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The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions…
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The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways (edición 2015)

por Michael Williams (Autor)

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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.… (más)
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Título:The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways
Autores:Michael Williams (Autor)
Información:Random House UK (2015), 336 pages
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The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways por Michael Williams

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There was this steam train. It was slow, unreliable, uncomfortable and no one used it. Then the lizardpeople shut the train down purely to spite everyone. A vicar chained himself to the track in a valiant effort to save the train by blocking its passage (not sure how that works) but in the end the train ran no more. This story repeats itself a dozen times. To be fair to the author he does mention the negatives of the old rail network as well but in the end it's a big nostalgia (?) trip. Although it all happened too long ago for it to really be nostalgia. Just a timeless (ha!) general unease caused by the changing world.

I was hoping for some more history and technical details and fewer quirky vignettes. I hope the author enjoyed his train journeys during which, if you were to believe him, he wrote this book. I certainly enjoy my train holidays. This book however, as delightfully whimsical as it is, is not what I was after and unless you have a notebook full of train numbers it might not be for you either. ( )
  Paul_S | Dec 23, 2020 |
Sixteen different stories about aspects of train travel and railway history in Britain that have now disappeared. The author takes a journalistic tone from the outset, but this is backed by extensive knowledge, which is worn lightly. Most of the stories go beyond the simple 'Beeching closed the branch lines' narrative, although this is covered. The final chapter, on the partial re-birth of the Waverley route which until 1969 connected Edinburgh and Carlisle, is especially telling, as I remember some of the controversy over this at the time but was too far away to relate to the doomed struggle to prevent closure that local residents mounted. (The author omits mention of the Border Union Railway scheme, which tried to raise funds to acquire the railway directly from BR as a mixed heritage and community railway; this was probably over ambitious, even for the late 1960s when the preservation movement was still in its comparative infancy, but that didn't stop The Powers That Be stomping on it fairly hard.)

Michael Williams makes a case for the return of actual writing about railways, as opposed to books being published that consist of photographs with captions. Both have their place; in my own writing, I've tried to strike a better balance between words and pictures, but I appreciate the thought. His influences are some of the great names of railway writing's past: C. Hamilton Ellis, Cecil J. Allen, W.J.K. (Keith) Davies, Bryan Morgan and T.W.E. Roche to name but a few. These are names little seen today; in the heyday of the publishing midlist, they were staples of most bookshops' railway titles and enthusiasts' libraries.

I have two criticisms; firstly, in the chapter dealing with towns and cities connected with locomotive building, he omits the major locomotive works that produced engines for industry or export: Bristol with Pecketts, Leeds with Hunslet and Kitson, Sheffield with the Yorkshire Engine Company, Stafford with Bagnalls, Manchester with Beyer, Peacock, Newcastle upon Tyne with Robert Stephensons & Hawthornes and the Springburn district of Glasgow with North British Locomotive, again to name but a few. As many of these also supplemented the main line railways' locomotive stocks from time to time, this omission is a bit glaring. And I also bristled slightly at his description of some preserved engines as "patched-up rust buckets" when contrasting them with the new-build engines such as Tornado. Modern insurance demands the highest level of maintenance and engineering ability so that locomotive boilers - pressure vessels which are going to be used in close proximity to the public - are safe to operate. It is this rigour that has actually given the preservation movement the skills to graduate to building complete locomotives from scratch. Many of the restoration projects that has returned engines that languished in scrapyards to service involved so much engineering ability that it was only a short step from such restorations to building complete engines. (I often wonder if steam locomotives would have lasted as long as they did if insurance requirements had been as strict in times past as they are now; I am sure that some superannuated engines that were farmed out to potter around on branch lines and in isolated yards did not get the benefit of new boilers roughly every ten years, as happens now.) (In fairness, I have seen instances of preserved diesel locomotives that the phrase 'patched-up rust bucket' would apply to; but that's another story.)

Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book immensely (the author had me in the introduction when he cited one of my favourite books in any category, Bryan Morgan's The End of the Line, even though that book is resolutely Continental in outlook whereas Williams' book is just as resolutely British), and I can recommend it as an exemplar of how to write about railways for a general readership. ( )
1 vota RobertDay | Feb 1, 2019 |
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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.

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