London to Brighton: 150 Years of Britain's Premier Holiday Line
Brighton is the most cosmopolitan of British resorts, elegant and scruffy, rich and poor, snobbish and generous, intellectually stimulating and vulgar, almost within sight of mainland Europe yet less than an hour from London. All this bewildering variety is reflected in the railway which serves it.
One hundred and fifty years ago, on May 11 1840, Brighton station was opened, and by September 1841 the line through to London was completed. Thus began a remarkable new era in the development of the south-coast town that had begun when royal patronage had transformed the obscure fishing village of Brightelmstone into Britain's first seaside resort.
Soon that one route, cutting through Surrey and the Sussex Weald, was to become the 'trunk' of a system branching deep into southern England, along the south coast and into the dense, newly created suburbs of South London. It gave access to 'London by the sea' for millions of day- trippers, while its fortunes were also entwined with those of the Pullman company whose celebrated, luxurious, brown and cream carriages, with their distinctive names, carried the rich and famous to and from a rather different Brighton. The greatest name in railway signalling history, John Saxby, was a Brighton man, trained by the LB&SCR. Between the wars it became the world's first fully electrified main line, and during the Second World War it carried tens of thousands of evacuees from the threatened capital. Today, unlike some other parts of the BR network, Brighton forms the focal point of a system offering almost unprecedented regular through trains not only to east and west but also north to the Midlands via the new Thameslink route.
All these threads are drawn together in this entertaining history of the line, describing the early companies, locomotives and engineers, the social impact of the line on the development of Brighton, London and many of the places in between, and the degree to which the modern- day preservation scene, especially the remarkable Bluebell Railway in Sussex, is keeping alive the golden age of steam on the Brighton line, while BR ensures it a healthy future as a vital strand in our railway network.
Hardback with dust jacket, 19x25cm, 232 pages, black & white photographs
Condition: Good/Very Good
ISBN: 9781852601461
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