Railway Enthusiasm

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 4

Railway Enthusiasm

Continental Main Lines. By O. S. Nock. Allen and Unwin. 210 pp. Railways of the Andes. By Brian Fawcett. Allen and Unwin. 328 pp. Double Headed. By Gilbert Thomas and David St. John Thomas. David and Charles. 200 pp. North Western Steam. By W. A. Tuplin. Allen and Unwin. 250 pp. The Railways and the Nation. By A. J. Pearson. Allen and Unwin. 123 pp. As the world’s railways experience decline from their once proud position of complete sovereignty in transport owing to competition from air and road, the appetite of enthusiasts for books about railways seems to increase; and publishers are ready to satisfy this appetite, to which this handful of recent issues testifies.

Perhaps the most attractive of the five is Mr Nock’s “Continental Main Lines,” a book about the famous railway routes that criss-cross Europe. The construction of some of these lines involved stupendous engineering feats, a subject to which Mr Nock does justice, as he does to details of travel, railway coaches, engines, signalling, etc. Indeed, as a knowledgeable man about the European railways, their history and the scenic routes most travel, the reader will find Mr Nock a most engaging companion. If construction of the European lines involved major engineering feats, they were achievements that in even the most difficult places could not excel the building triumphs described in Mr Fawcett’s “Railways of the Andes.” Here indeed is a story of railroad

construction in the raw, in terrain where railways reach the highest summits, have the stiffest adhesion grades, the most tortuous curves and the hardest operating conditions to be found anywhere. Here again, the author is an enthusiast and an expert, one with a gift for conveying the achievement and adventure in building and operating railways where some thought they could not be built or survive. A man with persona) working experience on Andean railways, Mr Fawcett intersperses the railways’ story with personal experiences.

The remaining three books are about British railways “Double Headed” is an uninhibited effort by two unblushing railway enthusiasts—a father and son—to add an entertaining volume to railway literature. “North Western Steam” aims to fill a gap in railway literature—the story of the locomotives themselves. Naturally, a story of this nature must be largely technical and given to statistics. But the human element appears in a chapter at the end of the book in which three journeys on a footplate are described in a manlier that graphically associates the drivers and firemen with the monsters under their control. In the last book, Mr Pearson, a senior officer of British Railways, examines the present state of Britain’s railways, discusses how they have got into that state, and suggests what should be done to get them right. Though the discussion is confined to British railways, much of it applies also in countries where, as in Britain, the railways’ place in the structure of a modern economy has become a major national problem.