Railroads category: 1183 books

Porthmadog was once host to a wide variety of industries. Its slate went to Germany and exists there today on the roofs of thousands of dwellings, as well as to America, where the Boston Court House is roofed with Welsh slate. The slate often travelled in Porthmadog-built vessels – over 200 sailing...

When Stanier joined the LMS in 1932, as their CME, he was expected to breathe new life into this ailing giant. Since its formation it had steadily lost ground to its main rival, the LNER. In Doncaster, Nigel Gresley and his team, with an eye to advancing locomotive design at the same time as making...

Although, in pre-Grouping days, Oxfordshire was primarily Great Western territory, the county was also served by the Buckinghamshire branch of the London & North Western Railway, which was in many ways a 'foreign' intruder. The line was completed to its western terminus at Oxford Rewley Road in...

The railway in 1980 had not changed much since the 1960s. There were certainly no more steam locomotives, but passenger trains consisted largely of carriages hauled by locomotives, which had mostly been constructed in the 1950s or early 1960s. Secondary services were provided by various types of multiple...

‘Railway Mania’ changed Victorian Scotland forever. Fortunes were made and lost as rival railway promoters transformed the landscape with stations, cuttings, tunnels and bridges. In fact Scotland had its own railway system well before a link was established with England. Scottish railways had...

A railway arrived on Anglesey in 1848, linking London and Dublin. It was the great railway engineer Robert Stephenson who ensured that the railway link to Ireland would run along the North Wales coast to Holyhead when he presented plans that overcame the engineering challenges associated with the...

Stronghold of the Romans, and later the Vikings, York was to become the powerbase of the infamous ‘Railway King’, George Hudson, whose empire would eventually extend from the far north of England to the south and south-west. Today, York is the home of the National Railway Museum where many old...

The traditional Yorkshire fishing town of Whitby was transformed by the development of the railways in the nineteenth century. Steam locomotion was crucial in attracting the Victorian holidaymakers who helped change the town's fortunes. Ideally situated at the crossing point of two railway routes,...

The north-east of England and the Middlesbrough area are the birthplace and cradle of modern railways. Collieries had been established in the North East since the Industrial Revolution and wagonways were constructed using horse power to transfer coal from pitheads to the coast for onward shipment...

Having been established as a seaside resort since the seventeenth century, Scarborough was an attractive destination for the new railways of the mid nineteenth century, and the town became part of George Hudson's empire by the late 1840s. However, the line through Scarborough was not the first line...

Steam Around Sheffield, the latest work by prolific railway author Mike Hitches, documents how Yorkshire's 'Steel City' and its environs were faithfully served by steam locomotion for many years. Sheffield, for so long the source of Britain's cutlery, has a rich railway history encompassing various...

While the first public passenger-carrying railway operated between Liverpool and Manchester from 1830, it was the construction of the Grand Junction and London & Birmingham that created the first long-distance, inter-city route from 1838. The meeting point of these two independent companies was...

Railway stations were a prominent feature of most towns and villages in Britain until post-war modernisation and closures swept many away. The largest and most imposing stations were in large towns and cities. Among the most impressive were the London termini such as King’s Cross, Liverpool Street,...

Isambard Kingdom Brunel considered the Great Western Railway the 'finest work in England' and he contributed many groundbreaking features, none so unorthodox as the decision not to adopt the 'standard' track gauge of 4ft 8½in and instead introduce the new 'broad gauge' of 7ft ¼in. Describing the...