The beautifully restored St Pancras Station is a magisterial example of Britain’s finest Victorian architecture. Like the viaducts at Belah and Crumlin, cathedral-like stations such as Nottingham Victoria and spectacular railway hotels like Glasgow St Enoch's, it stands proud as testament to Britain's architectural heritage. In this stunning book, John Minnis reveals Britain's finest railway architecture. From the most cavernous engine sheds, like Old Oak Common, through the eccentric country halts on the Tollesbury line and the gantries of the Liverpool Overhead Railway, to the soaring viaducts of Belah and Cumlin, Britain’s Lost Railways offers a sweeping celebration of our railway heritage. The selection of images and the removable facsimile memorabilia, including tickets, posters, timetables and maps, allows the reader to step into that past, serving as a testimony to an age of ingenuity and ambition when the pride we invested in our railways was reflected in the grandeur of the architecture we built for them.
In the popular imagination Essex is associated with the urban and industrial strip of land reaching out from east London along the north bank of the Thames, a place of car factories, oil refineries, warehouses and commuter housing, but Essex is also a county with rolling countryside, small villages and picturesque towns. Although the railway netowrk in Essex has fared better than elsewhere the losses are shown here, together with dates and vital statistics, and include Ongar, Tiptree, Thorington, Canning Town, Halstead, Saffron Walden, Takely, Felstead, Earls Colne and many others.
The drastic railway closures of the 1960s led to the slow decay and re-purposing of hundreds of miles of railway infrastructure. Though these buildings and apparatus are now ghosts of their former selves, countless clues to our railway heritage still remain in the form of embankments, cuttings, tunnels, converted or tumbledown wayside buildings, and old railway furniture such as signal posts. Many disused routes are preserved in the form of cycle tracks and footpaths. This colourfully illustrated book helps you to decipher the fascinating features that remain today and to understand their original functions, demonstrating how old routes can be traced on maps, outlining their permanent stamp on the landscape, and teaching you how to form a mental picture of a line in its heyday.
Containing over 25,000 entries, this unique volume will be absolutely indispensable for all those with an interest in Britain in the twentieth century. Accessibly arranged by theme, with helpful introductions to each chapter, a huge range of topics is covered. There is a comprehensiveindex.
SOMETIMES you come across a lofty railway viaduct, marooned in the middle of a remote country landscape. Or a crumbling platform from some once-bustling junction buried under the buddleia. If you are lucky you might be able to follow some rusting tracks, or explore an old tunnel leading to...well, who knows where? Listen hard. Is that the wind in the undergrowth? Or the spectre of a train from a golden era of the past panting up the embankment? These are the ghosts of The Trains Now Departed. They are the railway lines, and services that ran on them that have disappeared and gone forever. Our lost legacy includes lines prematurely axed, often with a gripping and colourful tale of their own, as well as marvels of locomotive engineering sent to the scrapyard, and grand termini felled by the wrecker's ball. Then there are the lost delights of train travel, such as haute cuisine in the dining car, the grand expresses with their evocative names, and continental boat trains to romantic far-off places. The Trains Now Departed tells the stories of some of the most fascinating lost trains of Britain, vividly evoking the glories of a bygone age. In his personal odyssey around Britain Michael Williams tells the tales of the pioneers who built the tracks, the yarns of the men and women who operated them and the colourful trains that ran on them. It is a journey into the soul of our railways, summoning up a magic which, although mired in time, is fortunately not lost for ever. THIS EDITION REVISED AND UPDATED TO INCLUDE MAPS.
A striking photographic record of how the Beeching cuts and modernisation saw our grand terminal stations, soaring viaducts and cavernous locomotive works wiped from the landscape The current restoration of St Pancras Station and its Midland Hotel is a glorious exception to a melancholy rule – that the finer our railway architecture, the more likely it was to be demolished in the name of progress. Who would know that the ugly, low concrete bunker of Birmingham New Street station replaced a handsome glass-roofed train shed, or that until the 1960s the stupendously high Belah viaduct swept across a remote Cumbrian valley – or that the outlet mall in Swindon selling cheap designer clothing used to be he great GWR locomotive works? – or that on little bucolic branch lines in the West Country or Essex an old bus body was the waiting-room? In over 200 fascinating and often rare images John Minnis documents the remarkably rich architectural heritage of our railways, from quaint country halts to distinguished railway hotels – all of which exists now only in photographs.
