Gordon Pettitt, former Managing Director of Regional Railways and the last General Manager of BR's Southern Region, writes the inside story of the history of the third passenger sector of British Rail with insights from other leading personnel in the industry at the time.

By the time it was merged into the Union Pacific in 1995, the Chicago & North Western was one of the nations oldest surviving railroads, a testament to the Midwestern stoicism with which it had gone about its business since 1859. This illustrated history chronicles how C&NW emerged from a collection of regional carriers to become a strategic link between eastern railroads and the West. Author Tom Murray traces the railroads expansion as it extended secondary lines throughout the Midwest. He also explores C&NWs joint ownership of UP passenger trains and describes how the railroad answered challenges from regional rivals with the "400" series of passenger trains. As fascinating as the story are the hundreds of accompanying illustrations--historical photographs, archival images, route maps, and period print ads. The result is an entertaining and informative history of an iconic Midwestern railroad--a narrative that spans the decades from the 1850s to the 1990s and takes in steam and diesel motive power, freight and passenger operations, and all the key characters, events, and deals that figured in the Chicago & North Westerns rise and eventual demise.

It was the railway's Titanic. A horrific crash involving five trains in which 230 died and 246 were injured, it remains the worst disaster in the long history of Britain's rail network.The location was the isolated signal box at Quintinshill, on the Anglo-Scottish border near Gretna; the date, 22 May 1915. Amongst the dead and injured were women and children but most of the casualties were Scottish soldiers on their way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign. Territorials setting off for war on a distant battlefield were to die, not in battle, but on home soil victims, it was said, of serious incompetence and a shoddy regard for procedure in the signal box, resulting in two signalmen being sent to prison. Startling new evidence reveals that the failures which led to the disaster were far more complex and wide-reaching than signalling negligence. Using previously undisclosed documents, the authors have been able to access official records from the time and have uncovered ahighly shocking and controversial truth behind what actually happened at Quintinshill and the extraordinary attempts to hide the truth.As featured in Dumfries & Galloway Life magazine, January 2014.

Railway histories are always popular and the continued regard for heritage railways around the UK highlights the nostalgia the industry evokes. Inevitably many concentrate on the locomotives, lost stations and lines that crisscrossed the region. What has often been missing have been the stories of the individual railway workers and the conditions under which they worked, despite some valuable autobiographies and memoirs of railwaymen who worked in the area. This volume aims to address this gap, bringing to life stories of railway workers within a context of the changing nature of the industry from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.Heavily influenced by his personal and family memories, Douglas Bourn draws on available memoirs, alongside other evidence from railway magazines and local and regional newspapers, to provide the reader with an introduction to the fascinating story of railways in the region. The book takes readers on a historical journey starting with the creation of the first railways in East Anglia, via the growth of a network that promoted and served the agricultural, industrial and tourist development of the towns throughout the three eastern counties, and ending with their almost inevitable decline, as transport needs changed in the post Second World War period.