Summer Saturdays in the West
This is the third edition of one of the most unusual railway books to be published since the war. In it you will meet many famous trains and engines going about their normal duties on a day of incredible pressure on the main line railway to the West, choked with crowded trains at the start of the holiday season's busiest fortnight of 1957. That is probably enough to whet the appetite of confirmed enthusiasts, but there is much more to the story.
David St John Thomas tells from deep personal knowledge how the rail-ways came to carry armies of people in queues of steam-hauled trains and recalls the time when the performance on the main line was monitored as eagerly as a football match, since late arrivals upset everybody in the resorts, from taxi drivers to chefs having to work overtime.
Simon Rocksborough Smith fills in with detail from many enthusiasts' reports from the field on what happened not only on that Saturday in July 1957 but on a similar Saturday in 1971 with notes also on 1982.
All the obvious facts and portraits are here, but the book's richness lies in its occasional asides and details. For railways as presented here were not just a means of transport: they were a way of life.
Hardback with dust jacket, 178 pages, over 20 black & white photographs
Condition: Very Good
ISBN: 9780946537044
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