When I've read this book before — it's been a favourite since I was about eleven years old — I've been struck, as RobertDay is in his review, by the enterprising, adventurous spirit of the little group of volunteers who decide to try to save a railway from extinction. This is a very important aspect of the book, and it clearly encouraged many readers to go out and do likewise themselves. Rolt deserves a great deal of credit for his work in getting people to think seriously about the value of the 18th and 19th century industrial heritage around them.

This time, however, what struck me most was how circumstances conspired to make the Talyllyn in 1950 into "a heritage railway waiting to happen". For a start, there was the line's remarkably unremarkable history: where else could you find a railway that was still operating, 85 years on, with its original equipment over its original route, innocent of any major investment or rebuilding. The Talyllyn should by rights have disappeared after the Bryn Eglwys quarry on which it depended got into difficulties in 1911, but by an extraordinary stroke of good luck, quarry and railway were bought by local MP and businessman Sir Henry Haydn Jones, who was prepared to carry on running them at a loss for the benefit of his local community.

Another important factor was the line's obscurity, which effectively kept it below the radar of officialdom. The neighbouring and very similar Corris Railway made a very successful effort to diversify into bus operations, and as a result found itself taken over by a larger company that had no interest in keeping the railway part of the business going. The Talyllyn, on the other hand, was never of commercial or strategic importance to any outsider, and indeed it seems likely that it was omitted from the 1948 railway nationalisation simply because no-one in Whitehall knew it still existed.

Thus, although what Rolt and his colleagues did in rescuing the line after Sir Haydn's death in 1950 was something unprecedented, they had it easy compared to many of their successors. The line's owners (Sir Haydn's executors) and the local community were well-disposed towards any scheme that would keep it open; further, because it had never officially closed, the enthusiasts were able to continue to operate under the existing legal powers and with the existing (albeit worn out) equipment.

This in contrast to later heritage railway groups (these have proliferated in late-20th century Britain the way non-conformist sects used to...), who often had long battles with railway and planning authorities to get permission to reopen abandoned lines. ( )

Tom Rolt was in at the beginning of what has become a mass movement world-wide, the railway preservationist movement. In so doing, he was also instrumental in triggering the paradigm shift that has led people in all walks of life to decide that they can Do It Themselves without waiting for the Big Battallions, whether they be Government or Big Business.

World War 2 caused a lot of damage to rural railways in Britain, especially those which had avoided, by some miracle, being sucked into the 'Big Four' companies in 1923. Restrictions in resources, plus the numbers of men enlisting in the Forces, reduced the more remote railways, such as the Talyllyn and its near neighbour the Festiniog to skeleton services and (eventually) to no service. Maintenance became non-existent; and the release of war surplus motor vehicles meant that business dried up after the war almost overnight.

In the late 1940s, the coming nationalisation of Britain's railways by the post-war Labour Government inspired Tom Rolt to go looking for threatened railways. In Wales, he stumbled across the Talyllyn, running on its last legs; its aged proprietor buried in a Dickensian office, the two veteran locomotives leaking steam from every orifice (if they would run at all), and the rails held apart in places by turf rather than timber sleepers. Tom Rolt did what any true Briton does under these circumstances: wrote letters to the press, called a meeting (at the Imperial Hotel, Birmingham) and formed a committee. Let no-one decry such bureaucracy: for from this sprang possibly the first railway preservation society, dedicated to preserving intact and in working condition an entire railway for the purpose of carrying fare-paying passengers, rather than just having the odd historic locomotive stuffed and mounted on a plinth or in a museum. (The Middleton Railway in Leeds claims precedence from time to time; there is debate over who met first and when, and their line was never a passenger-carrying public line; but I digress.)

'Railway adventure' is the account of Rolt's involvement with the Talyllyn, from discovery, through the formation of the preservation society, to his appointment as General Manager and the problems of actually running the railway for the first two years under conditions that today's safety-conscious society would not tolerate under even the lightest of regulatory regimes.

There cannot be many, if any, railwaymen left in harness who worked on British Railways in the days of steam; let alone that many who actually took on running a railway lock, stock and barrel. So anyone with even the slightest interest in railways should read this classic account of a project that, against all the odds, succeeded and paved the way for so many others. ( )