A key part of the Great Western Railway’s network was the main line to the North through Birmingham. From London, this route, including the Princes Risborough cut-off, joined Didcot, Oxford, Banbury and Birmingham, and then Wolverhampton, Chester and Shrewsbury, opening up destinations in the North and North West. The GWR also ran services on its joint lines with the London & North Western Railway and the Great Central Railway to reach Birkenhead and York. In this book, author, modeller an...

The Dirt Road: A Story of Family, Forgiveness, and Finding Your Way Homeby Robert Hendry"I grew up on a dirt road on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia. To some, that might sound idyllic. But for me, it was the boundary line between chaos and calm."In this deeply personal memoir, Robert Hendry explores the scars and strength forged in the shadow of addiction, mental illness, emotional abandonment, and generational trauma. Told with vivid honesty and quiet resilience...

The London & Birmingham Railway was the first intercity line in Britain to travel from London. Superbly engineered by Robert Stephenson, this pioneering early achievement of the railway age in Britain linked England’s second city Birmingham to the capital at Euston station and became part of what later came to be known as the West Coast Main Line. En route, the line travelled through Rugby and Coventry and terminated at Curzon Street station in Birmingham but by 1854 passenger services sto...

Signalling on British Railways underwent massive change from Nationalisation in 1948 to privatisation in the 1990s, but throughout this period much of the network’s infrastructure dated from the era of the Big Four and the pre-Grouping companies. The variety of traditional signalling in use in the BR era, from the pre-Grouping infrastructure and mechanical signalling up to BR-built signal boxes prior to the conversion to colour-light signalling, is explored here. The principles of signalli...

The Southern Railway, and later British Railways’ Southern Region, extended its reach into Devon and Cornwall, competing with the Great Western Railway. The main line served Exeter and Plymouth and named trains such as the ‘Atlantic Coast Express’ and the ‘Devon Belle’ took holidaymakers to the coastal resorts, including Padstow, Bude and Ilfracombe. In addition, a network of lines served smaller locations in the two counties. Many of these lines were closed in the 1960s, during the Beechi...

Railways Around Rugby: Pre-Grouping to Rail Blue tells the story of change on the railway network in the Rugby area, covering a period spanning from before the Grouping of the Railways in 1923 to the BR Rail Blue era of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, The London & North Western Railway, The Great Central Railway and the Midland Railway all operated in and around Rugby. Rugby was served by two stations, Rugby and Rugby Central. The latter ...

The newly married 20 y.o. Lidiya Petrova relaxes on the yacht of her husband, Admiral Mikhail Petrov, C-in-C, Black Sea Fleet. It is an idyllic life. Soon Mikhail is under arrest and Lidiya is a fugitive, as a plot to murder Yuri Andropov takes shape. The impractical 'Little Dreamer' must lose the guy who saved her, or win through in a dramatic action packed novel set in the USSR.Adult Content

The usual Cold War novel has a James Bond style Western agent pitted against the KGB. "To Kill Our Worthy Comrade" is a very different novel. Most of the action takes place in the USSR, but the novel depicts the rivalries that existed at the heart of Soviet power, as the Brezhnev era draws to a close in the early eighties.We encounter a young air defence force officer who meets a pretty girl at a dance and then finds she is the daughter of his commanding officer.Admiral Mik...

Lidiya Petrova,the lovely young wife of Admiral Mikhail Petrov is used by the Kremlin as a goodwil ambassador for the USSR in the troubled 1980s. After a dangerous mission to Turkey, she is sent to Washington where Mikhail will become Soviet Ambassador. Now a mother of twin girls, Lidiya is caught up in a terrorist kidnap plot, a Soviet move to invade Scandinavia, and claims that she is a spy.

As the Lidiya Petrova series has evolved, I have frequently gone back to the photographs I have taken of Soviet military hardware and locations such as the Project 825 underground submarine pens. It gave me a feel for the locations and events I was describing just as seeing naval infantry or Spetsnaz frogmen helped in getting the atmosphere right.I had described the Soviet rebreather sets used by the frogmen in "To Kill Our Worthy Comrade", and compared to Western equipment with exp...

Lady Godiva's naked ride through Coventry as a protest against oppressive tax entered history! Did it really take place? Historian and Godiva descendant Robert Hendry offers compelling evidence from 1000 years ago that it did! Discover the social and religious background to this famous event and unravel the mystery of where she was laid to rest. 120,000 words + 100 illustrations, appendices.We all know of Lady Godiva's naked ride to spare the people of Coventry from taxes imposed b...

"Prepare for a sampling of Japanese ghosts and spirits, from sources that include the worlds oldest novel, the urban legends of contemporary Japanese schoolchildren, movies both classic and modern, anime, manga, and more." For hundreds of years Japan has lived in a reality consisting of the real world and the spirit world; sometimes the wall between the two worlds gets thin enough for spirits to cross over. In such a reality, ghost stories have been popular for centuries. Patrick Drazen, a...