There’s a lot to cover if you are going to tackle the entire history of Britain’s railways as this starts, not with the Stockton & Darlington and George Stephenson, but the wheeled tracked carts of ancient times. And that’s exactly what happens here, justifying the cover’s sub-header of ‘A history of the nation’s railways’.
Produced by the trading arm of the National Railway Museum, York, this is as comprehensive a story of the steam railway as you could get in fewer than 200 pages with around 100 colour and mono illustrations (pictures, posters, leaflets etc).
It gives a good coverage of the subject, with chapters covering early railways, the coming of steam, the first railways, railway mania, networks, grouping, wartime, nationalisation, dieselisation and modernisation. It closes with a section on preserved railways, with details of around 60 centres. For those who want to know more, there is a good bibliography, while the index is very good, running to three pages.
The authors have done a good job of covering the significant events, trends and all the while telling the story in an engaging manner. This is the best of its genre of recent years.