This is the story of a quarter-century struggle to rebuild from scrap condition a unique locomotive, it being an essential part of the British engineering heritage. It covers the unusual and efficient Caprotti valve gear in depth and solves the mystery of why the locomotive did not work properly in service. It was never improved until it was restored and its secrets revealed with a surprising conclusion.

During much of his early career, from 1944 through to the early 1960s, Richard Hardy took hundreds of pictures of life on the railways and the men he knew and worked with on a daily basis, using his trusty Brownie 620 box camera. These unique and largely unpublished images form a fascinating and hugely evocative portrayal of the height of the steam era, during the age of the 'Big Four', and after 1947 on the sprawling nationalised network known as British Railways. Many of the pictures capture the railways in wartime, providing a valuable social record of the nation at war. In addition there is a sequence of rare photographs of French engines, railways and railwaymen, which offer a superb contrast to the British rail network (it quickly becomes evident that whereas the British rail system ran on tea, the French system ran on wine). Great characters are the unifying theme of the pictures, and they include famous figures associated with the railways, such as the poet John Betjeman. This lavishly illustrated book sets Richard's personal photographs and text alongside a carefully collated selection of ephemera, artworks and photographs drawn from the National Railway Museum in York. Collectively these images and artefacts tell the stories of the great brotherhood of railwaymen.

"The History of the Fleet Street House": 20 p. at the end of v. 18.

Since the mid-nineteenth century the East Coast Main Line has been one of the major routes from London to northern England and to Scotland. It has seen some of the greatest achievements in the railways, most notably the 'Flying Scotsman' becoming, in 1934, the first locomotive in the world to exceed 100mph and the 'Mallard' in 1938 claiming the as-yet-unbroken world speed record for steam locomotives of 126mph. The East Coast Main Line not only made history by facilitating an ever-faster link between two capital cities, it also provided an international stage for Britain's engineering marvels, inspiring many generations of schoolboys and adults alike. That was to continue after the end of the steam era on British Railways, with diesel and then electric traction setting a series of new records over the route. This new book looks at how the London-Edinburgh line became the world's fastest steam railway and how its proud and unique heritage is appreciated and celebrated today more than ever before. Superbly illustrated with over 300 colour and black & white photographs.

Railway workers were a uniformed and respectable section of the Victorian and Edwardian working class. They built their trade unions in the face of employer hostility and their organisations played a crucial role in the construction of effective labour politics. Local political organisations owed much to the patience and creativity of railway workers, not least in small towns and country districts. Respectable Radicals uses rich archival sources to analyse this history through a series of case studies. It focuses, among other topics, on disasters, strikes, the modernisation policies of companies, inter-union rivalries and the promises and frustrations of labour politics. A dominant theme is the complex relationship between changing experiences of work, shifting trade union strategies and political identities. The result is a new perspective on a significant sector of trade unionism and on the character of labour politics from the 1890s to the 1950s.