John B. Snell: notably his Railways: mechanical engineering
To an extent One man's railway tells something about John Snell who was Managing Director of the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch Railway for 27 years. The book jacket notes that he was born in Fiji in 1932. He is a barrister who worked for both London Transport and British Railways before joining the RHDR in 1972. He was found dead in his home at Dymchurch on 3 January 2014. His parents were New Zealanders. He was education at Bryanston and Balliol College. He was an early volunteer on the Talyllyn Railway. For a time he worked for London Transport and British Railways. He was Chairman of the North Norfolk Railway from 1969-74. He was Vice Chairman of the Heritage Railway Association. He had a sharp intellect and wry sense of humour.
Britain's railways under steam. London: Arthur Barker, 1965.
224 pp. 206 illus. (incl. 26 col.),diagr., 17 tables, 7 maps. Bibliog
This is a history of steam railways, not a history of locomotives.
It does, however, contain an economic study of steam motive power and there
are many fine illustrations. KPJ bought his copy at Liverpool Street Station
during Christmas 1965, at the time of his father-in-law's death.
Early railways. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1964. 128pp.
This book has a strange similarity to the Puffin Picture Books: the
simple diagrams and the multiplicity of illustrations (many of which are
in colour, and a fair proportion of which are non-photographic) are obvvious
similarities which are accentuated by the semi-landcsape format. As the period
covered extends to 1914 and includes both early electric and diesel traction
the title is inaccurate. Amongst the illustrations are some based on H.M.
Le Fleming paintings. The approach is global. Sadly it fails to note the
full sources for some of the key illustrations..
Mechanical engineering: railways. London:
Longman. 1971. 177pp.
Ottley 10370: contains a useful bibliographical
survey of the early literature and its observations on contemporary sources
such as Nicholas Wood's Practical treatise
are helpful.
Snell noted that the amount of literature published on railways, as
one might expect, was very large between the 1820s and 1850s. Authors were
at first propagandizing for, and then describing, something quite new; and
popular interest was kept up by the spread of new lines over the country
together with the pace of technical improvement. From the 1860s the quantity
of matter declined markedly, and consisted of technical and educational works,
concerned to describe the innovations that continued (at a slower pace) and
to train new generations of railway men; together with works dealing with
the administration of railways, and their finance and politics. Historical
and biographical writing was fairly rare during the nineteenth century, though
there were some important books of this kind; the first beginning of the
present great flood of historical, descriptive, evocative writing did not
appear until the 1880s and 1890s (when perhaps the imminent extinction of
Brunel's broad gauge gave an initial impetus), although a few volumes of
personal, more or less anecdotal, material were published
earlier.
Following Wood, who used a number of drawings and whose book also
contained some folding engraved plates, came several extremely large volumes
mainly concerned to publish detailed drawings of every possible part of a
railway, from the design of pumps and axles to station architecture (and
layout) and signal-levers, as a guide to those engineers who were building
new lines. In this way information regarding different practices was circulated,
and the best gained acceptance; it is a pity that as new construction slowed
(and engineers began to feel they knew it all already) the printing of such
books became uneconomic after the 18608. However, such periodicals as The
Engineer continued. In some of these books the text was minimal, and
of less importance than the drawings; with Wood the balance had been quite
the other way.
One example of this kind of book was S. C. Brees's Railway
Practice, which appeared (in-five volumes) between 1837 and 1847 (Ottley
2554). It is mainly concerned with civil engineering, but has some useful
information on rolling stock, including French and Austrian. It might be
mentioned that the French published at least as many books of this kind on
an even larger scale, including Perdonnet. and Polonceau's Nouveau
portefeuille de l'ingemeur des chemins de fer (1857). G. D. Dempsey's
The Practical Railway Engineer (1855) is a finely produced book which
carries on Nicholas Wood's aim considerably more successfully than Ritchie,
and in which the text is restored to predominance.
D.K. Clark's Railway Machinery (1855)
and Railway Locomotives (1860) are worthy of mention.
Three other contemporary works will be mentioned here, apart from those otherwise
referred to in the text. The Liverpool & Manchester, when it opened and
during its construction, was an object of intense public interest, and perhaps
the first of all the popularizing railway books was
Henry Booth's The Liverpool
and Manchester Railway, published in 1830. Booth was not only the
Treasurer of the Company, but as we have seen a man of some mechanical ability,
with a recorded share in the development of the multiple-tube boiler and
the screw coupling. More even than that, he was a competent writer, and in
addition to a good account of the history of the project (for public consumption)
enlivened his narrative with some quite evocative descriptive
passages.
Dionysius Lardner has had a bad
press since E. T. Mac Dermot, writing his two-volume History of the Great
Western Railway (1927-51), savaged him on behalf of his ancient adversary,
Brunel. Certainly his judgment lapsed on occasion; apart from the Box Tunnel
incident, he once committed himself to the proposition that if a train ran
on an undulating railway at a certain low speed on upgrades and a certain
high speed on downgrades, its overall average speed would be the average
of the uphill and downhill speeds, thus falling into a boobytrap avoidable
by the averagely cautious schoolboy. But, as one of the first men to see
the need, in an industrial society, for somebody to explain the mysteries
of science to the general public, he had a considerable reputation in the
1850s and 1840s, and did a great deal of essential basic research into railway
matters himself. He wrote a host of books; a typical sample might be his
Report on the Determination of the Mean Value of Railway Constants
(1842), prepared at the request of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science, and as a result of experimentation with special trains on the
Liverpool & Manchester, Grand Junction, and Great Western railways, among
other trials. By force of experiment, carried very much further than Nicholas
Wood had been able to at Killingwoth, Lardner determined the nature of frictional
and air resistance, and produced data, including a log, of a journey from
Liverpool to Birmingham in vast detail, to show that the Stephensonian
rule-of-thumb principles of construction, to keep grades and curves as slight
as possible, was needlessly expensive. He proved that curves of under a mile
radius, and gradients of up to 1 in 200, might be used without practical
disadvantage, and Locke and others listened. On the way, he demolished by
experiment a suggestion of Brunel's that air resistance might be significantly
reduced by a form of streamlining with a train 'having a pointed front like
a ship's prow', by trials on Madeley Bank in July 1859.
Perhaps the best general account of early railways in Britain is given
by John Francis, in History of the English Railway (2 vols, 1851):
Ottley 4774. This is a sound, non-technical account; Francis was a
writer on commercial and financial topics. He rather enjoys himself on certain
subjects, notably the depredations of the brutal and licentious qavvies,
and the vitiated sons and dishonoured daughters of the country folk that
they left behind them, but on such matters as the Railway Mania and the rise
and fall of George Hudson he is extremely sound. However, he does not deal
with technical detail, though he does write well of certain
engineers.
Turning finally to recent books, which approach the subject as history
rather than as exposition or memory, the two most useful works on locomotive
history and development are probably E. L. Ahrons, The
Bn'tish Railway Steam Locomotive, 1825-1925 (1927, 1961), and
J.G. H. Warren, A Century if Locomotive Building
(1925; 1970), which is a Centenary History of Robert Stephenson & Co.
Ahrons's is a wideranging book, full of essential information, but very scrappy
and ill-organized with many traces of its origin in a series of magazine
articles, and with a poor index which might otherwise have helped. The author
did not live to complete and revise the book. Warren covers a much narrower
field (though one wide enough to miss little of importance, since the firm
was in such an outstandingly predominant position in the early years) and
therefore presents a clearer and better told story.
On other mechanical matters, there is much less. So far as carriage
construction is concerned, Hamilton Ellis enters a one-horse race with his
Nineteenth Century Railway Carriages in the British Isles (1949), but does
his usual workmanlike job despite the lack of competition, within close limits
of space. Otherwise, and on wagons, there seems to be nothing in book for,
though back numbers of Engineening in particular are goldmines, waiting to
be attacked.
Charles Hadfield's Atmospheric Railways (1967) is a useful
summary; much was published contemporaneously, including pamphlets by the
Samudas, but after the bubble burst a silence fell. A. R. Bennett, better
known for his books on steam engines, published a paper on 'Electric traction',
read to the East of Scotland Engineering Association on 19 March 1889, whose
date makes it early enough to be useful to the antiquarian.
As regards general engineering history, the field is considerably
wider, though little of it specially refers to railways. L.T.C. Rolt's
biographies of I.K. Brunel and the two Stephensons deserve a place in any
list: but the seeker of detailed information will find a treasuretrove bristling
with further references in the five volumes of the Oxford
History of Technology dealing with every aspect of manufacture and industry,
to whjch the author records his final acknowledgements.
C.F. Dendy Marshall appears to receive no mention whatsoever, other
than being listed in the bibliography.
One man's railway: J.E.P. Howey and the Romney, Hythe
& Dymchurch Railway. Newton Abbot: David & Charles,
1983.
Probably his best book as written from the inside: he was General
Manager of the Railway when the book was written, which was not that long
after Howey had died.
2015-01-27