The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways by Michael Williams
| The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways by Michael Williams | |
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| Category: History | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: While it's possibly not for everyone on the Clapham line, this book will certainly bring fascinating detail and rich history to light it its own unique way, which will appeal to many train fans. | |
| Buy? YES | Borrow? YES |
| Pages: 336 | Date: May 2015 |
| Publisher: Preface Publishing | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781848094352 | |
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Beaching wasn't the only buffer to the fate of various train lines of our land – it could have been sheer managerial incompetence, the birth of the package air holiday, or even road-builders' bloody-minded spite that served to bring down the end of the line. Yes, the fact you can easily pepper your words with idiom from the world of trains shows how important they have been over the last two hundred years, and this book is geared around that as well, if happily cliché-free. Our author takes us on a journey around various sites where train lines and elements of what once rode proudly upon them have been and gone. So grab a platform ticket (RIP) and see what class of journey we're travelling in.
Well, to me, the first chapter wasn't the most auspicious of places to start. I couldn't get a handle on what the book wanted to be, for it told us all we should want to know about the Somerset and Dorset (aka the Slow and Dirty) line but didn't seem to fit with how I expected the content to be presented. Is this a guide to who built the lines, or what and who rode upon them, or what killed them off, or what is left now and how one goes about replicating the extinct route? I felt it was a little jack of all trades and conveyer of none. But bizarrely, through sheer repetition, when you've looked at over a dozen other lines in similar ways, you get the feel of the full picture – this is much more pointillist, with tiny details in just the right place to produce the full effect.
Repetition is a little bit of a problem, however, for too many chapters are finished with a kind of 'Hark, is that really wind, or the spirit of the 10:34 stopper up from Alsager?' refrain. Not all chapters here concern actual lines, for they look at sleepers to Paris, fine dining, named express departures and other factors that are dead or dying, however some of those can turn into lists too easily. I didn't find it a completely easy read, in fact, for while it is generally layman-friendly there was an insistence on using a terminology with no explanation (multiple unit trains I still can’t distinguish).
However, that's my niggles done with. This book is chock full with enjoyment for the right audience, and even for me it would easily have been twice as long in the reading if I had had google images open all the time to see what and where. It easily fascinates, just as trains old and new can themselves – you don't have to be an anorak to goggle at the figures of over 4,000 miles of line being laid in just eight industrious Victorian years, when we don't have 10,000 miles in the entire national network now. Who can imagine the days of the London underground network reaching right out into the leafy suburbia of Metroland, and tempting the pioneering commuters into work with kippers and posh drinks en route?
So bear in mind what this is not – it won't get you walking the Downs Link or any long distance paths, ticking off extinct junctions. It won't be a sit-down history of British rail before, er, British Rail. But it will capture and transport just as any kind of train can today. I've given a healthy star rating for the book due to what it made me feel critically, but there will be thousands lambasting that for the achievements of this author, and they will engage with this history a whole lot more, and will only be willing to give it pretty much full marks.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
To see how it was to travel as a tourist when those early lines were being built, you have only to turn to Three Men and a Bradshaw by John George Freeman and Ronnie Scott (editor).
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways by Michael Williams at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways by Michael Williams at Amazon.com.
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