Scottish railway history began in 1722 when William Dickson commenced work on the Tranent–Cockenzie Waggonway. Built entirely in wood and designed to carry coal from pits at Tranent to salt pans at Cockenzie, it was the first railway to be built in Scotland. Developing first in the most industrialised parts of the country, in the Lothians and later around Glasgow, wooden and iron railways flourished in no small part thanks to the work of Robert Stevenson. Ed Bethune and Anthony Dawson of t...

Rocket is perhaps one of the best-known railway locomotives in history. Entered by George and Robert Stephenson and Henry Booth for the Rainhill Trials of October 1829, Rocket was the outright victor and paved the way for the dominance of the steam railway as the major means of communication for the next hundred years or more.But Rocket was not ‘the first’ locomotive – that honor goes to the work of Cornishman Richard Trevithick, while the Middleton Railway saw the first commercial...

What day-to-day life was like for those who traveled and worked on the world's first intercity railway in early nineteenth-century England.Much has been written about the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, especially how it came into being and the Rainhill Trials, but very little has been said about what happened after the grand opening on 15 September 1830.Drawing on years of research, and practical experience of working with the replica of Stephenson's Planet ...

Week after week, the guns of the British expeditionary force battered away at the defences of Sevastopol, eight miles away from Balaklava, the port through which all besiegers' supplies arrived. As autumn turned to winter, rain and frost turned the track from Balaklava into a muddy quagmire and soon it became virtually impassable. Horses were dying daily in their endeavours to pull carts up the hills to the siege lines, and with few supplies reaching the front, the troops suffered terribly...

Robert Stephenson's Planet class locomotive was the first true design of mainline express passenger locomotive. Delivered less than a year after Rocket it was one of the most successful early locomotive designs. Planet set the mold for British locomotive design for more than the next century featuring a multi tubular boiler; inside cylinders; crank axle; and the first use of proper frames. The Planet class, and its 0-4-0 Samson derivative, found use across Britain with examples being suppl...

A history of the grueling Crimean War battle as told through personal accounts of those who fought there.The Crimean War, the most destructive and deadly war of the nineteenth century, has been the subject of countless books, yet historian Anthony Dawson has amassed an astonishing collection of previously unknown and unpublished material, including numerous letters and private journals. Many untapped French sources reveal aspects of the fighting in the Crimea that h...

George and Robert Stephenson are well known names in the canon of railway history. Henry Booth (who designed Rocket’s boiler) was the world’s first railway manager and was instrumental in the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time. Timothy Hackworth, the Methodist engine-wright from Shildon, established his own engineering firm, which built one of the first locomotives to run in Russia. Although his locomotive Novelty was a failure, John Ericsson found fame as the designer of the USS Monitor. Thi...

In the quarter of a century between 1830 and 1855, the railway locomotive developed from the small sisters of Rocketto the broad gauge monsters of Daniel Gooch, with a boiler pressure nearly three times that of Rocketand weighing in at nearly 40 tons (eight times the weight of Rocket). There was a marked increase in loads, speeds and reliability as the railways spread across the country from their cradle in the North West, with several thousands of miles of track being laid. In this book, ...

‘The most striking result produced by the completion of this Railway, is the sudden and marvellous change which has been effected in our ideas of time and space. What was quick is now slow; what was distant is now near.’ So wrote Henry Booth of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. The early railways changed all aspects of life: what people ate (and how they cooked), what they wore and how they communicated. But what was it like to travel on the railways in the 1830s and 1840s? This book hop...

"Dozens of graphic first-hand accounts of the Charge of the Light Brigade emerge to shed new light on the military blunder immortalised by Tennyson's poem" (The Telegraph (UK)).The Charge of the Light Brigade is one of the most famous, controversial and emotive small-scale actions in military history. Over 160 years since the event, and since it was immortalized in Tennyson's poem, it has generated a stream of writing and debate. Yet, as this new book by Anthony Da...

The quarter-century after the Rainhill Trials was an exciting period of growth and experimentation on the railways. The railway locomotive evolved from a lumbering curiosity to being indispensable – changing every aspect of daily life, from food (and how it was cooked), to heating and clothing – with more than 7,000 miles of track being laid in Britain between 1830 and 1855, and found on just about every continent around the globe. Much has been written about the success of the Rocket at t...

Many histories have been written about the conflicts the British army was involved in between the Battle of Waterloo and the First World War. There are detailed studies of campaigns and battles and general accounts of the experiences of the soldiers. But this book by Anthony Dawson is the first to concentrate in depth, in graphic detail, on the experiences of the British cavalry during a century of warfare. That is why it is of such value. It is also compelling reading because it describes...