The British Railways

The book I read to research this post was The Official British Rail Book Of Trains For Young People by Michael Bowler which is a very good book that I bought from a local secondhand bookstore. This book was published in 1985 so is quite old and only goes up to the HST & APT trains which did revolutionize the British railway network. The book is only around 160 pages so is quite short but I found it quite helphful in explaining a lot of things about the history of the railways in a easy to understand way. Britain of course is the original home of railways which were fed by the advances in the Industrial revolution. The Rocket built by George Stephenson was the first steam train to see regular service on the Stockton to Darlington line. They held a competition where the competitors had to go round a circuit 10 times which equalled the distance of the planned railway. The Rocket was the only one to complete it in the allotted time.  The Rocket was the first engine to use lots of small pipes instead of one big pipe to maximize the steam pressure. Britain is also the inventor of the Express Service and there originally was a service on the GWR from Cheltenham to London. The GWR had the fastest steam locomives in the world for many years. When the idea of express trains caught on The Mallard a Duchess class steam locomotive held the fastest train in the world record for many years. It still holds the record for fastest steam locomotive ever. It was also the fastest British train till the advent of the HST’s in the 80’s. I really enjoyed this book and I think if you see it for sale secondhand is a definite must buy.

The London Underground

The book I read to research this post was Down The Tube by Christian Wolmar which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is about the London Underground System  and was written in 2002 so probably doesn’t have the latest information. They were introducing the idea of drivers who just operated the doors to re assure the public they were safe and trains moved and stopped automatically. Nowadays they are some trains that don’t have a driver at all. There also was a line built to Heathrow Airport & talk of building a line to Canary Wharf & the Docklands. The book starts by looking at Camden Town station which has a popular market and has seen visitors increase dramatically. The Underground System in general is getting much more popular with travelcards which let you travel anywhere for a flat fee. Bromley which doesn’t have an Underground System took the GLC to court over the travelcards and won its case meaning they had to scale back the sale of them. Camden Town has a portion of the station that’s disused and also a disused line to Aldwych & London Transport are only too happy to show anybody round although only on request. It is part of their public relations programme. There are rooms filled with machinery that it would be too costly to remove and the ceilings are quite low as people tended to be shorter in those days. Christian is one of the most popular railway authors and fairly recently one of his books topped the History Chart on Amazon which is unusual for a railway book. He is a consistently good writer and I have read several books by him which I have enjoyed. It would be interesting if he updates this book to see what new developments have taken place. I did see a tv programme a couple of days ago that argued London swallows up far too much money developing its transport infrastructure and that it would be fairer to spend more money on other areas of Britain and help them catch up. Apparently they spend £5,000 per head in London and on average £700 elsewhere.