A Hundred Years of Railway Weighells: Three Generations of a Railway Family
Sidney Weighell, the outspoken and often controversial General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen from 1975 to 1982, comes from the third generation of a family proud to have served on the railways. His grandfather was a farmer's son who became a passenger guard towards the end of the nineteenth century; his father was a signalman; and his brother Maurice still drives locomotives out of Teesside.
Sid himself joined the old London and North-Eastern Railway Company at the age of sixteen as an apprentice in the road motor engineer's department at Thirsk Station, eight miles away from his home in Northallerton in North Yorkshire. In A Hundred Years of Railway Weighells, he not only tells the story of a close-knit family for whom Chapel, the Labour Party and the Union all played their parts, but lso gives an authoritative insight into the history of Britain's railways.
The book is illustrated with unusual and interesting photographs, a number of which are
published for the first time. There are unsentimental remembrances of the sheer hard work that the age of steam demanded, and of the dangers of driving an engine during the war years; entertaining anecdotes of long-disused branch-lines and reminiscences by railwaymen as well as Sid Weighell's own observations on railways at home and abroad.
Also included is a fascinating interview with Sir Peter Parker, former Chairman of British Rail.
Hardback with dust jacket, 14x22cm, 240 pages, black & white photographs
Condition: Good/Very Good
ISBN: 9780715381571
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