David Joy (2)

This is a short but detailed guide to Steamtown, Carnforth as it was in 1972. Ordinarily, this wouldn't really merit a review; but as a nearly forty-year-old guide it shows how the world of preserved railways has changed. In those days, Steamtown was a working museum, a former main-line locomotive shed given over to the overhaul and storage of main-line steam locomotives, and their occasional steaming. But changes have been wrought, to the extent that Steamtown is now no longer open to the public except on special open days (and those are few and far between). Major legislative changes in health and safety law (and, some would say, an associated decline in the degree of sense exercised by the visiting public) have made it impractical to open the site to the public. At the same time, the fragmentation of the public railway and the growth of a myriad of small operators, contractors and the like mean that Steamtown now makes more money from engineering under contract than it ever could as a tourist attraction.

The tourists now head for nearby Carnforth station, with its 'Brief Encounter' tearooms and attractions (the station was used to film an iconic 30s romantic film, as iconic now for its stilted and [to our eyes] innocent love story as for its backdrop of a busy mainline junction station with steam-hauled expresses thundering through the night). Steamtown is now, to all untutored eyes, merely another anonymous industrial unit. This book remains as a small testimony to the way that this was not always so.… (altro)