Gavin Morrison (1)

A lavish large-format book of railway locations of the old London Midland and Scottish Railway, with comparisons between historical and "modern" photographs. Except, of course, that this is now a twenty-year-old book, so even some of the "now" photographs are historical. The main place where this shows up is in signalling; signal boxes and semaphore signals still survive in many pictures, and were sufficiently rare in 1995 to be worth commenting on - but since the time the book was published, they have been all but eliminated from the British railway network.

Many pictures come from the north of England, close to the author's home in south Yorkshire; and many of those pictures show the greatest impact of the changes to British industry and society. "Then" pictures mainly cover a span from the 1930s to the 1960s, but a couple of them are later - into the 1970s or even 1980s - where the changes were noticeable in a short time. In a few instances, the landscape "now" shows no sign that there had ever been a railway in that location, or indeed anywhere within a couple of miles radius!

Of more concern is the standard of proofreading; and worse, a number of unchecked factual inaccuracies which leapt out at me, as some of the stations that survived into the 1970s came under the unrelenting gaze of my own camera. So I could say that what the author identified as a footbridge at Sheffield Midland was almost certainly a dedicated bridge for parcels barrows; and I have to remark that I find it hard to believe that the station building at Maryport in Cumbria, which incorporated the offices of the Maryport & Carlisle Railway Company, were demolished in 1960, as stated, when I managed to photograph them sometime between 1972 and 1978! I don't recollect coming into possession of a time machine back then, and if I did I must have forgotten where I put it...

Still, these points aside, the book is still of great interest. It would be worth finding a copy on the second-hand market as its coverage is fairly broad; and the reproduction is worthy of the material.… (mehr)