hamilton Ellis (The trains we loved, 1947). 41-5
The old man and the boy. Clifford Dyment. (The railway game, 1962). 46-57

Part II: The Making of Britain's Railways

Preview. Marjorie Whitelaw. (The Review of the Hunting Group of Companies, 1958 March). 61-9
Liverpool to Manchester, 1830. Anon (quoted in The railway age by C. Bruyn Andrews, 1937). 69-76
Railways in 1843. W.M. Acworth (The railways of England. 5th ed., 1900) 76-94
The Mania and the Crash. John Francis (A history of the English railway, 1851) 95-100
The Battle of the Gauges. Jack Simmons (The railways of Britain, 1962) 100-2
Racing to Scotland .Roger Fulford (BBC Broadcast July 1951) 103-7
London to Aberdeen by East and West Coast routes
North and South in 1889. E. Foxwell and T. Farrer (Express trains, 1889) 108-111
Character of the railways south of the Thames: slower, but with better Sunday services
The Last Main Line. John Pendleton. (Our railways, 1894) 111-17.
The nimbies of St John's Wood and Lord's Cricket Ground in protest at the MSLR's southward extension
The golden years. C. Hamilton Ellis (British railway history, 1877-1947. 1959) 117-27
"Brief years, from the death of Queen Victoria to the outbreak of war in 1914, were proud years."
War and Amalgamation. Jack Simmons (The railways of Britain, 1962) 127-36
World War Two. C. Hamilton Ellis (British railway history, 1877-1947. 1959) 137-43
Up to date. Jack Simmons (The railways of Britain, 1962) 143-7

Part III: Men and Machines

The Pioneers. Samuel Smiles (The life of George Stephnson, 1857). 151-66  
The Rainhill Trials O.S. Nock (The railway engineers, 1955). 167-73.
Patrick Stirling. O.S. Nock (Steam locomotive: a retrospect of the work of eight great locomotive engineers. 1958). 174-6
Richard Moon. C. Hamilton Ellis (British railway history, 1877-1947. 1959). 176-7
Henry Ivatt. G. Giffard Jackson  (Book of the locomotive, 1924). 177-9
Churchward's Classics W.A. Tuplin (Great Western steam, 1958). 179-85
The heyday of steam. O.S. Nock (Steam locomotive, 1957). 186-8
Nigel Gresley. O.S. Nock (Steam locomotive: a retrospect of the work of eight great locomotive engineers. 1958). 189-91
Rolling stock. C. Hamilton Ellis (The trains we loved, 1947) 191-202.
The twilight of steam. Geoffrey Freeman Allen (British railways today and tomorrow, 1959). 203-10

Part IV: The Master-builders

Order out of chaos. Charles Dickens (Dombey and Son, 1846). 213-14
The navigators. John Francis (A history of the English railway, 1851). 214-18
Railways and landscapes. Michael Robbins (The railway age, 1962). 219-22
The architecture of railways. Christian Barman (An introduction to railway architecture, 1950). 223-42
The railheads of London. John Betjeman (First and last loves, 1952). 242-54
Temple Meads Station. Jack Simmons (The Railways of Britain, 1961). 255-6
York Station. John Pendleton  (Our railways, 1894). 257-8
The Royal Albert Bridge L.T.C. Rolt (Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 1957). 258-64
The Britannia Bridge. H. Shirley Smith (The world's great bridges, 1953). 264-5
The Woodhead Tunnel. O.S. Nock (The railway engineers, 1955). 266-70
The Severn Tunnel. C. Hamilton ElIis (British railway history, 1877-1947. 1959) 270-5

Part V: A network of lines
East Coast to Scotland. O.S. Nock (Scottish railways, 1950). 279-80
Express to the West. Cecil J. Allen (Titled trains). 280-3
Atlantic Coast Express
Cambrian profile. L.T.C. Rolt (Lines of character, 1952). 283-8
On Cambridge Station. Roger Lloyd (The fascination of railways, 1951). 288-92
City and suburban. Jack Simmons (Railways of Britain, 1961) 293-301
Tuppenny tubes C. Hamilton Ellis (British railway history, 1877-1947. 1959) 302-10
Irish extension. L.T.C. Rolt (Lines of character, 1952). 311-16.
Once per month Dingle cattle train over Tralee & Dingle
London extension. John Betjeman. (Punch, 25 August 1954) 317-19
Steam trains operating within London, including Clapham Junction to Olympia
Farewell to a branch. R.C. Robertson-Glasgow (Sunday Times, 16 April 1961) 319
Non-specific; rather the atmosphere of the rural branch line

Part VI: Safety, danger and disaster
Signalling grows up. Richard Blythe (Danger ahead, 1951). 323-33
Full of information about the history of railway signalling: including biographical information about Charles Vincent Walker, Edward Tyer, Charles Ernest Spagnoletti, etc.
The first fatality. The Times (Friday, 17 September 1830). 334 -5
Death of Huskisson
Dickens in danger. Charles Dickens (Letters of Charles Dickens, 1893). 336-7.
Abergele,1868. John Pendleton (Our railways, 1894). 338-41.
Thorpe, 1874 L.T.C. Rolt (Red for danger, 1955). 342-5. 
Penistone, 1884. John Pendleton. (Our railways, 1894). 345-7 
Armagh, 1889 L.T.C. Rolt (Red for danger, 1955). 347-51.
Grantham, 1906 L.T.C. Rolt (Red for danger, 1955). 351-4.
Ais Gill, 1913 L.T.C. Rolt (Red for danger, 1955). 354-7
The Tay Bridge Catastrophe. John Prebble (High girders. 1955) 357-71
An American heroine. J.A. Swisher (The Palimpsest, VI (2) 1925.
On 6 July 1881 Kate Shelley managed to get help, at great disregard for her own safety, to stop the midnight express when severe floods led to the collapse of the Honey Creek bridge on the Chicago & North Western RR

Part VII : Services and specials
Sleeping-car. Roger Lloyd  (The fascination of railways, 1951) 379-82
Overnight Glasgow to Euston: vague awareness of Carlisle and either Tamworth or Lichfield
Dining-car. Paul Jennings (The Observer, 29 October 1962). 382-5.
Buffet-car. Bryan Morgan (The compleat imbiber, 1956)
Station hotel C. Bruyn Andrews (The railway age, 1937). 389-91
Great Western Railway Hotel at Paddington; also mentions the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria and the Charing Cross Hotel.
Bradshaw, 1885. F.S. Williams (Our iron roads, 6th ed., 1885). 391-3
Bookstall. Henry Mayhew (London labour and the London poor, 1851). 393-4
More on what was sold and at what prices: newspaper prices reflected demand
Boat train. Roger Lloyd (The fascination of railways, 1951), 394-6
Via Winchester and Southampton to the Channel Islands and Le Havre.
Ferry train. Paul Jennings (The Observer, 12 February 1961). 396-8
Impression left by wagon owned by Societe Anglo-Belgique des Ferryboats.
Excursion train. Thomas Cook (Leisure hour, 1860). 398-9
How idea arose
Courier's train. Anthony Carson (Punch, 2 June 1956). 399-403.
Victoria to Sitges and return with adventures with customs at Port Bou and in tunnel with over-ventilated rolling stock: Ryanair seems far simpler.
Emigrant train. Robert Louis Stevenson (Across the Plains, 1892). 403-14
Union Pacific RR towards San Francisco
Hobo's train. W.H. Davies (Autobiography of a super-tramp, 1908). 415-16
Ammunition train. Peter Fleming  (BBC Broadcast 1949). 417-22
Larissa in Northern Greece during WW2 in April 1941
Deportation train. Andrew Karpati (The Observer 16 July 1961). 422-6
Hungarian Jewish citizen deported from Hungary to Lower Austrian internment camp

Part VIII: Foreign parts
Comments on Three Nations. Bryan Morgan (The end of the line, 1955). 429-37
France, Italy and Germany.
Through the Alps. Cecil J. Allen (Switzerland's amazing railways, 1959). 437-41
Belgian branches. Peter Allen and P.B. Whitehouse (Narrow gauge railways in Europe, 1959). 441-4
Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Vicinaux
Hardships in Jugoslavia. Peter Allen and P.B. Whitehouse. (Narrow gauge railways in Europe, 1959). 445-8
Journey from Dubrovnik to Mostar and (presumably) Sarajevo 
The Road to Samarkand. Peter Fleming  (BBC Broadcast, November 1949). 449-51
Japanese journey. C.S. Small (Far wheels, 1959). 451-4.
Osaka to Nogoya on secondary routes
Short Line, U.S.A. Lucius Beebe (Mixed train daily, 1947). 454-60.
Oxygen in the Andes. C.S. Small (Far wheels, 1959). 461-3

Part IX: Fact and fiction
Mixed passengers. Leais Carroll (Alice through the looking glass, 1871). 467-9
The vanishing train. Arthur Conan Doyle (The collected stories, 1924). 469-85
Journey to the summit. R.B. Cunninghame-Graham (Success, 1922). 486-93
Story of a dying man's journey from Euston to Beattock
The great locomotive chase. John Buchan (A book of escape and hurried journeys, 1925). 493-501
Dickens and the railway. Robin Atthill (English spring, 1961). 501-9
Belloc breaks a vow. Hilaire Belloc (The path to Rome, 1902). 509-10.
Como to Milan by train
Strike service. Spike Hughes (Opening bars, 1946). 511-13
Volunteer during General Strike: served as guard (on milk train from Ely to Cambridge), then as signalman.
The harebell hunters. Richard Collier (A house called memory, 1960). 514-17

Part IX: Railway verse

Opening Hymn. Anon. 521
Tragic Incident. T. Baker. 522
King Steam. Ned Farmer. 523
The Speculators. W.M. Thackercry. 524
Casey Jones Anon. 525
The Little Red Caboose Behind the Train. Anon. 527
The Tay Bridge Disaster. William McGonagal1. 528
Are Ye Right There, Michael? Perry French. 529
The Iron Steed. Robert Louis Stevenson. 531
From a Railway Carriage. Robert Louis Stevenson. 531
Faintheart in a Railway Train. Thomas Hardy. 532
Romance. Rudyard Kipling. 532
Cyclopean. G.K. Chesterton. 533
Broad-Gauge Farewell. Horatio F. Brown. 533
Dawn. Rupert Brooke. 534
Morning Express. Siegfried Sassoon. 535
A Local Train of Thought. Siegfried Sassoon. 535
Railway Note. Edmund Blunden. 536
Two Wars. Edmund Blunden. 536
Adlestrop. Edward Thomas. 537
The Everlasting Percy. E.V. Knox. 538
The Express. Stephen Spender. 539
Night Mail. W.H. .Auden. 540
The Railway Cat. T.S. Eliot. 542
Incident in August. Bryan Morgan. 544
Harviston End. Peter Ling. 545
Exploring. John Betjeman. 546
Nostalgia. R.P. Lister. 547
A Prayer. W.R. Rodgers. 549
Aackowledgements. 551
Index of Authors

Prospects
Seamus Heaney. The Railway Children. 3
Emily Dickinson. 'I like to see it lap the Miles'. 4
Willlam Barnes. The Railroad. 5
Willlam Carlos Williams. Overture to a Dance of Locomotives. 6
Walt Whitman. To a Locomotive in Winter. 8
Robert Louis Stevenson. From a Railway Carriage. 10
Elizabeth Bishop. Chemin de Fer, 11
Kenneth Koch. One Train May Hide Another. 12
Les Murray. The Away-bound Train. 15
Ruth Stone. Train Ride/ 18
Frances Cornford. To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train. 19
Willlam Stafford. Vacation. 20
Randall Jarrell. The Orient Express. 21
Stephen Spender. The Express. 23
Peter Didsbury . The Guitar. 24
Anon. Working on the Railroad. 26
Charles Simic. Leaving an Unknown City. 28
Paul Farley. From a Weekend First. 29
James Wright. A Poem Written under an Archway in a Discontinued Railroad Station in Fargo, North Dakota. 31
Hugo Willlams. Now That I Hear Trains. 32
Norman Dubie. The Train. 33
Philip Larkin. The Whitsun Weddings. 35
Flanders and Swann. The Slow Train. 38
Mark Waldron. The Very Slow Train. 40
Alan Brownjohn. The Train. 41
Willlam Wordsworth. On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway. 42

Stations
Walter de la Mare. The Railway Junction. 45
Simon Armitage. The Metaphor Now Standing at Platform 8. 47
W.H. Auden. Gare du Midi. 49
Edward Thomas. Adlestrop. 50
John Betjeman. Pershore Station, or A Liverish Journey First Class, 51
Wilfred Owen. The Send-Off. 52
Frances Cornford. Parting in Wartime. 53
Thom Gunn. Berlin in Ruins. 54
Patrick McGuinness. Correspondances. 56
Christopher Middleton .Pointed Boots. 57
John Montague .All Legendary Obstacles. 58
Dennis O'Driscoll. A Station. 59
Louis Simpson. The Unwritten Poem. 61
U.A. Fanthorpe. Father in the Railway Buffet. 62
Ian Hamilton. Pretending Not to Sleep. 63
Tony Harrison. Changing at York. 64
Michael Hofmann. Nighthawks. 65
Helen Dunmore. The marshalling yard. 67
Philip Larkin. Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel. 69
Dannie Abse. Not Adlestrop. 70
Wislawa Szymborska. The Railroad Station. 71

Underground
Ezra Pound. In a Station of the Metro. 75
Michael Donaghy. Poem On The Underground. 76
Seamus Heaney. District and Circle. 78
Seamus Heaney. The Underground. 81
W.N. Herbert. Comrade Bear. 82
Edwin Morgan. The Piranhas.  83
Matthew Sweeney.  Tube Ride to Martha's. 84
Charles Reznikoff. .from Jerusalem the Golden. 85

Travellers
Robert Johnson. Love in Vain Blues, 91
Wendy Cope. 'Indeed, 'tis true'. 92
Hugo Williams .Day Return. 93
Sherman Alexie. On The Amtrak From Boston To New York City. 94
John Ashbery. Melodic Trains. 96
John Betjeman. Thoughts in a Train. 99
John Fuller. In a Railway Compartment. 100
Elma Mitchell. The Passenger Opposite. 101
Douglas Dunn. Renfrewshire Traveller. 103
Paul Durcan. Tullynoe: Tete-a-Tete in the Parish Priest's Parlour. 105
Louis MacNeice. Corner Seat. 107
Dan Pagis. Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car. 108
Les Murray. Troop Train Returning. 109
Peter Porter. On the Train Between Wellington and Shrewsbury. 111
Jean Sprackland. The Stopped Train. 114
Hugo Williams. Toilet. 116
Ruth Stone. 'The widow likes to ride on trains'. 118
Robert Crawford  The Railway Library. 119
Ian Duhig. Jericho Shandy. 121
Thomas McCarthy. The Emigration Trains. 125
Michael Longley. Couchette . 127
Norman MacCaig. Sleeping Compartment. 128
Loulse Gluck. The Chicago Train. 129
Louis Macneice. Figure of Eight . 130
Ciaran Carson. Yes. 131
Grete Tartler. Orient Express. 132
Carol Ann Duffy. The Way My Mother Speaks, 133

Night
Anon. The Midnight Special. 137
T.S. Eliot. Skimbleshanks: the Railway Cat. 139
W.H. Auden. Night Mail. 142
Thomas Hardy. The Missed Train. 145
Willlam McGonagall. The Tay Bridge Disaster, 146
Edna St Vincent Millay. Travel. 149
Paul Muldoon The Train. 150
Sam Phillips and Junior Parker. Mystery Train. 151
Linda Pastan. At the Train Museum. 153
Carl Sandburg. Limited. 154
Dave Smith. Cumberland Station. 155
Ken Smith. Zoo Station midnight. 158
James Thomson. In the Train. 159
Katrina Porteous. If My Train Will Come. 160
George Szirtes. Ghost Train. 161
Tom Waits. Train Song. 163
Louis Macneice. Charon. 164
Norman Nicholson. Coastal Journey. 165

Acknowledgements. 167

Index of Poets. 171

The ODNB biography makes it very clear that Jack Simmons was first and formost an academic whose primary interest was to promote the standing of Leicester University. His interests were wide; but as was noted by A,L. Rowse he was a slow writer. His interests included both literature (a book on Southey) and history. As a compiler of three anthologies (one on African discovery, one on journeys in England, and one on Devon) it is possible to characterise him as an anthologist and when seen in this capacity it is easy to understand his strong bond with George Ottley and it seems  ev odd that George was not acknowledged in the limited range of helpers in the prefactory section.

A few of the entries (below) are the entries per se as it was impossible to abstract what was in effect a very short quotation; see entry 50 for instance. Some like 171 are potent reminders of serious Parliamentary papers which now look wildly absurd, such as proposals for railways on the Island of Arran and elsewhere in rural Scotland made in 1919. Sometimes, as in 149, they capture the utter arrogance of the so-called upper classes, even during War time. A few (202, for instance where J.M. Dunn is clearly being quoted) raise another problem with works of this type in that it partially consists of nests of quotations and extracts and the compiler may only be aware of this to a limited extent.

Introduction
This book brings together some 320 comments that have been passed on railways in Great Britain and Ireland, ranging in length from three words to six printed pages, and in time from 1615 to 1989. That the collection should be limited to the British Isles may seem insular, but anyone who thinks so must recognise that railways have forged a literature across the world. To illuminate them all alike – themselves and their work and the experience they have occasioned – would demand an enormous book. Wolfgang Minaty combed German literature to make his excellent anthology Die Eisenbahn in 1984. In Le Train dans la littérature française Marc Baroli charted the course of the railway through the wonderfully productive literature of France. As for the United States, the American railroad ballads – to take them alone – would make a book very much larger than this one. A world-wide anthology of railways, in say five volumes prepared by a committee, would seem readable to ten devoted students, no more. And how much joy would that bring? But if the comments presented here all relate to the British Isles, some of them come from sharp-eyed foreigners: from the Dane S. E. Rasmussen (173) from two highly intelligent German engineers (32) and from Theodor Fontane (20, 81); from Taine and de Franqueville (97,138); from Nathaniel Hawthorne (95) and the expatriate Henry James (67, 139, 285c).

What was it that such writers as these, whether foreigners or natives, were looking at? Some were only trying to describe operations they saw – though even that might be an exacting task, for several of them were barely literate (11, 19). Some were moved to plain admiration, or to affectionate laughter; others to denigration or fear or intense dislike. As railways grew to be a normal, accepted part of life, familiar to most people, they came to provide a natural setting for imaginative works, in a train or at a station or on the line; but it was a setting different from any other, offering its own opportunities, imposing restrictions. These observers were not required to invent, however. Some of the best did no more than record, needing only a pair of good eyes, a pencil and a scrap of paper or a sound memory. For the railway is unconsciously self-revealing. It has become an institution, to some of those who run it a way of life (208), governed by strict rules, codes of practice and conduct, influenced now and then by something thought of rather vaguely as "public relations"; a craft the railways seldom mastered (see 26, however, 168, 173) and for which they often display no feeling whatever in our time (178).

The literature of railways is not confined to literary works. One may come upon it in odd places: scribbled up in a disused station (285g); proclaimed on gravestones and memorial tablets (205), in a legal judgment (59) or in evidence given to Parliamentary committees (22, 35, 154). Even when the comment is made by a well-known writer it may have been published in an unlikely place. What some people may find one of the best pieces of prose here comes from a letter addressed to a Manchester newspaper in I884 (268).
The railway cannot properly be thought of as a work of engineering, an economic and administrative device, alone. It was forged and maintained by human beings, for the service of other human beings. This book is not concerned primarily with the railways' technical equipment or their complicated operations, with pounds and pence or with management, though all those important things find a place here. The human beings are the heart of it: those who used the railways, admired or denounced them, the men who built them and made them work. It deals very largely with the people who travelled on the railways themselves or watched them carrying passengers, and with the effects that their work seemed to produce. In that it reflects the literature itself, for most of those who have written about railways in such a way as to interest us now were concerned with them as instruments of human life and effort, and as agents of change. The eyes and minds of some of them reached out in pursuit of that change, delighted by the new facilities, the release the railways afforded (87, 9I, 96) through their services and the security and regularity they offered, to a degree never known before (272). But others viewed them much less favourably, pointing to the social miseries and injustice often entailed by their construction (236, 245), to the dangers involved in their working – spelt out carefully in the inspecting officers' reports on accidents (see for instance 80,83,84, I60) – and the damage they might cause to the landscape they traversed (58, 219, 268).

Now and then this observation, at its most refined, concentrates itself not on human beings in general or on the community a railway served but on one person, who speaks of it and its arrangements as they affected a single life. People who remember the old Euston station thirty years ago, before it disappeared, will if they are candid be bound to agree that it had become a sad, dreary muddle. Yet it was a place entered and left by millions of human beings, and to many of them its physical shortcomings mattered very little. To some, intent on the meetings to which it opened the way, it personified happiness and love. One of them expressed this feeling in a haunting elegy on the old station (279).
That was the work of a woman. Only twenty-four pieces in this book are due to women writers. Railways may not be, in any special sense, their subject. Yet they all travel on them, and they can comment on their journeys quite as well as men. Some people (I am certainly among them) feel they owe what is the most richly comic account of a railway journey made anywhere in the British Isles to two Irish ladies (1l7). Emily Dickinson wrote one of the most delightful of all tributes to a locomotive, "I like to see it lap the miles", but alas it has had to be excluded here according to the rules of the book, for it relates to New England, not to Old. (Those rules have also required the omission of Kipling's splendid poem "The King".) Patricia Beer illuminates the character and conduct of a little line in East Devon (her father was a railwayman there) and muses on its closing (55). Confronted with a railway Beatrix Potter's eyes, as usual, missed nothing (260d, 273).

Looked at all together, these writers make up an interesting company. Among the professionals four Victorians stand out, as one might expect: Dickens, Ruskin, Trollope, and Hardy, each with several pieces in the book. Three politicians who were, or became, Prime Ministers figure here; two Poets Laureate; three clergymen. Railway men, of different types, show us something of their own business. We come here face to face with George Stephenson in the early days and with Brunel, the most articulate of railway engineers. Then in 1889 we can observe George Findlay, who was the first officer of an English company to set out with the deliberate intention of describing and interpreting the practices of railway management to the public; a public that had shown itself strongly critical of that management for more than twenty years before he wrote. His book was a pioneer, a deft and intelligent exercise in public relations. At the same time too a much younger man, W.M. Acworth, published his observations on the railways of England. He wrote in a way that was intelligible and highly attractive to the general reader. These two men's success in their widely different tasks can be proved, for five editions of each of their books were called for in 1889-1900.

Acworth has had no successor in the twentieth century. No writer equally expert has appeared, commanding the same respect both in the railway and in the academic worlds, and at the same time communicating easily and plainly with laymen. On the other hand the range of opportunities for recording well-informed comment on railway matters was greatly enlarged in his time by the multiplication of journals and other vehicles for publishing, and a new interest in railways showed itself among imaginative writers who had no connection with railways at all, which has carried on into our own time. Arnold Bennett and Max Beerbohm, Sassoon and Eliot and Wodehouse and Betjeman all figure in this book; Osbert Sitwell too, damning trains as "slums on wheels" (286g). He wrote, as usual, with a satirist's exaggeration, tongue in cheek. But his dislike of railways has come to be widely shared in the twentieth century; notably by those who support and make use of other means of transport, though not by them alone. Politicians have treated them with undisguised cynicism, as a public service to be favoured or disadvantaged not in accordance with any long-term strategy of social or economic development but as passing opportunity might seem to them and their advisers to dictate, and with no regard whatever to the morale of the service itself, which ought to have been among their cares (256). High technology has been accompanied on the British railways by low reliability. The timetables they issue twice a year contain a great deal of inaccurate or carelessly-presented information. The computer is a great new public servant, but it needs a direction that British Rail seems unable to supply.

Yet at the same time something of just the opposite tendency has emerged. The contraction of the railway system, in the face of improving transport on the roads and in the air, moved slowly in the 1930s, quickened as a consequence of Hitler's war, and then gathered speed rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s. This was seen by many people to be a weakening of the vital services they relied on; services, moreover, to which Great Britain had just owed a debt in war-time that was beyond adequate acknowledgement (204-5). It represented the loss of a lifelong acquaintance, an old companion, or at least a tool of life that seemed to be there for good. The displacement of the steam engine, carried through at what some well-qualified observers thought a brash and injudicious speed (48), symbolised the whole process, and it provoked an extraordinary demonstration of regret and resentment. Much of this was futile, an attempt to resist changes that were demonstrably required. Dr Beeching, who enunciated the "reshaping of British railways", was held up – to my surprise, he is still held up in some quarters thirty years later – as a figure of evil. Most unjustly: for he was a public servant, making a case for what had to be done to relieve the railways of part of the burden they carried, and making it cogently (175). But the emotion was there, and it would express itself; sometimes after a very dignified fashion, rather in the spirit of what Cromwell called "cruel necessity", and – though very rarely - enjoying the luck to be recorded by an eye-witness who could do justice to both the necessity and the sadness (54, 55).
This reaction against public policy went further than demonstrations of mourning as lines were shut down and steam engines taken out of service. It set out positively to find the means of keeping some of what had been condemned, or of resurrecting it after it had been killed. The way to success in this effort was shown when the Talyllyn Railway was prevented from closing and put immediately on to its feet, by a society formed for the purpose, in 1950-1 (56). This successful operation was quickly matched by others. Today there are some fifty "preserved" railways in the British Isles, running passenger services in summer over nearly 200 miles of line.

None of these enterprises was ever expected to make a true profit. The work has called for much professional expertise, in engineering, management, and finance. But though some of that has of course had to be paid for, the whole is essentially an achievement of amateurs. Most of them are amateurs in the fullest sense of the word: they are lovers of railways. Similar things have been done all over the world during the past forty years, some of them on a considerably larger scale. But the example was set on that Welsh railway, and Wales has reaped the reward it deserved. Its "Great Little Trains" have drawn many visitors there, to look at them and enjoy travelling on them through a remarkable landscape, and the money they have spent has aided the economy of a tract of the British Isles that has never been rich.

It is right to end the consideration of the things that have gone into this book by dwelling on the affectionate attitude towards railways displayed in Britain. The mechanically-worked railway was set going there on a path of its own; a path that proved to be different from that laid down in other countries, different in management, in engineering, and in operation. The British government played no part at all in determining the system (210, 217), and though there were those who thought, at various times, that it should assert itself and take them over (236), that policy did not prevail until 1947. A British railway came to be immediately recognisable, even on a casual inspection, as something different from one that was to be seen anywhere else: its carriages smaller and divided into compartments, which most North Americans disliked (104); its engines smaller too (for running in small islands), neat and trim, concealing many of their moving parts (50, 274); adorned with a spare and telling precision and painted in a striking variety of colours – green, red, blue, brown, black.

Those liveries, worn by engines and carriages alike (46), personified the British railways' competitive system. For all the discomfort, and sometimes the strong hostility, that railways might arouse in Britain, the general affection for them lasted, and is apparent still. It derives ultimately from a certain pride, in the fact – clear beyond argument – that Britain pioneered the mechanically-worked railway. As an American put it, looking back to the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester line in 1830: "Its advent was in the highest degree dramatic. It was even more so than the discovery of America" (7).

A little needs to be said about the distribution of the pieces printed here. The first section of the book brings together a small number of passages illustrating the early emergence of the railway in Britain. The next two are concerned with the building of the lines, the machinery used in working them, and the speed the service attained – one of the most evident and undeniable advantages it enjoyed in competition with any other form of long-distance public transport until the middle of the twentieth century. Section 4 considers the opening of lines and, in our own time, examples of their closing and revival. In spite of what they offered, they had to face opposition and strong public criticism (Section 5), exacerbated by misfortunes they encountered and by much that was evidently wrong with their operation (Section 6).
Section 7 opens out the whole act of travelling by train, the opportunities, the pleasures and unhappiness to which it might give rise. In Section 8 stations are treated on their own; the chief interface between railways and their public. The next two sections illustrate the working of the railways: their organisation (Section 9), the men of all kinds who built and ran them (Section 10).
Section I I looks at the part the railways came to play in the life of the community of these islands as a whole. And finally, Section 12 tries to draw together something of the total experience that arose from railways and their working, to consider the impression they have made on the minds and eyes, the imagination of those who saw and used them.
The date in diamond brackets at the end of each piece gives the date (or approximate date) that the piece refers to. The order of the pieces within each section is usually chronological (except where a number of short ones on a single subject have been grouped together).
This book is in no sense a history of railways. But it is a commentary on that history, largely in the words of men and women who observed it themselves but also, at some points, in those of historians who have looked back and reflected on it since.
Leicester
September 1990
j.s.

Contents
1. Prehistory
1. Origins
Huntingdon Beaumont via Statement by Francis Strelley in proceedings before the Court of Chancery, 1615: Richard S. Smith in Renaissance and modern studies (1960) p. 123)
2. Wind-power at Neath
William Walker. An essay on the mines, late of Sir Carbery Price (1698), preface
3. Tanfield Waggonway.
M.J.T. Lewis. Early wooden Railways (1970). p. 150
4. The first known account of a railway journey.
Swansea to Oystermouth in 1808: Elizabeth Isabella Spence. Summer excursions through parts of Oxfordshire... 2nd ed. 1809, 2, 98 (Ottley 7397)
5. George Stephenson agrees to take a pupil.
George Stephenson to W.T. Salvin, Croxdale, near Durham, 25 June 1827. Durham Record Office
6. A noble salute
Perceived advantages of railways. Quarterly Review, 1830, 42, 404.
7. The railway bursts on the world
Charles Francis Adams, jr. Railroads: their origins and problems (1886 ed.), 3-5

2 Construction
8. Staemboats, viaducts, and railways.
William Wordsworth. Shorter poems
9. How to deal with the railways
George Eliot. Middlemarch (1971)
10. Stagg's Gardens
Charles Dickens. Dombey and Son (1846-7)
11. The power of steam
London footman's diary of 1837: Diary of William Tayler; ed. D. Wise (1962), p. 51
12. General Pasley inspects a tunnel [Higham east of Gravesend]
F.R. Conder Personal recollections of English engineers (Ottley 4016) republished as The men who built railways (1983), pp. 154-6
13. Surveying in Wales: [Vale of Neath: Merthyr Tydfil to Swansea]
Alfred Russel Wallace. My life (1908, ed.), pp. 131-3
14. Rapid railway building [section of York to Scarborough line opened within one week]
Liverpool Mail, 12 July 1845
15. Level crossings
a. [Lincoln High Street]: Sir Francis Hill. Victorian Lincoln (1974). p. 174
b. [Lostwithiel]: I.K. Brunel to W.H. Bond, 23 March 1854 reproduced J. Transport Hist., 1957-8, 3, 204.
c. [Chapel Row crossing]: R.S. Arnold. The golden years of the Great Northern Railway. 1983 ed. 1, p.4
16. Rough track [Great Southern & Western Railway bridge rails which led to failure of locomotive springs]
E.L. Ahrons. Locomotive and train working in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 1954, 6, 2-3
17. An Irish railway inspected [the Waterford & Limerick by Captain Simmons with  its engineer Richard Osborne].
In 1848. Recorded J. Irish Rly Rec. Soc., 1978, 327-9.
18. John Fowler [as engineer to Metropolitan Railway]
An appreciation. Proc. Instn Civil Engrs., 1899, 329-30
19. Watching the emergence of a railway [John Ostle's diary on Carlisle & Silloth Railway construction in 1855]
Cumbria Record Office
20. The approach to Liverpool [descent into Lime Street by rope haulage in 1857]
Theodore Fontane. Journeys to England, trans D. Harrison (1939), 138-9.
21. Railway architecture [general observations including on wayside stations on Lancaster & Carlisle Railway]
George Gilbert Scott. Remarks on secular and domestic architecture. 1857. pp. 217-19.
22. The design of railway bridges [John Hawkshaw in evidence before Select Committee on Metropolitan Railway Communication]
Parliamentary Papers, 1863, viii, p. 149
23. The man with two heads [Arthur Blomfield deputed Thomas Hardy to supervise exhumations in Old St Pancras Churchyard].
Florence Emily Hardy. The life of Thomas Hardy. 1933. 1. 57-9.
24. The rationale of the St Pancras train-shed [as stated by W.H. Barlow]
Proc. Instn Civil Engrs., 1870, 30, 79-81
25. A new suburban railway [Great Northern Railway Enfield branch of 1870]
Henrietta Cresswell. Winchmore Hill. 2nd ed. 1912. pp. 110-15
26. An emergency met [Llandulas viaduct on Chester & Holyhead Railway washed out and replaced by temporary bridhge within seven days]
Sir George Findlay. The working and management of an English railway. 6th ed. 1899. pp. 114-15.
27 A tunnel.
Thomas Hardy. A Laodicean. pp. 120-2 (available Kindle)
28. A narrow eascape from death [inundation of water into Severn Tunnel workings]
T.A. Walker. The Severn Tunnel: its construction and difficulties. 1888. pp. 131-4.
29. Stability and finish [obsevations on English railways by an American in 1886]
A.T. Hadley. Railroad transportation. 1886. p. 146
30. Runway crosses railway [at Ballykelly near Lough Foyle]
E. John. Time table for victory. 1947. pp. 170-1
31. Footbridges at stations [from timber to wrought iron, to steel, to concrete, especially on Southern Railway]
Sir James Richards. The National Trust book of bridges. 1984. pp. 115-17.

3 Traction and speed
32. Inclined planes [on Stockton & darliongton Railway at Greenfield and Brusselton]
C. von Oeynhausen and H. van Dechen. Railways in England 1826 and 1827; treanslated by E.A. Forward. 1971. p. 12
33. Prophet without honour [appointment of engineer to Stanhope & Tyne Railway]
Robert Stephenson to T.E. Harrison 13 December 1833. PRO RAIL 1148/1 No. 13
34. The railways' use of horses.
F.M.L. Thompson. Victorian England: the horse-drawn society. 1970. pp.  13-14.
35. American engines not wanted [Edward Bury evidence to Commons Committee on Railways]
Parliamentary Papers 1949, 10, p. 783.
36. Mrs Gamp on the steam engine.
Charles Dickens. Martin Chuzzlewit. 188. Chap. 43
37. A Noomboog [atmospheric railways]
Edward Lear to Lord Carlingford. 21 December 1884. Later letters of Edward Lear; ed. Lady Strachey. 1911. p. 324
38. High speed over a great distance. [James Allport recounting journey from Sunderland and back in 1845]
F.S. Williams. Our iron roads. 3rd ed. 1888. pp. 332-3.
39. Speed and power [comparison of steam train with progress on horse or on foot]
G. Measom. Guide to the London & South Western Railway. 1856. pp. 2-3.
40. Mechanical fitness [from obituary of William Stroudley]
Proc. Instn Civ. Engrs., 1890, 99, pp. 38-9.
41. An American engineer praises the British block system
E.B. Dorsey. English and American railroads compared. 2nd ed. 1887. p. 13.
42. Express train [footplate skills]
W.M. Acworth. The railways of England. 1889. pp. 210-13
43. The race to Aberdeen.
Leading article Engineer, 10 August 1895.
44. Comfort and speed.
H.G. Wells. Anticipations. 1902. pp. 19-21.
45. Ghosts [old North Eastern Railway locomotives stored awaiting scrapping in shed near North Sea]
E.L. Ahrons. Locomotive and train working in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 1951 1, 93-4.
46. The railway carriage as a work of art [as developed on the Midland Railway]
George Dow. Midland style. 1975. p. 103
47. Motive-power mess [small engine policy on LMS]
Brian Reed. Loco Profile No. 8
48. From steam to diesel traction [mererly a matter of fashion?]
E.S. Cox. Locomotive panorama. 1965. v. 2 pp. 152-3
49. Industrial archaeology [Railway carriages were the embodiment of certain social distinctions to such an extraordinary degree that to study such rolling stock is to study some of the most telling archaeological remains of Victorian society. (1969)]
H. J. Dyos and D. H. Aldcroft, British Transport: an Economic Survey from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth (1974 ed.), p. 213
50. The beauty of the Victorian locomotive [Like Eric Gill, I have never lost my affection and respect for the work of the great locomotive engineers of the nineteenth century. The sense of balance they achieved by such details as the spacing of springs on the tenders, by the excellence of lettering, by even the pattern of rivet heads - never for one moment forgetting that their aim was efficiency in operation - was something to marvel at. (1969)]
Sir Gordon Russell in preface to Ernest Gimson exhibition catalogue (Leicestershire Museums, 1969)
4. Opening, closing, revival
51. Opening the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway [chaos caused by lack of experience including a collision at Milton]
W.W. Tomlinson. The North Eastern Railway. 1915. pp. 317-18.
52. Lavish entertainment [at Ashbourne by Brassey on 31 May 1852]
Staffordshire Advertiser. 5 June 1852
53. The Paignton pudding [made to celebrate opening and chaos which ensued]
J.T. White. History of Torquay. 1878. pp. 231-5 (KPJ: presumably entry was a by-product from his Devon anthology)
54. The closing of a railway. [Hexham to Riccarton Junction. 13 October 1956]
Michael Robbins. Points and signals. 1967. pp. 107-12. (KPJ the rivet counter: error No. 62022 is called a K3 rather than a K2)
55. The branch line [poem on closure of Sidmouth Junction to Exmouth line]
Patricia Beer. The Estuary. 1971. pp. 15-16.
56. The preservation of a railway [Tallylyn Railway]
L.T.C. Rolt. Railway adventure. 1953. pp. 63-5; 72.

5. Opposition, fear, hatred
57. Objections to the building of railways
(a) The line is not 5½ miles in length, and there is not any direct traffic between Sheffield and Rotherham. It enters neither Rotherham nor Sheffield, and parallel therewith is a canal and navigable river and an excellent public road. (1835)
Sheffield & Rotherham Railroad. Reasons against the Bill. Session 1835: Darlington Public Library: copy in Pease-Stephenson Papers, vol. 2. The railway was nevertheless authorised in 1836 and opened two years later
(b) Trustees of the Dartford & Strood Turnpike Road successful petition against  projected Kent Railway in 1837
Kent Archives Office. Maidstone. AG.54
58. The sense of beauty [in the vale of Norbury under Box Hill threatened by proposed London to Brighton railway]
John Stuart Mill. Collected works. 1982. 6 pp. 327-8
59. Judgement in a famous case {Lord Petre versus Eastern Counties Railway]
Vice Chancellor 10 May 1838. Essex Record Office. D/DP/E51/8
60. A just disdain [poem]
William Wordsworth. Shorter poems
61. A ducal opponent of railways. [5th Duke of Cleveland versus railway through Rabey Estate to Barnard Castle]
History of the Durham & Barnard Castle Railway. 1877. p. 27
62. Intrusions of the press [Diary of the King of Saxony]
C.G. Carus. The King of Saxony's journey. 1846. pp. 156-7.
63. Fear of railways
(a) Though I am so greatly benefiting by the railway [a projected line to Colne, for which she had sold some property], I should have a horror in travelling by it.
Miss Ellen Wilson to her solicitor, Edward Parker, 12 June 1847: Lancashire Record Office, DDB/75
(b) My father, being in bad health, travelled to Malvern, and my step-mother, for his sake only, took her place in the train. I see her still, sitting in the carriage, as we children were taking leave of her. She had her handkerchief tightly pressed to her eyes, so that she might see nothing, and begged us not to make her uncover them. A more abject picture of terror and dejection I never saw. (c.1855)
Sir J. H. A. Macdonald, Life jottings of an Old Edinburgh Citizen (1915), pp. 16-17
64. Pollution [by smoke near Chilterns]
Letter The Times 25 July 1864
65. Scandalous and irretrievable ugliness [Charing Cross to London Bridge]
A.L. Munby: Derek Hudson. Munby: man of two worlds. 1972. p. 175
66. "It's all right" [David Davies, contractor for Pembroke & Tenby Railway. 1862]
Ivor Thomas. Top Sawyer. 1988 ed. pp. 78-80.
67. Detestable little railway [on the Isle of Wight, 1879]
Henry James. English hours. 1905. p. 232
68. Better railway facilities not desired [verses composed in 1882]
C.H. Mate and C. Riddle. Bournemouth, 1810-1910. 1910. p. 135.
69. Carriage of damned souls. [letter John Ruskin. The Times 1 March 1887]
Works; ed. E.T. Cookand A. Wedderburn. 1902-12, 34, p.604.
70. Advertising in fields [adjacent to railways]
Urbs in rure [verse]. A.D. Godley. Reliquiae. 1926, 1, p. 355.
71. The whistling of engines
(a) [Herbert Spencer to Earl of Wemyss. 1 June 1892]
D. Duncan. Life and letters of Herbert Spencer. 1908. p. 314.
(b) [Anonymous letter to North London Railway. 22 September 1903]
PRO RAIL 529/113
72 A watchful critic [death of Rev. W.J. Jenkins]
Rly Mag., 1897, 1, 187.

6. Danger and disaster
73. Huskisson's death [the folly of 700 people going fifteen miles an hour, in six carriages on a narrow road, exceeds belief]
Henry Brougham to Macvey Napier. 16 September 1830. Selections from the correspondence of the late Macvey Napier. 1879. p. 88.
74. Fracas in Lancashire [L&YR versus ELR at Clifton Junction in March 1849]
Illustrated London News, 14 March 1849.
75. Moderrn triumphs? [poem, 1860]
T.L. Peacock. Gryll Grange, Chap. 28. Novels. ed. D. Garnett. 1948. p. 933
76. The Abergele accident [22 August 1868]
Illustrated London News, 29 August 1868
77. Suicide at Willesden.
Anthony Trollope.  The Prime Minister. 2. pp. 231-5. 
78. The Abbot's Ripton accident [1876]
Lord Colville of Culross to Henry Ponsonby, 23 January 1876. A Ponsonby. Henry Ponsonby. 1942. pp. 312-13.
79. Racing between trains [between Midland and Great Western trains leaving Gloucester for Standish (1877]
Evidence given at inquiry into death of platelayer on 27 January 1877. Parliamentary Papers, 1877, 77, pp. 393-4.
80. A "wild run" [down Seven Mile Bank between Torpantau and Talybont on Brecon & Merthyr Railway]
Account given by Joseph Davies, fireman on leading engine at inquiry conducted by Col. F.H. Rich into accident at Talybont on 2 December 1878. Parliamentary Papers, 1877, 62, p. 219.
81. The Tay Bridge. 28 December 1879.
Theodore Fontane translated by David Jeffreys. First published in Die Gegenwart 10 January 1880. German text in Die Eisenbahn; ed. W. Minaty. 1984. pp. 95-6.
82. Snow in Galloway

7. Travelling
87. London-Birmingham-Liverpool [in 1838]
Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas Moore. 1956, 7, p. 231
88. No. 1 ticket [for travel from Derby to London Euston on 12 August 1839]
A.B. Granville. The spas of England: Midland spas. 1841. pp. 125-7
89. Ameneties of travelling prophesised [refreshments, toilets, corridors and smoking (1839)]
Peter Lecount. Practical treatise on railways. 1839. p. 194.
90. Mr. Weller on railways (1840)
Charles Dickens. Master Humphrey's Clock. pp. 79-80
91. A children's excursion (1850).
John Layhe. Minister to the Poor in Manchester. Sixteenth Report to the Ministry of the Poor, 1850. p. 47
92. Excursion train to the Great Exhibition (1851)
Thomas Hardy. The Fiddler of the Reels. Collected short stories. 1988 ed. pp. 500-1.
93 Luggage.
(a). [1851]
R.S. Surtees. Town and Country Papers; ed. E.D. Cuming. 1929. pp. 231-3.
(b). {Trveller advised to take as little luggage as possible (1889)]
G. Measom. Official Illustrated Guide to the North Western Railway. 1859. p. 13.
(c). [LBSCR scrupulously weighed every particle of luggage]
E.L. Ahrons. Locomotive and train working in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 1951 5, p. 67.
94. Third class [passengers did not receive care given to cab horses with water troughs]
Punch, 1854, 26, p. 133.
95. The solemnity of first class travel (1855).
Nathaniel Hawthorn. English Notebooks; ed. R. Stewart. 1941. p. 119
96. Writing in the train [Barchester Towers (1855)]
Anthony Trollope. Autobiography. pp. 102-3.
97. A religious excursion in Scotland [Keith to Aberdeen for revival meeting in 1862]
Hippolyte Taine. Notes on England; translated E. Hyams. 1957. pp. 281-2.
98. An old lady on her way [buying a ticket with money in voluminous handbag (1862)]
The railway travellers handy book (1917 ed.). p. 58.
99. From Windsor to Balmoral [Superintendent of the Line's preparations for a journey be Queen Victoria]
G.P. Neele. Railway reminiscences. 1904. pp. 465-6
100. DTs in the train. [violent drunken sailor's journey from King's Cross to Peterborough on 9 August 1864]
Annual Register, 1864 (Chronicle) pp. 117-18 (still prevalent in 2011 on 22.45 Norwich to West Runton)
101. A beastly funk [female joined compartment at Wandsworth possibly to allege lewd response in 1866]
Sir William Hardman. The Hardman Papers; ed. S.M. Ellis. 1930. pp. 153-4.
102. Edward Lear proves his identity [in a railway carriage]
Edward Lear to Lady Waldegrave, 17 October 1866: Later letters of Edward Lear; ed. Lady Strachey. 1911. pp. 78-9.
103. Haverfordwest to Brecon. [18 October 1871: from Neath singing passengers and beauty of autumnal scene].
Edward Kilvert. Diary. 1939. 2, pp. 70-1
104. Travelling underground [London Underground as observed by Canadian reporter from New York Tribune in 1873]
C. Roger. Glimpses of London and Atlantic experiences. 1873. pp. 20-1.
105. The cattle train: Penmaenmawr [close-pack'd and mute they stood]
Charles Tennyson Turner. Sonnets, lyrics and translations. 1873. p. 27
106. Nothing like being well known [29 June 1882: special stop of train from Dereham at Hardingham when en route to Hingham]
B.J. Armstrong. A Norfolk diary. 1949. p. 249.
107. Excursion train to Brighton [Chorus of Directors: With our slap dash, crack, dash...]
H. Cholmondeley Pennell. From grave to gay. 1884. p. 119
108. Lancashire & Yorkshire express [slow progress from Bradford towards Halifax in 1880s]
E.L. Ahrons. Locomotive and train working in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 1951 2, pp. 53-4.
109. Catching the train [with tardy lady at Cambridge in 1880s]
Gwen Raverat. Period piece. (1960 ed.). pp. 93-5
110. Tipping [or how to avoid, and yet reap benefits]
Sydney Grundy. A pair of spectacles (1890). Nineteenth century plays. pp. 517-18
111. An incident on one of Queen Victoria's journeys. [John Brown's "What gars this stink?" on hot axle at Forfar in 1892].
G.P. Neele. Railway reminiscences. 1904. p. 521.
112. Midnight on the Great Western [poem: In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy]
Thomas Hardy. Complete poems; ed. J. Gibson. (1978 ed.). p. 514
113. Faintheart in a railway train [At nine in the morning there passed a church,]
Thomas Hardy. Complete poems; ed. J. Gibson. (1978 ed.). p. 576.
114. The pillory at Clapham Junction [on 13 November 1895 Oscar Wilde waited in convict dress, handcuffed there for half an hour]
Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, 1897. The Letters of Oscar Wilde; ed. R. Hart-Davis (1962). pp. 490-1.
115. The seal [mammal conveyed by passenger train between Whitby and Scarborough around 1900].
Sir Osbert Sitwell. Left hand! Right hand! (1946) p. 126.
116. From Ravenglass to Irton Road [Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway in 3ft gauge days (1903]
Mary C. Fair. Wide World. 19 December 1903.
117. The personal element. [rural travel in Ireland]
From "Poisson d'Avril". Edith Oenone Somerville and Martin Ross. Further experiences of an Irish R.M. 1908. pp. 57-69
118. Using Bradshaw.
(a) ["I wonder whether I can to Brighton tonight if I take the six train?" Hilda asked...]
Arnold Bennett. Hilda Lessways. 1911. pp. 385-90.
(b) ["See if it is possible to go direct from here to Cambridge", said Zuleika]
Max Beerbohm. Zuleika Dobson. 1947 ed. pp. 251-2.
119. Morning express [Along the wind-swept platform pinched and white (poem)]
Siegfried Sassoon. Collected poems. 1961. pp. 44-5.
120. Journey to a country house [from Victoria, c1917]
Max Beerbohm. Seven men and two others, pp. 72-4.
121. The Misery [Naval Specials fom Euston to Thurso run during World War I]
J.A.B. Hamilton. Britain's railways in World War I. 1967. p. 178.
122. All London theirs [great was my joy with London at my feet]
John Betjeman. Summoned by bells. 1960. pp. 56-7
123. The Foreign Secretary departs for Laussane [Curzon from Victoria (1922)].
Harold Nicholson. Some people. 2nd ed. 1927. pp. 127-8
124. The Ancient Mariner of railway travellers [Beware of the elderly man who sits in the corner of the railway carriage and says that the train is two minutes behind time (1922)]
J.B. Priestley. Papers from Lilliput. 1922. pp. 163-4.
125. Journey to London [At  seven he reached Paddington and the attrocious city was all around him]
Evelyn Waugh. Scoop. 1938. pp. 27-9
126. Restaurant car. [Mad country moves beyond the steamed up window]
Louis MacNeice. Collected poems; ed. E.R. Dodds. 1966. p. 504.
127. Inter-City trains [but not in Oxford in 1984]
Tiresias [Roger Green] Notes from the Overground. 1984. p. 21

8. Stations
128 Confusion at York [terminus in 1846]
Wilkie Collins. No name. (1967) pp. 142-3
129. Blackburn station
(a) Blackburn Standard. 3 June 1846 quoted G.C. Miller. Blackburn: the evoluation of a cotton town. 1951. p. 316.
(b). P.A. Whittle. Blackburn as it is. 1852. p. 361
130. Euston illuminated [by gas lamps for arrival of a train]
Sir Francis Head. Stokers and pokers. 2nd ed. 1849. p. 47.
131. Temples of discomfort [excessive decoration in station architecture]
John Ruskin. The seven lamps of architecture: works; ed. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn. 1903-12. 8, pp. 159-60.
132. Station refreshment rooms
(a) [glutinous lumps of gristle and grease, called pork pie]
Charles Dickens. Refreshment for travellers, The uncommercial traveller
(b) [stale buns, and fossil cakes]
T.H.S. Escott. England: its peope, polity and pursuits. (1885 ed.). p. 264
133 A wayside station [Bray]
G.R. Powell. Official railway handbook to Bray, Kingstown and the coast of Wicklow. 1860. pp. 12-13.
134. Puzzle Junction: an account of Didcot
H.A. Simmons. Ernest Struggles. 1879. pp. 43-4
135. The first underground station [advertising, bookstalls and Spiers & Pond refreshments]
T.C. Barker and M. Robbins. A history of London Transport. 2nd ed. 1975. pp. 120-1
136. Waiting rooms
(a) [That hour at Taunton was terrible to her]
Anthony Trollope. The Belton Estate (Old World's Classics). p. 81
(b) [Gwendolen felt that the dirty paint in the waiting room]
George Eliot. Daniel Deronda (Everyman ed.), 1, pp. 168-9.
137. The freedom of access to British trains [Samuel Laing, Chairman London, Brighton & South Coast Railway]
Parliamentary Papers, 1874, 58, p. 78.
138. Praise of English stations from a Frenchman [the platforms are always at the level of the carriages]
Charles Franquet de Franqueville. Du Régime des travaux publics en Angleterre. 1875. pp. 427-30.
139, London stations [I delight in the spectacle of Paddington. Euston or Waterloo (in 1888)]
Henry James. English hours. 1905. p. 346
140. Waterloo Station in 1889.
(a) ["nobody at Waterloo ever knows where a train is going to start from" (nothing changes)]
Jerome K. Jerome. Three men in a boat. pp. 47-8
(b). ["the vast and gloomy shed of Waterloo, lay like the temple of a dead religion"]
Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. The wrong box. pp. 183-4.
141. A steam feeler [loading milk cans onto a train]
Thomas Hardy. Tess of the Durbervilles. Chap. 30. pp. 188-9.
142. At the railway station, Upway.["A little boy with a violin"]
Thomas Hardy. Complete poems; ed. J. Gibson (1978 ed.) p. 607.
143. Stoke-on-Trent station.["Season-ticket holders at Finsbury Park think they know how to take possession of a train" c1905)]
Arnold Bennett. The death of Simon Fuge in The grim smile of the Five Towns, 1928, pp. 211-13.
144. London Bridge Station ["This ancient terminus first saw light"]
John Davidson. Fleet Streeet and other poems. 1909. pp. 39-40.
145. Last enchantments. [Oxford station].
Max Beerbohm. Zuleika Dobson. 1947. pp. 1-2
146. Our big railway stations. [comparison of London and New York].
Charles Reilly. Some architectural problems of today. 1924. pp. 31-6
147. British and German stations compared [Whereas the German architect has authority behind him... his English colleague has nothing]
Michael Sadleir. The nineteenth century and after. 1930. 108, pp. 660-1
148. Refined calm at Paddington [whereas at Watrerloo "all is hustle and bustle, and the society tends to be mixed"]
P.G. Wodehouse. Uncle Fred in the springtime. pp. 78-9
149. Paddington in 1944 [as observed by an aristocrtic prat]
Sir Osbert Sitwell. Queen Mary and others. 1975. pp. 51-4

9. Organisation and management
150. Patronage on the railways [posts were filled at the discretion of individual board members]
P.W. Kingsford. Victorian railwaymen. 1970. pp. 5-7.
151. Passenger traffic in Scotland [the railways there were forced to base their revenue on quantity rather than quality]
C.J.A. Robertson. The origins of the Scottish railway system, 1722-1844. 1983. pp. 314-15.
152. The Innocent Railway [Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway]
C.J.A. Robertson. The origins of the Scottish railway system, 1722-1844. 1983. pp. 64-6.
153. Losing your ticket [if lost subject to severe retribution in 1839]
James Wyld. Great Western Railway guide. 1839. pp. 1-3
154. A way to deal with fare-dodgers [Joseph Pease evidence on Stockton & Darlington Railway methods given to Commons Committee]
Parliamentary Papers, 1839, 10, p. 332.
155. Locking carriage doors [Sydney Smith campaign against in Morning Chronicle]
Sydney Smith. Works. 1869 ed. pp. 793-4
156. S.O.S. [reproduced in full below]
Let me beg of you to send another person here as soon as possible. I have a quantity of goods here that I know no more what to do with than a child. It is no use for me to attempt to do it for I cannot, therefore please send some person here in the morning. (1846)
From William Hambleton, in charge of Navigation House station on the Taff Vale Railway, to George Fisher, manager of the company, 28 September 1846: Public Record Office, RAIL 1008/120
157. A municipality's dislike of Sunday trains [Bedford Town Council: LNWR trains increase from one to two trains per Sabbath]
Bedford Town Council, Minute of 9 February 1847: Bedfordshire Record Office
158. Competitors watch each other.
(a) [Withdraw the man who has been peeping from the top story of your Botany Bay warehouse in Water Street Manchester]
Braithwaite Poole (LNWR) to Fereday Smith (Bridgewater Trust, controlling Bridgewater Canal), 28 May 1851: F. C. Mather, After the Canal Duke (1970), pp. 219-20
(b) Barry Railway competition for the Cardiff-Pontypridd traffic: espionage by Taff Vale Railway management in c1900]
D.S. Barrie, The Barry Railway (1962), pp. 192-3
159. Sabbath travelling [converted into quotation]
"I fear there is a great deal of Sabbath travelling here", said he [Mr Slope]. "On looking at the 'Bradshaw', I see that there are three trains in and three out every Sabbath. Could nothing be done to induce the company to withdraw them? Don't you think, Dr Grantly, that a little energy might diminish the evil?"
"Not being a director, I really can't say. But if you can withdraw the passengers, the company, I dare say, will withdraw the trains", said the doctor. "It's merely a question of dividends." (1857)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers , p. 37
160 Plain words to the North Eastern Railway, [accident in Heworth tunnel on 14 September 1860]
H.W. Tyler report Parliamentary Papers, 1861, 7, p. 100.
161. Capitalists and managers. [former favoured]
Walter Bagehot. The English Constitution Chap. 6, Collected works, 1965-86, 5, p. 330.
162. A tribute to the London & North Western Railway [rreliability for conveyance of mail from Ireland]
Sir Samuel Morton Peto. The resources and prospects of America. 1866. pp. 299-300.
163. Seized for debt. [train owned Athenry & Ellis Junction Railway seized by County Clare sheriff]
K.A. Murray and D.B. McNeill. The Great Southern & Western Railway. 1976. p. 126.
164. Epitaph on the Bristol & Exeter Railway. [poem]
Anonymous. Public Record Office. RAIL 1014/3/16
165. From an alphabet of railway management [six lines of verse]
Squib on verso of accident claim on Caledonian Railway. SRO Br/cal/4/171
166. Tiger-shooting in Northamptonshire [escaped tigress at Weedon in July 1877]
F.S. Williams. Our iron roads. 5th ed. 1888. pp. 410-11.
167. Haughty railway directors. [Mayor of Blackpool's caustic comments]
Printed report of meeting on 29 September 1882. North Yorkshire Record Office
168. Fog at Christmas [1891: thick fog and heavy traffic, but LNWR coped]
Sir George Findlay. The working and management of an English railway. 6th ed. 1899. pp. 219-20.
169. The board of a great railway. [North Eastern Railway 1898-1905]
Lord Grey of Falloden. Twenty-five years. 1928 ed., 1, 116-18.
170. The Sisters Blazek. [tickets for Siamese twins travelling on GNR]
Rly. Gazette, 1911, 15, 51.
171. Rural transport in Scotland [new lines envisaged with government finance]
Report of the Rural Transport (Scotland) Committee. Parliamentary Papers. 1919. 30, 83-7.
172. The joys of amalgamation [rationalization at Dorchester by GWR and SR in 1930s]
Sir John Eliot. On and off the rails. 1982. p. 44
173. A Dane's view of the London Underground system [appreciated excellent style]
S.E. Rasmussen. London: the unique city. 1937. pp. 343-53.
174. Euston sleepers [inspired by telephone inquiry]
Paul Jennings. The Jenguin pennings. 1963. pp. 77-9.
175. The Beeching Plan [introduction showing sowing seeds for failure]
British Railways Board. The reshaping of British Railways. 1963. pp. 2-3
176. Epitaph on the Golden Valley Railway [We too easily forget ... how much of the railway system of England, not only the little backwaters like the Golden Valley, which might better have never been made, but much larger concerns, of real and lasting value to the community, were built at the cost of private persons and the unpaid or little-paid services of local directors, gentry and tradespeople: money and service for which there was no financial return, often serious loss. And even the Golden Valley performed a real service to the people of the valley in the days when shanks's mare or the horse were the only alternative means of travel].
C.L. Mowat, The Golden Valley Railway (1964), p.85
177. Jargon unknown here [Attention please. The London train due at 16.46 has just left Weymouth. There was a change of engines; that's why the train was delayed].
Station announcement at Dorchester, 8 July 1981
178. Who cares? [The other Friday I caught the 6. 18 p.m. [from Manchester to Birmingham]. It was composed of a decaying rake of Mark I stock. Neither of the platform-side doors in my coach would open. Half the strip lighting was defective. The seats were festooned with reservation tickets from the down journey which had not been removed and which caused enormous con- fusion to less wily passengers than myself. The train left fifteen minutes late. It dropped another seven minutes by Stoke. Shortly before Wolverhampton an agitated guard ran through the train shouting "Passengers for Wolverhampton change at Birmingham New Street". We then began an agonisingly slow diversion through the Black Country freight avoiding lines. No explanations were offered when we arrived at New Street. The following Sunday I took Peter train-spotting. We arrived at New Street at about 1.15. Not a single [television] monitor was working. The arrival and departure boards were empty. The printed timetables had no information about trains before 4 o'clock. The station was quite full.]
J. M. Bourne to Jack Simmons, 27 November 1989

10 Railway men
179. George Stephenson's battle [for steam locomotives on Liverpool & Manchester Railway]
Samuel Smiles. The life of George Stephenson. 1857. p. 477.
180. The young Brunel. [G.T. Clark to Isambard Brunel]
I. Brunel. The life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. 1870. pp. 94-8
181. Brunel's mistrust of "authority" [letter I.K. Brunel to Douglas Galton 13 March 1848]
Brunel Collection, Bristol University. Letterbook 5, ff. 355-6.
182. On the tramp [navvy's wife's observations on conditions]
Anna Rebecca Tregelles. The ways of the line. 1858. pp. 79-80.
183. Navvies' nicknames ["very suddenly given, and almost immovable"]
F.S. Williams. Our iron roads. 5th ed. 1888. p. 141
184. Navvy's song [folk song from Devon 1857-9]
Trans. Devonshire Assn., 1935, 67, 389. (by-product from Devonshire anthology?)
185. The Community of navvies
T. Fayers. Labour among the navvies. 1862. pp. 10-13.
186. The railway navvy: a just appraisal.
David Brooke. The railway navvy. 1983. pp. 168-9.
187. Daily duties spelt out [Policeman's report, Glasgow Paisley & Greenock Railway]
Printed form signed. Glasgow Museum of Transport
188. Engine-drivers
(a) [punishments for mistakes and exposure to severe weather]
Sir Francis Head. Stokers and pokers. 2nd ed. 1849. pp. 63-4.
(b) [class distinction from coach drivers who were middle class in 1860s]
H,A. Simmons. Ernest Struggles. 1879. p. 61.
189. Breakdown men. [David Joy's diaries]
Rly Mag., 1908, 23, 155.
190. The great Irish contractor [William Dargan]
F.R. Conder. Personal recollections of English engineers. 1868]
191. Civility to passengers
(a) [concise, but not offhand]
Handbook guide to railway situations. 1861. p. 12.
(b) [politeness of Pullman staff on Midland Railway]
Miss H. Tupper in Mid-England. 1881. p. 102.
192. Porters
(a) [at Shoreditch in 1862]
Mrs M.E. Braddon. Lady Audley's secret. 1862. 1, p. 291.
(b) [Aspatriah; Speattry; Spatthry]
Rly Mag., 1908, 22, p. 329.
193. An obstreperous passenger [drunk endangering himself at Silverton]
The life of Roger Langdon; told by himself. 1909. pp. 78-9.
194. Overwork.
(a) [Henry Tyler on accident at Lawton Junction on 26 September 1873]
Parliamentary Papers, 1874, 58, 157.
(b) [Tayport accident on 25 November 1881]
Parliamentary Papers, 1882, 60, p. 295.
195. Sister Dora [Dorothy Pattison of Walsall Cottage Hospital]
(a) Jo Manton. Sister Dora. 1971. p. 224.
(b) [her funeral]
from above pp. 15-16
199. The frame shed at Swindon [long extract, from which the longish quotation gives some indication of the tone of this classic]
Another reason for the selection of young and comparatively unknown men for the post of foreman is that they have a smaller circle of personal mates in the shed, and, consequently, a less amount of human kindness and sympathy in them. That is to say, they will be able to cut and slash the piecework prices with less compunction, and so the better serve the interests of the company. The young aspirant, moreover, will be at the very foot of the ladder, hot and impetuous, while the elder one will have passed the season of senseless and unscrupulous ambition. (1911)
Alfred Williams, Life in a Railway Factory (1984 ed.), pp. 76-7
200. Discipline [quoted in full in view of unusual source]
When I first came on the railway I found the discipline was a damn sight worse than the Navy. The old drivers were absolute disciplinarians. Absolutely. They were tin gods. And there's very rarely you didn't find one with a beard and a clay pipe and a box of snuff. They were a type of person like this. They'd got a kind of complex that had crept into them that they were the people. They were that wrapped up in railways when they saw other people come in, we've got to watch what they do, separate to my job. That's how they were. It was a case that you'd got to get on duty fifteen or twenty minutes before your book time just for the sake of getting every- thing ready for the driver. Go and fetch his oil from the store. Fill his feeders, his small feeder, his long feeder, put 'em on the dishplate to get 'em nice and soluble, warm. And then he'd come along. He'd stand there with his food box and an old stone jar. Some used to have tea without milk and a lemon in it. And I think some of them used to have a drop of beer in it. That was the way of them. "Come on, clean up this, and have you wiped that there box?" You had to near enough lift him in the engine. They were autocrats.
In conversation they knew it all. They were full of consequence. But at the same time they were reliable. In those days if you ran by a signal there was nothing to tell you you had run by. The only thing you knew were the consequences of running by a signal. I did admire them that way. There used to be some good chaps. As a pass cleaner you'd get different types on different weeks. Now you'd find one driver perhaps he'd be interested in gardening; you'd find another one he was interested in religion. You'd find another one that was absolutely opposite. You used to talk about this and the other. It was education. I remember Sam Redfern, number one in the Co-op. Now he'd got a long ginger beard. He was a guard. Then there was another one we used to call Foxy Reynolds. He was a big Co-op man. If I had my time over again I wouldn't choose anything else. It's not only the job, it's the variety. Every day was different. Then there were the conversations with these old drivers. Perhaps it would be a lovely starlit night and he was an astronomer and he used to show me this and show me that. They were educated for the simple reason the job had educated them. (c.1910)
H. Edwards in D. Stuart, County Borough: the History of Burton-upon-Trent, 1901-74, 1975, 1. pp. 101-3
201. Service ungenerously rewarded [quoted in full]
The very name of the Railway Executive Committee would hardly be recognised by the multitude; yet this body, which controlled the railways with such astonishing skill, did much to ensure our ultimate victory in the field. Its members paid the price. Two general managers of railways died through overwork in the war.2 They received very little thanks or recognition and none at all from the Government, while the bounteous showers from the fountain of honour left them almost unsprinkled. This was especially the case in Scotland, and it is deplorable to have to record the fact that while thousands of persons received war honours very lightly won, not a single Scottish railway man has ever been selected for conspicuous honour for war work. (1921)
E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War. 1921, p. 1165, quoting The Times, 15 August 1921
202. A railway of characters [Merthyr Tredegar & Abergavenny line]
D.S.M. Barrie. Regional history of the railways of Britain: South Wales. 1980. pp. 79-80.
205. Soham saved [Tablet commemorating bravery of Fireman J.W. Nightall, G.C. and Driver B. Gimbert, G.C. on 2 June 1944]
Memorial in Soham Church
206. Railway ritual [The guard blew his whistle and waved his flag – how weighted with ritual have the railways in their brief century become! – and the train crawled from the little station. The guard walked alongside through the snow- flakes, wistful for that jump-and-swing at an accelerating van that is the very core of the mystery of guarding trains.]
Michael Innes, Appleby's End (1945), p.1.
207.  Railway language [Railway language seems a closed area to historians of the age of steam. Who has recorded the engine-driver's breakfast- "two Woodbines and an aspirin" - or the contents of the fireman's head, which, when devoid of the daily racing information, showed "twenty inches of vacuum"? Who has heard of the "fifty face man" whose word could not be trusted? The footplate was a rich tapestry of nicknames and uncomplimentary titles such as:
Abadan: This was a driver who hoarded engine oil in hideaways around the shed.
The Desert Drivers: These were enginemen who had a permanent fear of running short of water in the tank or sand in the boxes.
The Whispering Baritone: Every shed had a loudmouth, a barrack- room lawyer; this was his title.
His Master's Voice: Generally an ex-footplateman turned foreman's assistant. A crawler, a sycophant.
Little Sir Echo: See above, for interchangeable term.
The Bugler: Before the steam whistle was invented drivers had bugles which they used to give warning of their approach. The Bugler was an excessive whistler.
Captain Hornblower: Another excessive whistler – especially during the night hours. ]
Frank McKenna, The Railway Workers. 1980, p. 236
208. The enclosed order of railwaymen [The observation that the railways are a monastic order of disciplined, committed enthusiasts is as much a cliché as the observation that the industry has suffered from political intervention. But it remains true that the "culture of the railroad", rooted in its nineteenth century domination of the transport system, has survived all attempts to tinker with the organisational structure, from the dismantling of the main-line companies in 1947 to the establishment of an organisation dominated on paper by corporate planning and the use of executive directors in 1970. Some would argue that it will survive the introduction of "sector management" and the privatisation drive of the 1980s. The "enclosed order of railwaymen" exhibits strengths in its loyalty and discipline, necessary qualities in an industry where operational safety is rightly emphasised. But it also encourages a close-knit group antagonistic to outsiders and hostile to new ideas. Some of the costs of this kind of management may be seen in the heavy reliance on commercial and marketing practices developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which became increasingly inappropriate to the post-war world, and in the courtroom atmosphere of much collective bargaining before the late 1960s.]
T.R. Gourvish. British Railways 1948-73. 1986. pp. 577-8.

11. Railways and the Community
209. The new power of the railways [The steam railways' real significance lay in the fact that they could cater for both high-value and low-value traffic. Before the coming of these railways there was no such single form of transport capable of performing the twofold function. (1830s and 1840s)]
T. C. Barker and C. I. Savage, An Economic History of Transport in Britain (3rd ed., 1974), p. 15.
210. A planned railway system [A modern historian allows it is unfortunate that the State did not exercise more control over the planning of the railway system in its formative period in 1830-50, but explains that that would have been impossible in Britain then].
Norman Gash, The Age of Peel. 1968), p. 16
211. Early warning of the consequences of railway development [Railroads, without the slightest permanent advantage to the subscriber, or the public in general, will, in their efforts to gain ground, do incalculable mischief].
John Bull, 15 November 1835
212. Holiday-making in Guernsey [Comment passed in the second season after the opening of the railway between London and Southampton]..
J. Duncan, History of Guernsey. 1841, p. 269
213. Political possibilities [At Windsor yesterday for a Council; almost all the Cabinet went together in a special train. A Whig engineer [i.e. driver] might have produced an instantaneous and complete change of government. (1842)]
From the diary of C.C.F. Greville, Clerk to the Privy Council: The Greville Memoirs, ed. Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford (1938), Vol. 5. p. 47
214. Enterprises for the Canaille ["Our family have always been against manufactories, railroads – everything", said Egremont.]
Disraeli, Sybil. 1845, chap. 14
215. Here the railway pays the farmers' poor rates [They manage generally to relieve the farmers of all poor rates and parish taxes, by the heavy way in which the railways are rated.]
C.P. Grenfell to the Earl of Sefton, 13 January 1845: Lancashire Record Office, DDM 6/2
216. Railways and fox-hunting
(a) [Gentlemen who, like Mr Assheton Smith, wished to represent their shires in the House of Commons and at the same time hunt their fox-hounds two or three days a week, soon learnt to approve a system which brought the best hunting countries within two or three hours' ride of the capital. (1845)]
J.C. Jeaffreson, Life of Robert Stephenson. 1864, Vol. 1,. p. 279
(b) [A line of rails carrying but very few passengers, and none too many goods, was made some years ago from Blisworth to Stratford-on-Avon, with a view to demonstrating to casual travellers how sweet a valley runs across the heart of the Grafton and Warwickshire countries]
E. Pennell Elmhirst, Fox-hound, forest, and prairie. 1892., p. 269
(c) [With reference to the hunting, a fair estimate of the landowners' attitude can probably be arrived at by trying to imagine the outcry that would be raised if anything were done to interfere with the amusements of the classes now in power, for instance if an attempt were made to seize football grounds in various parts of the country for use as landing places for public aeroplanes.]
Joan Wake, Northampton Vindicated. 1935, p. 11.
217. The community's interest neglected [The tracing of the new routes of railways which were to join all the chief cities, ports, and naval arsenals of the island was a matter of the highest national importance. But, unfortunately, those who should have acted for the nation refused to interfere.
Macaulay. Speech on the Ten Hours Bill. 22 May 1846. Speeches. 1854. p. 438
218. Should the government warn the public [Direct interference on our part with the mania of railway speculation seems impracticable]
C.S. Parker, ed. Sir Robert Peel. 1899. Vol. 3. pp. 188-90.
219. Railway mania in Scotland. [28 November 1845. Britain is at present an island of lunatics, all railway mad]
Journal of Henry Cockburn. 1874. Vol. 2. pp. 129-33.
220. Who can be exempt?
(a) Queen Victoria: "Tell me, oh tell me, dearest Albert, have you any railway shares?"
Punch, 1845, 9, 182 [actual entry]
(b) Lord Derby had lent money freely to railway companies, at reasonable rates of interest. But when in September 1847 his agent asked for the repayment of part of what was owing from the Manchester & Leeds, he got a chilly answer. In reference to your intimation that you will require £20,000 between this and Christmas I am requested to state that in the present extraordinary state of the money market our committee do not feel warranted in making you any positive promise, although they will endeavour to do what they can, hoping that some improvement will take place before that time. (1847)
Peter Eckersley to Richard Earle, 14 September 1847: Lancashire Record Office, DDK 661/1/26 [actual entry]
(c) [Yet prudence, steadily maintained, might prevail, as it did with Brunel].
I stick to my rule – of making what I can by engineering and not trusting myself in speculation. (1851)
Brunel to Charles Geach, 27 August 1851. Bristol University Library: Brunel Collection, Letterbook 8, fol. 228
221. Wise in time [investment in York & North Midland Railway]
Charlotte Bronte to Miss Woolmer, 30 January 1846. Mrs Gaskell. Life of Charlotte Bronte. p. 289
222. George Hudson's fall [verses probably by Gladstone written in 1849]
Manuscript: British Library: MS 44744. fol. 183
223. Class distinctions.
(a). [railway travel accentuated class divisions]
Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, 1846, 6, p. 194.
(b). ["Mr Moulder was a man who despised the second class"]
Anthony Trollope. Orley Farm. 1862. 1, pp. 154-5.
(c). [The Times comment upon Midland Railway abolition of second class in 1874]
By universal admission, there are, roughly speaking, three classes in all societies, and the existing arrangement of railway carriages appears to correspond very closely with the ordinary habits of life.
The Times, 12 October 1874.
224. Ichabod [York & North Midland Railway killed coach traffic at Ferrybridge]
G.F. Copley. Guide to the Wakefield Pontefract and Goole Railway. 1848. p. 48
225. The Marine Metropolis [Brighton]
E.L. Blanchard. Adams's illustrated descriptive guide to the watering-places of England. 1848. pp. 95-6.
226. Will towns change places?
(a) [Railways have set all the Towns of Britain a-dancing]
Thomas Carlyle. Latter-day pamphlets (1858 ed.). p. 229.
(b) [Urging the extension of railway north from Aylesbury in 1850]
G. Pigott to A. Tindal. 13 June 1850. Buckinghamshire Record Office. D/TL/46/B2
227. Peterborough. [dull, inhospitable city (1851)]
Samuel Sidney. Rides on railways. 1851 p. 61.
228. Taking trade away.
(a) [Horncastle residents more likely to travel to Boston or Lincoln, rather than reverse (1853)]
Flysheet letter from "Fairplay" to the Provisional Committee of the Horncastle & Kirkstead Junction Railway: Lincolnshire Record Office, 2TP 3/1/1
(b) [Every railway takes trade from the little town to the big town, because it enables the customer to buy in the big town. (1866)]
Waiter Bagehot, The English Constitution, chap. 5: Collected Works (1965-86), v. 310
229. Railway pickpockets.
Henry Mayhew. London labour and the London poor. 1862. p. 310
230. Progress in the Lake District [The best, as well as the last and greatest change... is arising from the introduction of the railroad]
Harriet Martineau. Guide to the English Lakes. 1855. pp. 141-4.
231. Railways and prize fighting [special train run by South Eastern Railway in 1859]
Chief Constable's report to magistrates, 25 October 1859. Kent Archives Office. Q GB 41 (Bundle B)
232. Suburban development [villa ticket system (1860)]
J.R.L. Currie. The Northern Counties Railway. 1973, Vol. 1, p. 108.
233. The railway in warfare [observations by William Bridges Adams on war in America and potential in Europe]
W.B. Adams. Roads and rails. 1862. pp. 352-53
234. Have you a station near by? [Palmerston speaking in Bradford in 1864]
Walter Bagehot. Economist 7 January 1865. Collected Works (1965-86), 3, pp. 280-3.
235. Social revolution in Wales [At Llanrwst we dined, and got back here [Llandudno] by the train a little after eight o'clock. The people travelling about in Wales, and their quality, beggar description. It is a social revolution which is taking place, and to observe it may well fill one with reflexion. (1864)]
Matthew Arnold to his mother, 20 August 1864: Letters (1895), 1. 236
236. Nationalisation advocated in the 1860s
Walter Bagehot. Economist 7 January 1865. Collected Works (1965-86), 10. pp. 449-50.
237. Railway property discredited [Financial crisis of 1866 led to  difficulties in many companies and corrupt practice in some]
Annual Register 1867. pp. 202-3.
238. Railways and temperance [reduced exhaustion of travel would also reduce the need for intoxicants]
Brian Harrison. Drink and the Victorians. 1971. pp. 334-6
239. The Moretonhampstead branch [effect on society in 1870s].
Cecil Torr. Small talk at Wreyland. 1918-23, 3, 12-13.
240. Wiltshire divided [difficulties of communication between North & South of County]
E.L. Ahrons. Locomotive and train working in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 1951 4, p. 120.
241. Fair wages [the labouring classes are entitled to a fair share of the general prosperity]
E.S. Ellis, chairman of the Midland Railway to W.H. Hodges, the Company Accountant, 28 December 1871. Public Record Office. RAIL 491/962
242. The Coniston peasant [jaundiced view of  effect of railway travel on rural folk]
John Ruskin. Fors Clavigera, Letter 44. Works; ed. E.T. Cook and A. Wesserburn (1903-12), Vol. 28. pp. 129-30.
243. Benefits conferred by a branch line [influx of tourists, efficient despatch of vegetables and fish]
J.H. Matthews. History of St. Ives. 1892. p. 368.
244. The railway in Birmingham [railway system... has largely altered the centre of the town]
J.T. Bunce. History of the Corporation of Birmingham. 1885. Vol. 2, p. xxiii
245. The railway in the Victorian city.[profoundly influencing the internal flows of traffic]
J.R. Kellett. The impact of railways on Victorian cities. 1969. pp. 419-24.
246. The extension of railways in the Lake District [acceptable along Bassenthwaite Lake]
T.H. Huxley to his eldest son, 6 July 1886: Leonard Huxley. Life and letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. Vol. 2. pp. 454-5.
247. Emigrants. [for America leaving Aberlour]
W.M. Acworth. The railways of Scotland. 1890. pp. 134-5
248. An enormous investment [in railways in the Highlands]
Proof of evidence submitted by 3rd Duke of Sutherland in opposition to proposed West Highland Railway. 1889. Staffordshire Record Office, D593,P/33/12
249. Commuting
(a) Thirty bob a week [For like a mole I journey in the dark]
John Davidson. Ballads and songs. p. 42.
(b) Our suburb [He blessed the groaning, stinking cars]
Ernest Radford. A collection of poems. 1906. p. 60
(c) [The commuter – l'homme moyen de notre époque. The anti-hero of our age]
Tiresias [Roger Green]. Notes from the Overground. 1984. p. 8
(d) [Commuting and war have this in common – they force people to come out into the open]
Tiresias [Roger Green]. Notes from the Overground. 1984. p. 195.
250. Seaside resort [Whitehead]
J.R.L. Currie. The Northern Counties Railway. 1973, Vol. 1, pp. 249-52.
251. Social divisions [business men as first class season ticket holders]
Katharine Chorley. Manchester made them. 1950. pp. 114-15.
252. Taking the time from the train [cottagers told the rtime from the smoke of the train]
Edith Olivier. Without knowing Mr Walkley. p. 113
253. A strategic railway [proposed orbital railway met with objections from Hampstead Garden Suburb]
E.A. Pratt. The rise of rail-power in war and conquest. 1915. pp. 203-4.
254. Irish cattle fairs [off Sligo, Leitrim & Northern Counties Railway at Enniskillen]
E.M. Patterson. The Great Northern Railway of Ireland. 1986. pp. 139-40.
255. Night Mail. [This is the Night Mail crosssing the Border]
W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, I927-57 (1966), 83-4.
256. A poor bag of assets. [Hugh Dalton: entry quoted in full]
Let us look at the railway system now. It is in very poor shape. Partly that is due to the strain of six years' war; partly, but not wholly. Those dingy railway stations, those miserable, unprepossessing restaurants, all the out-of-date apparatus for sleeping and eating, make one ashamed as an Englishman when one is travelling abroad .... This railway system of ours is a very poor bag of physical assets. The permanent way is badly worn. The rolling stock is in a state of great dilapidation. The railways are a disgrace to the country. (1946)
Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the House of Commons, 17 December 1946: Hansard, vol. 431, cols. 1808-9

12. Railways and the Imagination
257. The railways' presence [shared by people of every class].
H. J. Dyos and D. H. Aldcroft, British Transport: an Economic Survey from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth (1974 ed.), p. 213
258. The seeing eyes [railway journey by young woman from Beam Bridge and then encountered Turner's Rain, steam and speed at the Royal Academy]
Lady Simon in John Ruskin Dilecta: works; ed. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn. 1903-12. 35, pp. 559-601
259. Railways and archaeology [In consideration of the importance of the district with respect to both natural history and both British and Roman antiquities, and more especially at this time when the disturbance of the surface of the country in the formation of railroads is likely to bring to light specimens of interest in these departments of science, it is advisable to take immediate steps for the establishment of an institution in this town containing a Museum and Library for the County of Dorset. (1845)]
Resolution passed at preliminary meeting, 15 October 1845: G. Dugdale, William Barnes of Dorset (1953), 119.
260. Railways and wild life
(a) [Cutting open rail-ways causes a change of vegetation in two ways, by turning up buried live seeds and by affording space and protection for the growth of transported seeds: so that it is often very difficult to determine to which cause the appearance or superabundance of a plant is attributable. (1845)]
J.D. Hooker to Darwin, July 1845: Correspondence of Charles Darwin, (1987), 3. p. 224.
(b) [I wonder what most of the people who only knew him [John Stuart Mill] in connection with public meetings, would have thought if they had been like the mouse behind the curtain, when I, one day, as a youth, asked him in his room at the old India House about stations for rare plants along the Great Western Railway. He jumped from the four-legged stool on which he sat at his desk, with the words: "I'm your man for that!" and I still possess the list which he sent me afterwards in his own hand. (c.1845)]
Mountstuart Grant Duff, Out of the Past (1903), 2. p. 27
(c) [cuttings and embankments, as soon as they are well overgrown with grass, afford secure and sunny nesting grounds].
W. Warde Fowler. A year with the birds. 1886. pp. 144-51.
(d) [Before the railway was made, people said it would frighten all game out of the valley, but it has not]
The Journal of Beatrix Porter; ed. L. Linder. 1966. p. 260.
261. Standard time
(a) [We want that those absurd discrepancies should cease]
Henry Booth. Uniformity of time. 1847. Vol. 6. 9-10 (Ottley 4816: not in BLPC, nor in ODNB entry, but see Oxford Companion under time p. 512].
(b) [In consequence of instructions received from the General Post Office it is intended, on and after the first day of December next, to adopt LONDON TIME. Memorandum - London Time is in advance of local time 12 minutes at Carlisle, 15 minutes at Edinburgh, 17 minutes at Glasgow. (1847)]
Caledonian Railway time-sheet: Scottish Record Office
262. An appreciative American tourist [So complete is the system of English railways that four weeks judiciously appropriated, during the intervals of business or social engagements, will enable the American, in London, to visit and thoroughly explore a specimen, at least, of what is peculiar to the country... (1853)]
Henry T. Tuckerman, A Month in England (1982 ed.), p. 9
263. George Borrow visits Birmingham [At Birmingham station I became a modern Englishman]
George Borrow, Wild Wales (1862), Vol. 1. pp. 15-16
264. Before railways were made [We who mlived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah]
W.M. Thackeray. "De Juventute": Roundabout papers. pp. 85-7
265. Mugby Junction in the black hours[shrieks and growns invading the air]
Charles Dickens. Mugby Junction in Christmas stories. pp. 476-7.
266. A fiery centipede [The railway train dashes along the line – A   fiery centipede, terribly beautiful (poem)]
James Hurnard. The setting sun. 1870. p. 42
267. Alice in the train.["Show your ticket, child"]
Lewis Carroll. Through the looking-glass. pp. 127-30
268. A child's alphabet. [the railway kills little more than its own breath]
John Ruskin. Letter to the Manchester City News, 13 April 1884. Works; ; ed. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn. 1903-12. 34, pp. 571-2.
269. The summit of the Settle & Carlisle Railway. [lyrical description of Hawes Junction at sun set]
E.A. Foxwell. Express trains; two papers. 1884. pp. 53-4
270. Train spotting. [the wonderful names of the engines and store them in my memory]
Alfred Williams. A Wiltshire village. 1912. pp. 216-17
271. Express (from Liverpool, Southwards) [Of roaring tunnels, dark and long]
William Allingham, Life and Phantasy. 1889, pp. 71-2.
272.The mail service in Northern Scotland [Imagine a mail leaving Aberdeen at 3.30 a.m., and picking up and putting out its bags all along the route – in order that the fishermen of the Banff coast may find their Edinburgh and Glasgow letters awaiting them when they come down to breakfast. Yet more remarkable, imagine that from Inverness to Wick, through that "desert of silence", as Mr Foxwell appropriately terms Caithness, the Highland company hurries the mails faster than the Italian lines can convey the international special train to Brindisi, faster than the German and the Belgian governments, with the assistance of the Chemin de fer du Nord, can forward their passengers from Aix [i.e. Aachen] to Calais. Till some one can point out a better, I shall venture to believe that the combined rail and steamboat mail services to the western coast, and to Skye and the Lews, are unmatched in the world.]
W.M. Acworth, The Railways of Scotland (1890), p. 136
273.The Duke of Sutherland's Funeral Train [Birnam. 26 September 1892. Last night, between eleven and twelve, we thought we heard the special train taking the Duke of Sutherland on his long, last journey. Some people can see no sentiment or beauty in a railway, simply a monstrosity and a matter of dividends. To my mind there is scarcely a more splendid beast in the world than a large Locomotive]
The Journal of Beatrix Potter, ed. L. Linder. 1966., p. 267
274. Drawing engines [full quotation in cloud anthology]
Eric Gill, Autobiography (1944 ed.), 73-4
275. Cuckoo Valley Railway [Bodmin & Wadebridge in Cornwall; Tregarrick being Bodmin and Ponteglos Wadebridge]
Q [Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch]. The delectable Duchy. pp. 56-8.
276, An introduction to the Welsh language [the curious names on the coal trucks in the sidings below]
Humphrey Carpenter. J.R.R. Tolkien: a biography. 1977. p. 26.
277. The railway children ["I suppose a dragon's lair might look very like that tunnel..."]
E. Nesbit. The railway children. pp. 30-4.
278. Adlestrop [Yes, I remember Adlestrop]
Edward Thomas. Collected poems. p. 73.
279. At Euston station [Yon is the train I used to take]
Katharine Tynan. Collected poems. 1930. pp. 23-4.
280. A local train of thought [That train's quite like an old familiar friend]
Siefried Sassoon. Collected poems, 1908-56. 1961. p. 240.
281. Skimbleshanks: the railway cat [poem]
T.S. Eliot. Old Possum's book of practical cats. 1939. pp. 40-1.
282. Home coming to Cornwall [A landslide on the line, the train diverted].
A.L. Rowse. Poems chiefly Cornish. 1944. p. 56
283. The Metroplitan Railway: Baker Street Station buffet [Early electric! with what radiant hope]
John Betjeman. A few late chrysanthenums. 1954. pp. 38-40.
284. On the roof of Paddington Station [suicide]
John Wain. The smaller sky. pp. 136-42
285. Some closing words
(a) Her Majesty travels at the rate of forty miles an hour.
General Grey, Queen Victoria's private secretary, arranging  a journey to Scotland with the secretary of the Great Northern Railway, 30 August 1854: Public Record Office, RAIL 236/606/1
(b) The railways are the wonder of the age; It was our fools who chiefly paid for them, And everybody rides at their expense.
James Hurnard, The Setting Sun, 1870, pp. 249-50
(c) Will alight precipitately at 5.38 from the deliberate 1.50
Telegram from Henry James: Simon Nowell Smith, The Legend of the Master.1947, p. 21
(d) No liver can get in at Putney and remain sluggish beyond Walham Green. [Owen Seaman, commenting on the motion of the trains on the District line in London when it was first electrified:]
Punch, 131 (1906), 136. Walham Green (now called Fulham Broadway) is two stations from Putney Bridge
(e) A railway station is, after all, significant of half life's pleasures, of its memories and anticipations, and some of its sorrows.
A. G. Bradley, Exmoor Memories. 1926, p. 16
(f) Accidents do not happen by accident. [Sir Herbert Walker of the Southern Railway, in a discussion with his senior officers on the Sevenoaks disaster, 1927]
Sir John Elliot. On and Off the Rails. 1982, p. 119.
(g) Trains sum up, to my mind, all the fogs and muddled misery of the nineteenth century. They constitute, in fact, so many slums on wheels.
Sir Osbert Sitwell, Penny Foolish. 1935, p, 232
(h) Beeching is fab
Graffito on disused station in Suffolk, 1960s
(i) To the dungeons.
Graffito on door at the north-eastern corner of St Pancras station, 1967
(j) The clamorous confusion of parochial loyalties that enliven but muddy railway history.
Charles Wilson, First with the News. 1985, p. 125.
(k) The railways were the great connecter, linking up the furthest corners of the country, and making one England out of many.
Harold Perkin, The Age of the Railway. 1971, p.101

Section Two On the footplate

Paley, W.B. Locomotive driving by contract (The Locomotive Magazine, 1902). 17-19
Locomotive Engine Driving (The Locomotive Magazine, 1904). 19-21.
[McKillop, N.] Toram Beg, The speed tune: a footplate commentary. (Trains Illustrated, 1955). 22-6.
A3 Spearmint on the overnight Edinburgh to Newcastle run.
Vincent, R.E. The Maestro (Trains Illustrated, 1955). 26-9
In Italy during WW2 failure to stop at a level crossing due to confusion over controls of an Italian 625 class 2-6-0.
Balmore. Driving and firing modern French steam locomotives (Trains Illustrated, 1961)
[McKillop, N.] Toram Beg, Driving the "Directors" (Railway World, 1963). 39-44.
Dificulties of firing long grate, right-hand drive, especially in WW2.
Tuplin, W.A. Riding a "Niagara" of the New York Central (Trains Illustrated, 1952) 44

Section Three on the Narrow Gauge

Ellis, Hamilton. Waterloo to Lynton, 1935 (Trains Illustrated, 1955) 55-8
Actually journey made from Paddington via Taunton, Barnstaple and an overnight excursion ticket to travel on final day of Lynton & Barnstaple line.
Boyd, J.I.C. North Wales Narrow Gauge (Railway World, 1953 and 1954) 59-62
Welsh Highland Railway
Beddgelert Light Railway (The Light Railway and Tramway Journal, 1900) 60 [box]
Evidence to Commissioners from Sir James Szlumper, Engineer, and J.C. Russell, Managing Director
Patterson, E.M. The Londonderry & Lough Swilly Railway (Trains Illustrated, 1953). 62-4
Footplate journeys to \Buncrana and Letterkenny on the residual freight services
Boyd, J.I.C. Glimpses of the Narrow Gauge— Snailbeach. (Railways, 1951) 65-6
Rolt, L.T.C. The Talyllyn Railway, 1950-1960 (Railway World, 1960) 66-70
Vickers, H.E. Cavan and Leitrim: a farewell cameo (Railway World, 1959) 70-2
Snell, J.B. West from Alamosa (Railway World, 1961) 73-80.
Denver & Rio Grande narrow gauge to Durango

Section Four Travel by Train

The Orient Express (The Locomotive Magazine, 1901)  83-5
Paris to Constinople in 65 hours via Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia.
Perkins, T.R. A Railway Tour of Fifty Years Ago (Railways, 1950) 85-94.
North Eastern Railway "Selected Tour" made in 1901 made over the many lines into Whitby and over the Wensleydale branch.
The Paris Exhibition, 1900 (The Light Railway and Tramway Journal, 1900) 88 [box]
McNaught, R.S. Carlisle in Cardean Days (Railways, 1950) 94-8.
Day return from Liverpool Exchange to Carlisle in 1908: Cardean was not seen.
Tuplin, W.A. How it goes (Railway World, 1956) 98-101
19.10 ex-St Pancras: destination Sheffield, but where should change be made?
Ellis, Hamilton. Brighton to Quimper, 1954 (Trains Illustrated, 1955) 101-5.
Price, J.H. The Case of the Vanished Engines (Railway World, 1959). 105-8.
Irish locomotives withdrawn in 1958 sent to Spain for scrapping.
Newman, Marcus. A Typical Royal Tour: Her Majesty visits Central Wales (Trains Illustrated, 1953) 108

Section Five Salute to the Steam Engine

McNaught, R.S. The Dean Goods Class, 1883-1955 (Railway World, 1955). 113-16
Allen, G. Freeman. Nine Miles at 90 m.p.h: the 'Plant Centenarian'. (Trains Illustrated, 1953) 117-19.
Nock, O.S. The Lickey Incline (Railways, 1949) 120-4.
Footplate journeys on 0-10-0 No. 58100 and 3F No. 47313
Shedmaster. New Light on the Leaders (Trains Illustrated, 1953, 6, 311-12) 125-7.
Tuplin, W.A. The North Western "Princes" (Trains Illustrated, 1953) 127-36
Leech, Kennet H. An A4 in good form (Railway World, 1959) 135-9.
Footplate journey on Kylchap double-chimney No. 60028 Walter K. Whigham on 09.00 from King's Cross to Grantham
Allen, Cecil J. Salute to the Great Western (Railway World, 1964) 139-50.

Section Six Some Branch Lines

Moretonhampstead — a P.S. (Trains Illustrated, 1960) 153-4.
Dartington Hall sponsored study on travel patterns of former railway passengers who no longer travelled and did not use replacement bus services.
Rannie, J. Alan. The Newport-Freshwater Branch (Trains Illustrated, 1953)
Memories of journeys made in July 1913, and subsequently until just prior to closure
Newman, Marcus. Rush Hour at Monmouth Troy (Trains Illustrated, 1953). 157-8.
Newcombe, N.W. Two Irish Branches: (1) Evening Train from Enniskillen; (2) Diesel over Dingle Bay (Railway World, 1960). 159-62
Eniskillen to Sligo mixed train hauled by 0-6-4T Eniskillen and on mixed train on West Clare railway on train from Cahirciveen
McNaught, R.S. End of the M. & G.N. (Railway World, 1959). 163-9
Spalding Town to Melton Constable behind a B1
They Shall Not Pass (Trains Illustrated, 1955). 165 [box]
Opposition to closure of Nelson to Glenhope line in New Zealand

Section Seven The Railways go to War

Weight, R.A.H. Eight years back: the Southern Railway's magnificent achievement in 1940. (Railways, 1948). 173-4.
Gradon, W. McGowan. The Highland at War (Railway World, 1954). 175-7
WW2 at Forres
A Railway goes to War (Railway World, 1960)
Shropshire & Mongomeryshire Railway during WW2

Section Eight Railwayana

Jackson, Alan A. Railway Postcards (Railway World, 1961) 187-91
McNaught, R.S.  A Country Station Idyll (Railways, 1948) 192-6.
Childhood spent in Station House, Leominster?
Ransome-Wallis, P. Thoughts on Railway Photography (Trains Illustrated, 1955) 197-202
Far too practical for an anthology
Boyd, J.I.C. Narrow Gauge Photography (Railway World, 1953) 203-5
Much more down to earth (bog) than previous
Finch, G.B. Ticket Collector (Trains Illustrated, 1955) 205-7
5 Puse 5 Pause 5 Pre-Grouping Signal boxes (Railway World, 1964) 208-13
Harley, C.B. Memories of a G.C. Station in the Pennines (Railway World, 1964) 214-17.
Hazlehead (arrangements to stop train thereat); also conditional stop at Dunbar to pick up.
Memories of the Bristol-Birmingham Main tine of 60 Years Ago (Railway World, 1964) 217-23

The Ringing Grooves of Change. 13
1. Opening of the Merthyr Tydvil, 1804. The Western Mail.
2. The Rain-Hill Trials, 1829. The Liverpool Times. 13 October 1829.
3. The Loco Motive Machine. Thomas Creevey. 14 November 1829
4. A Footplate Run with Stephenson. Frances Anne Kemble. Liverpool. 26 August 1830
5. The Liverpool & Manchester. Crabb Robinson. Liverpool. 9 June 1833
6. Nothing More Comfortable. Charles Greville. Knowsley. 18 July 1837
7. Parliamentary Committee. George Stephenson
                                            Alderson (against Bill)
                                            Joy (for Bill)
8. Landowners v. Surveyors. John Francis
9. Surveyors. v. Landowners. John Francis
10. The Shareholders. Herbert Spencer
11. Brunel's Alarm Clock. St. George Burke, QC
12. The Camden Town Cutting. Charles Dickens.  
13. The Condition of the Dead in 1844. Friedrich Engels.
14. The Navigators. Samuel Smiles.
15. Spirituality destitute. John Francis
16. Socialists. Anon
17. The Navvy and the Landlady. Sir Francis Head
18. The Egyptians Eclipsed. Guide to the London & Birmingham Railway.
19. The Queen is Charmed. Buckingham Palace. 14 June 1842. Queen Victoria
20. Not Quite So Fast. Morning Post. February 1842
21. Situation Wanted. The Times. 25 February 1852
22. Bramwell Bronte: Ticket Collector. E.F. Benson
23. What Immortal Hand? John Ruskin
24. The Engine. Alexander Anderson
25. R.I.P. Anon

On Kelling Heath there is a cottage next to a level crossing on the North Norfolk Railway which if it was offered for rental during the bleak Norfolk winter when few if any trains are run then Lambert's railway miscellany might be useful to keep the occupants sane. This is less than an anthology and more than a dictionary of quotations: as Lambert does not cite his sources it could not really be either as the entries (items) rarely exceed three paragraphs and many are but a few lines, Some are in boxes. It is intended for the general reader and mirrors Readers' Digest and similar material associated with dentists' waiting rooms. It has a bibliography (list of assorted books rather like the Book Hive in Norwich): this lacks David St John Thomas, but includes two works by John Thomas; two by Bryan Morgan (who was rather good at this sort of thing), but no Hamilton Ellis, and only one O.S. Nock (presumably compiler is too young to have been moulded by their oeuvre). The book is divided into ten chapters which helps to bring things together and has a fairly good index (it is well constructed, but failed to provide rapid navigation to the questions set out in Martin Barnes review in J. Rly Canal Hist. Soc., 2011 (211), 60). Acknowledgements include many who are compulsive letter writers (Michael Dunn and Ann Glen, for instance). The index looks good, but fails to provide sufficient entry points at names, and this infuriating when one remembers something of interest: thus on page 189 there is a "box" which includes an entertaining item on Box signal box, but there is no index entry for Box. Similarly, another text box on page 45 contains an item on Royal Scot class No. 6122 Royal Ulster Rifleman having its nameplates removed when it was discovered that it was to haul a special conveying de Valera from Holyhead to London on 15 January 1938: the index lacks an entry point at "Royal". One major fault is that the sources are not identified.

Kevin does not like the vague line drawings, nor the arty headings, but he is difficult to please. There is so much more of interest on the Internet: one can browse nineteenth century newspapers, one can explore thr minutae of railway accident reports (via the wonderful Railway Archive website: who needs Lambert's railway miscellany? Martin Barnes was far more generous: receiving a free review copy may have helped: Kevin had to pay 55 pence for the transfer of one of Norfolk County Library's copies to Sheringham so that he could have a more thorough inspection than that provided on the shelves of Bertram Watt's excellent Sheringham bookshop. It is very meagre fare compared with Bryan Morgan's Railway lover's companion. Sadly, it is not something he would buy and questions whether it was worth 55 pence.

Prologue
Gilbert Thomas. Nostalgia. 13

Book One: Rolling stock. 17
Walt Whitman. To a locomotive in winter. 18
Archibald Macleish. Grazing locomotives. 19
Robert Louis Stevenson. The iron steed. 19
Henry Herbert Knibbs. Right of way. 20
Richard G. Esler. I am a railroad. 21
Charles Armstrong Fox. The steam-engine. 22
George W. Bungay. The locomotive. 23
John Davidson. Song of a train. 24
Strickland W. Gillilan. Song of the freight car. 25
Arthur Chapman. The market train. 27
Charles Tennyson Turner. The cattle train. 27
Alfred Kreymborg. Transcontinental train. 28
William Empson. The beautiful train. 28
Louis B. Coxe. Diesel train. 29
Karle Wilson Baker. Box-car letters. 30
Morris Bishop. Railroad coach seating-arrangement, I cannot but deplore you. 31
Stephen Gale. The Lackawanna Railroad, 32
Joyce Kilmer. The twelve-forty-five. 32
Horatio Brown. To a Great Western broadgauge engine and its stoker. 35

Book Two: Mainly Railwaymen. 37
Bret Harte.Guild's signal. 38
Bret Harte. The ghost that Jim saw. 39
Clement Scott. A tale of the Dover Express. 41
G.R. Sims. In the signal box: a stationmaster's story. 44
Roden Noel. The signalman. 49
G.R. Sims. The level crossing. 54
Wallace Saunders. Casey Jones. 58
Vincent Starrett. Train wreck. 60
Hayden Carruth. The wreck of the circus train. 60
George Colburn. John Walker. 61
Late Manager North British Railway
Carl Sandburg. The old flagman. 62
Wilfrid Gibson. The platelayer. 63
D.H. Lawrence. Morning work. 66
T.S. Eliot. Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat. 67

Book Three: People and the Permanent Way. 71
Willlam Wordsworth. On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway. 72
Richard Monckton Milnes. Answer to Wordsworth's Sonnet Against the Kendal and Bowness Railway. 73
Robert Frost. The Egg and the Machine. 73
Jones Very. The  Railroad. 74
Martin F. Tuppper. The Lamp Upon the Railway Engine. 75
Louis Macneice. Trains in the Distance. 76
Vivian de Sola Pinto. The Train. 77
John Davidson. Rail and Road. 77
Walter de la Mare. Flood water. 81
Siegfried Sassoon. A Local Train of Thought. 81
D.H. Lawrence. A Train at Night, 82
Kenneth Patchen. The Little Black Train. 82
H.S. Sutton. A Railway Ride. 83
J. Ashby-Sterry.  The Baby in the Train, 84
Witter Bynner. Traveller, 85
Genevieve Taggard. Train: Abstraction. 86
Witter Bynner. Train Mates, 87
Walter Kaufman. Trains. 87
Gregory Corso. Happening on a German Train. 88
John Berryman. The Traveller. 88
Donald Davidson. At the Station. 89
Jones Very. The Traveller at the Depot, 90
Thomas Wolfe. The Locomotive. 90
Dannie Abse. After a Departure. 91
Sidney Keyes. For MC, Written in the Train. 93
Thomas Wolfe. As it Had Always Been. 94
Gilbert Thomas. The Ploughman. 95
Laurence Binyon. The Tunnel. 96
Katharine Tynan. At Euston Station. 96
Edward Caswall. On Passing by a Former Home on a Railway. 97
J.C. Squire. Late Snow. 98
Kenneth Hopkins. From the Train. 99
Thomas Merton. The Night Train. 100
Gilbert Thomas. In the Train. 101
Horace Shipp. Journey. 102
May Sarton. After a Train Journey. 103
Theodore Dreiser. The Passing Freight. 103

Book Four: Stations - Arrivals and Departure. 105
Louis Bogan. Train tune. 106
Thomas Wolfe. The Railroad Station. 106
G.K. Chesterton. King's Cross Station. 108
John Davidson. Liverpool Street Station. 108
Charles Mackay. The Arriving Train. 118
Dartmouth Arms Statiion, Croydon Railway. 28 April 1844
John Davidson. London Bridge. 119
L.J.M. de Michele. On the Wall at Hayling Station, After Waiting an Hour for a Train. 122
Edward Thomas. Adlestrop. 122
Frederick Thomas. Exeter St David's. 123
Leah Bodine Drake. Through train. 123
E.M. Martin. The Railway Station. 124
Edwin Muir. The Wayside Station. 125
Archibald Macleish. Way-Station. 126
Gretchen Gall Shoemaker. 'They've Razed the Wooden Depot. 126
Joseph Warren Beach. Milwaukee Depot. 127
Richard Wilbur. For the New Railway Station in  Rome. 128
Karl Shapiro. Terminal. 129
Vivian de Sola. The Difference. 131
Edmund Blunden. The Tree in the Goods Yard. 131
Edmund Wilson. A Train Out of the Terminal, 132
Vivian de Sola. Statiion. 132
J. Ashby-Sterry. Baggage on the Brain, 133
C.S. Calverley. Thoughts at a Railway Station. 134
Henry S. Leigh. Bradshaw's Guide. 135
C.S. Calverley.  Striking, 136
Frances Cornford. Parting in War-Time. 138
Wilfred Owen. The Send-Off. 138
D.H. Lawrence. Going Back, 139
Richard Spender. Train Journey. 140
Karl Shapiro. Troop Train. 141
D.H. Lawrence. Tommies in the Train. 143
William Kean Seymour. Waiting Room, 144
Wilfrid Gibson.  Ambulance Train. 145
Anthony Rye. Running Commentary, 145
Edmund Blunden. The branch line. 147
Jack Kerouac. 164th Chorus. 148
Jack Kerouac. 165th Chorus. 148
F.O. Mann. The Hop-Pickers. 149
J. Ashby-Sterry. At Charing Cross. 150
Philip Henderson. Night Express. 152
Siegfried Sassoon. Morning Express. 154
Bertram Dobell. The Great Northern Express, 155
Martin Armstrong. After the Journey. 155
Thomas Hardy. In a Waiting Room. 156
James Kirkup. Waiting for the Train to Start. 158
Thomas Hardy. On the Departure Platform. 159
Alfred Noyes. On a Railway Platform. 160
Coventry Patmore. 'Leave-Taking at Salisbury'. 161
Herbert E. Palmer. Going North. 162
W.R. Rodgers. Express. 163
Kenneth Hopkins. At the station. 164

Book Five: Travellers and Commuters. 165
Richard Church. SR. 166
John Updike. English Train Compartment. 166
John Berryman. On the London Train. 167
Frances Cornford. The Face in the Opposite Corner. 168
Richard Church. Strap-hanging. 169
F.O. Mann. The Charwoman. 170
Julian Huxley. In the Train (I). 171
Julian Huxley. In the Train (II). 172
F.O. Mann. The Sleeping Man. 173
Richard Church. Peeping Tom. 174
Allen Tate. The Subway. 175
Richard Aldington. In the Tube. 175
Richard Wilbur. In the Smoking Car. 176
Carl Sandburg. Limited. 177
Rundell Jarrall. The Orient Express. 178
Rupert Brooke. Dawn. 179
H.T. Mackenzie Bell. Lines. 180
Maria Abdy. The Railroad by the Sea. 181
Louis Macneice. Train to Dublin. 182
Kenneth Hopkins. Train in Ireland. 183
Bret Harte. What the Engines Said. 184
Carl Sandburg. Southern Pacific. 186
Lawrence Ferlingetti. Starting from San Francisco. 186
John Gould Fletcher. Long Journey, Late Arrival. 190
Steve Allen. Boy on a Train. 193
Thomas Hardy. Midnight on The Great Western. 193
Charles Tennyson Turner. The Mute Lovers on the Railway Journey. 194
Coventry Patmore. The Girl of All Periods, 197
Richard Church. In the Railway Carriage. 198
Katherine Garrison Chapin. The Honeymooners on the Train. 199
Dannie Abse. Journeys and Faces, 200
Coventry Patmore. The Rosy-Bosom'd Hours, 201
D.H. Lawrence. Kisses in the Train. 203
Charles Mackay. The Stage Coach and The Steam Carriage. 204
James Thomson. 'In the Train'. 205
Stephen Fawcett. My First Railway Trip from Bradford to Leeds. 206
John G. Saxe. Rhyme of the Rail. 207
Roden Noel. A Child's Journey. 209
D.H. Lawrence. Excursion Train. 211
H. Cholmondeley-Pennell. How We Got to the Brighton Review. 212
Theodore Roethke. Night Journey. 215
James Kirkup, Photographs in a Railway Compartment, 216
Alfred Noyes. In a Railway Carriage, 217
Rupert Brooke. The Night Journey. 219
Stephen Spender. The Express. 220
Lawrence Durrell. Night Express. 221
Vivian de Sola Pinto. In the Train, 222
Evelyn Underhill. In the Train, 223

Book Six: Trainscapes and Journeys. 225
Willlam Wordsworth. Proud were ye, Mountains. 226
Teresa Hooley. Severn Tunnel, 226
Willlam Wordsworth. At Furness Abbey. 227
Carl Sandburg. On a Railroad Right of Way. 227
Joseph Warren Beach. Power. 228
Francis Bennoch. A Railway Rhyme. 229
James Kirkup. Durham Seen from the Train. 230
Patricia Beer. Peasant Woman Seen from a Train. 232
Frances Cornford. To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train. 232
G.K. Chesterton. The Fat White Woman Speaks. 233
Robert Louis Stevenson. From a Railway Carriage. 233
Alan Sillitoe. Guide to the Tiflis Railway. 234
Nancy Cunard. Southward. 235
Wilfrid Gibson. Fire. 236
Edmund Wilson. A Train's Whistle. 236
Edna St Vincent Millay. From a Train Window, 237
Witter Bynner. On the Train, 238
August Derleth. April Morning Train, 239
Joseph Warren Beach. Bohemian Flats, 239  
Robert Louis Stevenson. 'My Travelling Eyes ...'. 240
Willlam Wordsworth. Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways. 241
Walter de la Mare. The Railway Junction. 242
James Kirkup. The Railway Bridge, 243
Gordon Bottomley. The Viaduct. 244

Epilogue. 245
Horatio Brown. A Railroad Medley. 246

Navigating
Anon. Opening Hymn. 13
Willlam Wordsworth. On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway. 15
W.M. Thackeray. The Speculators. 16
Willlam Wordsworth. Just Disdain. 18  
Songs of social change. 19  
Anon. The Railway Whistle or The Blessings of Hot-Water Travelling. 19
Anon. The Cockney's Trip to Brummagem. 22
Anon. The Wonderful Effects of the Leicester Rail Road. 24
Anon. The Navigators . 26
Anon. A New Song on the Opening of the Birmingham and Liverpool Railway 28
Anon. Johnny Green's Trip fro' Owdhum to see the Manchester Railway. 30
Anon. Navvy on the Line. 35
Colin Ellis. Rugby to Peterborough Line. 37
Peter Ashley. Timetable. 39

Engineering. 41
Robert Louis Stevenson. The Iron Steed. 43
Ned Farmer. King Steam. 44
Rudyard Kipllng. Romance. 46
Horatio Brown. To a Great Western Broadgauge Engine and its Stoker. 47
William McGonagall. The Tay Bridge Disaster. 49
American Folk-Song. Casey Jones. 51
Anon.  The Little Red Caboose behind the Train. 55
T. Baker. Tragic Incident. 56
Huskisson's death during opening of Liverpool & Manchester Railway
G.K. Chesterton. Cyclopean. 58
Stephen Spender. The Express. 59
Percy French. Are ye right there, Michael? 61

Waiting. 65
Anon. 'If all the trains at Clapham Jctn'. 67
Thomas Hardy. On the Departure Platform. 68
Wilfred Owen. The Send-Off. 70
John Betjeman. Distant View of a Provincial Town. 71
Thomas Hardy. In a Waiting Room. 73
Kenneth Allott. Departure Platform. 75
John Betjeman. Pershore Station, or A Liverish Journey First Class. 77
Thomas Hardy. At the Railway Station, Upway. 79
Edmund Blunden. Railway Note. 80
Fleur Adcock. Country Station. 81
Edward Lear. 'There was an Old Man at a Junction', 82
Siegfried Sassoon. Morning Express. 83
Walter De La Mare. The Railway Junction. 84
Katherine Tynan. At Euston Station. 86
Edwin Muir. The Wayside Station. 88
T.S. Eliot. Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat. 89
John Betjeman. Dilton Marsh Halt. 93
Edward Lear. 'There was an Old Man at a Station'. 94
Alan Brownjohn. The Train. 95
Tony Harrison Changing at York. 96

Travelling. 97
Tiresias. Adlewhat? 1. 99
Robert Louis Stevenson. From a Railway Carriage. 100
Edward Lear. 'There was a Young Lady of Sweden'. 101
Thomas Hardy. Faintheart in a Railway Train. 102
E.V. Knox. The Everlasting Percy. 103
Edward Thomas. Adlestrop. 106
Rupert Brooke. Dawn. 107
John Betjeman. From The Great Western. 108
Tiresias. Loose Coupling 1. 109
Louis Macneice. Restaurant Car. 110
W.R. Rodgers. Express. 111
Tiresias. Adlewhat? 2. 112
Philip Larkin .The Whitsun Weddings. 113
John Betjeman. Great Central Railway Sheffield Victoria to Banbury. 117
Stevie Smith. The Singing Cat. 119
Tiresias. Loose Coupling 4. 121
Emily Dickinson. 'I Like To See It Lap The Miles'. 122
David Paul. The Sleeping Passenger. 123
John Betjeman. A Mind's Journey to Diss. 125
Tiresias. Adlewhat? 3. 127
Philip Larkin. 'Like the Train's Beat'. 128
John Betjeman. From Summoned By Bells. 129
Tiresias. Adlewhat? 4. 131
John Betjeman. From Summoned By Bells. 132
A.L. Rowse. Home-Coming to Cornwall. 134
Due to a landslide diverted via North Cornwall main line
Siegfried Sassoon. A Local Train of Thought. 135
Bryan Morgan. Incident in August. 136
W.H. Auden. Night Mail. 138
R.P. Lister. Nostalgia. 141

Musing. 145
C.L. Graves. Railway Rhymes. 147
Station names
Tiresias. Loose Coupling 7. 149
Peter Ashley. Railway Scrapbook. 150
Thomas Hardy. Midnight on The Great Western. 151
John Betjeman. Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station' 152
Thomas Hardy. The Missed Train. 154
Edmund Blunden. Two Wars. 155
C.H. Sisso. Commuters. 157
John Betjeman. The Metropolitan Railway. 158
Mr. Punch's Railway Book. The Tourist's Alphabet. 160
Ely Cathedral Memorial. The Spiritual Railway. 161
Peter Black. The Man in the Bowler Hat. 163
Philip Larkin. I Remember, I Remember. 165
John Betjeman Thoughts in a Train. 167
Patricia Beer. The Branch Line. 168
Seamus Heaney. The Railway Children. 170
Simon Armitage. The Metaphor Now Standing at Platform 8. 171
Daljit Nagra. University. 173
Peter Ling. Harviston End. 174

Index of Authors. 177

Acknowledgments. 183

H.A. Vallance. The railway enthusiast's bedside book. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1966. 264pp. + plates
Elmer T. Rudd. Thoughts on the Bull. 13-21.
O.V.S. Bulleid as observed on demonstration run of a Merchant Navy class Pacific:
Later, we were given a run to Exeter, in an immense train of rather shabby coaches which could be briefly spared from the Southern Railway's contri- bution to the British War Effort. Apart from Sir Eustace Missenden and his Southern Railway staff, there were several journalists and suchlike aboard the train. W.A. Willox, then of The Railway Gazette, and in one's experience never a man to gush unduly, went almost starry-eyed over the train's acceleration out of Waterloo. We got away from Waterloo, he said, like the wind. In his entourage was John Skelron, who suddenly stopped talking about South America, giving his eye to his stopwatch and evidently loving her like a mother. Even Hamilton Ellis had a stopwatch, saying with a smirk of half-shame that it was borrowed, and that he never used such a thing unless, as now, he was being paid to do it. The truth was that all these people wanted to see what happened when you had a Pacific locomotive, with a big firebox apparently full of thermic siphons and things, and a working pressure of 280 lb. per sq. in., on a train of unprecedented length, pointed towards Exeter by the London & South Western line.
We were not disappointed. Willox had been quite right about "getting away like the wind", and then, somewhere around Winchfield, a person best left nameless came out with his "I told you so!" For clouds of smoke, and an abominable odour, were coming from the front of the train, and someone else said he was sure that both came from that box with the works in it. When we pulled up in the environs of Basingstoke, it seemed that the only Southern Railway face neither red nor elongated was Bulleid's. He was down on the ballast, as on a long-ago occasion in Lincolnshire or somewhere, apparently fascinated by the fault and its possible causes, and wearing that mild grin which, like his feline handshake, many men will remember for a long time.
Two old engines, one South Western and the other more or less South Eastern & Chatham, took us on to Salisbury, where there was another of Bulleid's new babies waiting to take us to Exeter.
Robert M. Hogg. Scotland's mountain barriers. 22-32.
G.E. Williams. Timetable science. 33-9
M.D. Greville. Backward look. 147-55
Scotland, apart from its natural attractions, was, from a railway point of view, very fascinating, and having started, I visited it regularly up to the First World War, and have continued to do so frequently ever since. Very early, I explored the scenically beautiful Highland Railway, in many ways a slightly comic but rather lovable concern, faced with the almost impossible task of conveying-in the summer-a heavy traffic over long stretches of single line with the severe handicap offrequent late connections at Perth. One feature which sticks in my memory was the ten-minute stop at Bonar Bridge for refreshments, where the wild rush to get and consume something in the time was reminiscent of what one reads of Swindon in early days. It was needed, as the journey between Inverness and Wick took six or seven hours, as compared with four or five now, with refreshment cars.
Perhaps the highlight of Scottish railways, in pre-1914 days, was the Clyde steamer services. The beautiful and graceful steamers, the ultra-smart working, and the excitement of the extreme (and probably very wasteful) competition made travelling on the Clyde an unforgettable experience, apart from its scenic attraction. Looking back nostalgically to my trips 50 to 60 years ago, it seems to me that the weather was always fme, and the band always playing' 'Nights of Gladness", thought neither can be actually correct. The races for the piers were frequently really exciting. We all had our pet fleets-mine was the Glasgow & South Western (after the Great North my favourite Scottish line) and here again I liked the Caledonian the least. But I must admit that I think it showed up better here than elsewhere; the train services to the "Coast" were good and fast, with better stock than the average, and their two coast stations, Gourock and Wemyss Bay, quite seemly and well kept. Certainly the working of the boats was a revelation. It was quite usual at Gourock, in business hours (and there was a heavy residential traffic) for three well-filled boats to be got away in less than five minutes after the arrival of the train.
In 1904, I joined the Railway Club (then five years old, and still going strong) to which I owe so much. I am very grateful that I had the opportunity of meeting and knowing most of the leading early railway enthusiasts, whose names will be familiar to those who have read the earlier volumes of The Railway Magazine. Among others, G.W.J. Potter, a very sound and well-informed man, who became a great friend, and whose history of the Whitby & Pickering Railway, published in 1906, was one of the earliest histories of small lines (now so numerous) and, in view of the restricted sources then available, most admirable and informative. H.L. Hopwood, who contributed so much in his way to the early study of railway history; and the Rev. W.J. Scott, whom it was an education to have known, and a real "character" who combined extensive knowledge with a keen sense of humour. I could name many others, such as Rous-Marten, G.A. Sekon, Clement E. Stretton and R.E. Charlewood.
With Charlewood, I served for a time as joint secretary of the Railway Club. He was a man of immense energy. When he accepted the position, he was living at Carnforth, and stipulated that he should not be expected to be in London more than once a week. In actual practice, very few weeks passed when he did not come to the club at least three times, travelling backwards and forwards. I owe the inestimable benefit of a large number of friends with similar interests, to the Railway Club, and to the Railway & Canal Historical Society, of which I am a little proud to have been one of the founders ten years ago.
Among my liveliest recollections is the London Underground, both before and after electrification. In the steam days a journey on this was an interesting — almost eerie—experience, what with the gloom and smoke-filled atmosphere, the grim and spartan carriages and the archaic-looking locomotives (which appeared really older than they were). And then the atmosphere! This was pretty thick all round the Circle, but to get the best effects one had to be on the Metropolitan. I can still recall the smoke—could almost say the taste—at what I still find it difficult not to call Gower Street and Portland Road stations. How often have I waited at these stations, and one often had to wait quite a time (or did it only seem long ?), coughing and gasping. There were those who claimed that it was healthy—perhaps it was, but I doubt it. Then came the electrification which transformed things, but only after prolonged teething troubles, especially on the District Line. In the early days of electric working, travel on the District was a most interesting and amusing experience, always supposing that you did not want to get somewhere in reasonable time. For those who would know what it was like I would recom- mend a poem in Punch, by Owen Seaman, sometime about 1906, describing a journey from Putney to Charing Cross. This, though perhaps somewhat exaggerated, did give an idea of what travel on the District was like then. The irregular service, frequent breakdowns, ramshackle rolling stock—with automatic doors which, as often as not, refused to work—which made an appalling noise coming into the stations (Seaman described it as "a crash like skittle-balls on sheered lead"), and frequent doubts as to the destination of the train, were all really fascinating, unless, as I said, you wanted to get some- where.
The doubts as to destinations were partly caused by a traffic controller at Earls Court, who apparently arbitrarily altered them at a moment's notice. I once heard, as a result of this, an official call out the destination of a train as follows—"West Kensington, Hammersmith,—Oh! Damn, No !—Walham Green and Putney Bridge."

29-12-2016
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