THE RAILWAYS: NATION, NETWORK AND PEOPLE

As an historian who was also once a locomotive engineman, the classification of train drivers in New South Wales Australia, I have been searching for a railway history that covers all bases, a starting point for the many aspects of the railway. Simon Bradley does this and more, providing an easily read yet comprehensive overview of British railways.

Anyone interested in the history and development of British railways will have no trouble reading its 550 pages. It's not for 'rivet counters' but an easy read and I enjoyed it immensely.

Railways seen from a user social viewpoint, very detailed and comprehensive

A great read, because it connects a well known (and often derided) theme to the fabric of our daily lives, informing us of just how much the railways influenced the world most of us grew up in, embedding themselves into our culture. In this sense Bradley's is no ordinary book about trains, and I would recommend it not only to those already interested in railways, but also to anybody interested in social and political history, economics and innovation. Apart from the fascinating body of research, the book is also gracefully and clearly written - it whisks the reader along, generating an appetite for facts and explanations. The book might have benefitted from a concluding chapter that draws all its themes together, but readers are left so well informed that they can easily draw their own conclusions. Adrian Peach

This magisterial book traces the history of the railways in Britain, and the influence they have had on nearly all areas of national life since the opening of the first public, timetabled and steam-hauled, passenger train service in the full sense we understand it now, in 1830 running between Liverpool and Manchester. From modest beginnings during that decade, they flourished all over the country in the 1840s, peaking in 1847 when investment in railways accounted for almost 7 per cent of national income. Cornwall was the last county to join the national network in 1859. The railways transformed the economy by revolutionising transport of goods and people, and gave freedom of movement to far more people to travel farther than they or their ancestors would ever have dreamed of; it's striking that just 200 years ago - a snap of the fingers in the overall march of time - none of our great grandparents and none of their ancestors had ever travelled faster than the speed of a galloping horse. In the mid-19th century excursion trains took thousands of people of modest means living inland to the seaside for the first time, thus opening more possibilities for leisure as well as work. The railways, like photography, divide the 19th century into two very different halves - as one critic is quoted as observing, "the mere mention of train or railway in a Victorian novel serves immediately to locate the action in the present, just as a reference to stagecoaches pushed the story back into the past". One example of this is the casual mention of a character travelling by train in Dickens's last unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, published in 1865, whereas we generally associate the author with the stagecoach era. The railways even changed the way we measure time, by encouraging the phasing out of local time across the country, in favour of a uniform British time to make railway timetables work properly (even so the use of Greenwich Mean Time wasn't legally binding until as late as 1880). As well as these grand themes, the book also explores the history of aspects we take for granted, such as the heating and lighting of trains, and the varying layouts and levels of comfort (or not) that could be expected in the three classes of railway coach. Perhaps this may seem excessive detail to some, but the narrative flows in an engaging way that makes you think about things you take for granted, and how they have changed, or not, even during the 45 years or so of my own conscious memory of travelling on trains. The author also goes on to talk about developments in the technology of railway construction, signalling and so on, and how stations have changed over the years. In his final few chapters, he covers phenomena such as preserved and mini railways, and even discusses trainspotting as a social phenomenon. A fascinating and wonderful work.