RAILWAYS

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28257, 20 April 1957, Page 3

RAILWAYS

Farewell to Steam. By Roger Lloyd. Allen and Unwin. By the end of this century one or two of the giants of our day, the last of our steam locomotives, will be sleeping in a museum with the Rocket, Lion, * and a Patrick Stirling Single. So will be marked the Alpha and Omega of steam traction on the British railways. The diesels and electrics are already taking over. < Few could be better fitted to write on this —the death and rebirth of the locomotive—than Canon Roger Lloyd. His great personal interest and love for railways and their workings have led him to high places. From being a humble “engine spotter” he now > has access to board rooms, and personal friendships with railway executives. Added to his profound knowledge of locomotive and traffic working, he has from backstage obtained a comprehensive view of the British railway system as a whole. All this goes to make “Farewell to Steam” a very worth-while book. In the first chapter, “Hail and Farewell,” he writes something of the birth of the diesel locomotive and its teething troubles, but as a good parson should, he gives some hope for the future to those “railwayacs” who feel that with the death of steam their interest must also die.

The chapter on the work of a signalman in the Winchester Box during a big storm, the clearing of snow-bound traffic on the northern section of the Highland railway during the gi;eat storm of January, 1955, the organisation set up in a few minutes to meet the emergency created by the major disaster at Harrow station in October, 1952. all create interest in phases of railway working other than the locomotive. For good measure, a chapter,. “Traveller’s Pleasure” is added, telling something of the relaxation of rail travel and how to find it. He records that not only did John Buchan write “Greenmantle” on journeys from Paddington to Oxford, but that Professor Toynbee wrote the first notes for his nine-volume “A Study of History” on the Orient express in 1921. There is also “The Railway Scene, from the Parish Church,” and a chapter on the railwayman’s tradition. This book will give great pleasure to the ordinary—one might say layreader, and every railwayman should read it.