Two men started the transformation from sleepy hilltop community into a thriving town. Gooch and Brunel chose the area near Swindon to build a factory for the Great Western Railway and for more than 140 years The Works was renowned for high-quality heavy engineering. Gooch, Armstrong, Dean, Churchward and Collett would be responsible for the design and building of some of the world’s finest locomotives and stock. In 1948 the GWR became British Railways and later diesels replaced steam. In ...

Gripping forensic tales explain how and why trains crash.Trains are massive—with some weighing 15,000 tons or more. When these metal monsters collide or go off the rails, their destructive power becomes clear. In this book, George Bibel presents riveting tales of trains gone wrong, the detective work of finding out why, and the safety improvements that were born of tragedy.Train Wreck details numerous crashes, including 17 in which more than 200 pe...

The story of the most iconic railway company of the great age of steam.The initials ‘GWR’ conjure an evocative picture of a Brunswick green locomotive hauling tea-and-cream-coloured coaches through a verdant West Country landscape. But the GWR was not just engines and trains.In this comprehensive history, Colin Maggs, one of the country’s foremost railway historians, tells of other, perhaps less well-known aspects of the company’s history. Its construction and expansion; th...

Incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1835 and completed just six years later, the Great Western Railway became one of the great icons of the Age of Steam, and perhaps the world’s most famous railway company. Spanning Southern England from the Thames to the Bristol Channel, the history of Brunel’s greatest achievement, and the surprising offshoots of the company as an industry, are represented here for the first time in full colour from the Amberley Archive.

Thanks to a quirk of fate, and the survival of so many locomotives in the Barry scrapyard, the GWR is well represented in the steam preservation scene today. John Maybery takes us through the surviving Great Western locomotives, from the Kings and Castle passenger locos through Halls and Manors and onto the ubiquitous Prairie and pannier tanks. He also covers the narrow gauge locomotives of the Vale of Rheidol Railway, which was Britain’s last nationalised steam passenger railway until pri...

Many audacious and improbable schemes for new railways were dreamed up in the nineteenth century, but surely none matched the plan to link the Cromford Canal with the Peak Forest Canal at Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire using a series of rope-worked inclines. This railway oddity opened in 1831 and somehow survived almost unnoticed until 1967, when there was a flurry of publicity when it closed. The line weaved its way through some of the finest scenery in England and was dotted with crazy grad...

The sleek lines of the HST 125 High Speed Train represent a massive stride in British locomotive design in the latter part of the twentieth century. With two power cars the HST – otherwise known as the British Rail Class 43 – has a top speed of 125 mph, making it the fastest diesel-powered train in the world at the time of its introduction. Although nearing the end of its service life, recent refurbishments will give the HST another ten years in mainline service. The story of the HST is a ...

Britain is a country in love with its railway past. Nowhere else do the workhorses of the age of steam exert such a pull; in no other country is the nostalgia for the days when the railways extended to every corner of the kingdom so strong. However, the history of station buildings and signal boxes, steam and diesel engines, goods and postal services, main lines and branch lines is only part of the story told here.As a cherished part of Britain's heritage, it is the impact of the ra...

Bradshaw’s Guide of 1863 was the staple book on what’s what and where’s where for the mid-Victorians and it gives the modern reader a unique insight into the world of the nineteenth-century railway travellers. Built primarily to provide a passenger service, the railways of Ireland would go on to open up the country to tourism in new ways. They also brought communities closer together and many journeys that once took days to complete could now be undertaken in hours. This illustrated guide ...

In the 1950s and 1960s these cheap return excursion trains ran overnight between London and both Glasgow and Edinburgh, departing on Friday evenings and then returning on Saturday evenings a week or a fortnight later. The main purpose of these nocturnal trains was to compete with the Anglo-Scottish services being offered by the private coach companies in the 1950s and 1960s. Not only were they successful in doing this, they also generated long-distance and profitable traffic for British Ra...

The London & Birmingham Railway was the first major line in Britain and it was the greatest achievement of its engineer, Robert Stephenson, the man who, together with his father George, had set the age of the railway in motion with their pioneering achievements. The route presented a number of significant challenges, starting with the Camden Incline leading out of Euston up to the Primrose Hill Tunnel, followed by a number of other works including the Watford Tunnel, the Tring Cutting, Wol...

With its size, France is home to a huge number of locomotives. The country can basically be split in two, with the northern half running on AC traction, and the southern half on DC traction. A vast number of locomotives are dual-powered, and so can run all over the country. Locomotives can be found on passenger workings, but are mostly dedicated to freight. Main operator SNCF runs most, if not all, the services within France. The number of locomotive-hauled passenger services is dwindling,...