Michael Williams (23)

There was this steam train. It was slow, unreliable, uncomfortable and no one used it. Then the lizardpeople shut the train down purely to spite everyone. A vicar chained himself to the track in a valiant effort to save the train by blocking its passage (not sure how that works) but in the end the train ran no more. This story repeats itself a dozen times. To be fair to the author he does mention the negatives of the old rail network as well but in the end it's a big nostalgia (?) trip. Although it all happened too long ago for it to really be nostalgia. Just a timeless (ha!) general unease caused by the changing world.

I was hoping for some more history and technical details and fewer quirky vignettes. I hope the author enjoyed his train journeys during which, if you were to believe him, he wrote this book. I certainly enjoy my train holidays. This book however, as delightfully whimsical as it is, is not what I was after and unless you have a notebook full of train numbers it might not be for you either.… (altro)

When Britain went to war in 1939, they did so by rail. For at a time when air travel was enjoyed only by the few and automobiles nowhere nearly as ubiquitous as they would become, railways were the dominant form of long-distance transportation in the country. This was underscored over the next six years, as trains were employed in a range of tasks from evacuating children from London at the start of the war to preparing for the massive D-Day invasion that ended it.

The role Britain’s railways played in the war deserves a history that details their wide range of activities while analyzing the extent of their contribution and describes how they made it possible. Unfortunately, Michael Williams’s book is not that work. While he details in it the many roles the railways played, he does so in a way that is more adulatory than analytical — so much so that a more appropriate subtitle for this book would be “A Celebration of Britain’s Railways in the Second World War,” for that would better capture the tone of his narrative. This is reflected best in his focus on the individual stories of the men and women who worked for the railways during the war, where they coped with straitened circumstances and the dangers of attack. Chapter after chapter contain tales spotlighting the heroism and sacrifice of railway employees, yet there is little effort to connect these episodes to any broader explanation of railway operations or assessment within the context of the overall war effort. This reflects his sources, as apart from a series of oral histories with the now-elderly survivors Williams bases his book on a limited number of previously-published accounts, most notably the self-congratulatory wartime histories put out by the “Big Four” railway companies immediately after the conflict. Expanding his research by consulting the archival records or by incorporating the vast body of literature about British mobilization would have made for a much stronger work that gave readers a more in-depth understanding of the contribution of Britain’s railways to the war effort.

Because of this deficiency, Williams’s book functions as more of an homage than anything else. This is particularly regrettable given the case the author makes within it for a good, thorough study of British railways that pushes past the myths and misconceptions that have accumulated around their role in the war to detail the many roles they played in it. In the end, though, what Williams provides his readers with is not a book that explains “How Britain’s Railways Won the War,” but simply salutes it as something to be assumed.
… (altro)

Sixteen different stories about aspects of train travel and railway history in Britain that have now disappeared. The author takes a journalistic tone from the outset, but this is backed by extensive knowledge, which is worn lightly. Most of the stories go beyond the simple 'Beeching closed the branch lines' narrative, although this is covered. The final chapter, on the partial re-birth of the Waverley route which until 1969 connected Edinburgh and Carlisle, is especially telling, as I remember some of the controversy over this at the time but was too far away to relate to the doomed struggle to prevent closure that local residents mounted. (The author omits mention of the Border Union Railway scheme, which tried to raise funds to acquire the railway directly from BR as a mixed heritage and community railway; this was probably over ambitious, even for the late 1960s when the preservation movement was still in its comparative infancy, but that didn't stop The Powers That Be stomping on it fairly hard.)

Michael Williams makes a case for the return of actual writing about railways, as opposed to books being published that consist of photographs with captions. Both have their place; in my own writing, I've tried to strike a better balance between words and pictures, but I appreciate the thought. His influences are some of the great names of railway writing's past: C. Hamilton Ellis, Cecil J. Allen, W.J.K. (Keith) Davies, Bryan Morgan and T.W.E. Roche to name but a few. These are names little seen today; in the heyday of the publishing midlist, they were staples of most bookshops' railway titles and enthusiasts' libraries.

I have two criticisms; firstly, in the chapter dealing with towns and cities connected with locomotive building, he omits the major locomotive works that produced engines for industry or export: Bristol with Pecketts, Leeds with Hunslet and Kitson, Sheffield with the Yorkshire Engine Company, Stafford with Bagnalls, Manchester with Beyer, Peacock, Newcastle upon Tyne with Robert Stephensons & Hawthornes and the Springburn district of Glasgow with North British Locomotive, again to name but a few. As many of these also supplemented the main line railways' locomotive stocks from time to time, this omission is a bit glaring. And I also bristled slightly at his description of some preserved engines as "patched-up rust buckets" when contrasting them with the new-build engines such as Tornado. Modern insurance demands the highest level of maintenance and engineering ability so that locomotive boilers - pressure vessels which are going to be used in close proximity to the public - are safe to operate. It is this rigour that has actually given the preservation movement the skills to graduate to building complete locomotives from scratch. Many of the restoration projects that has returned engines that languished in scrapyards to service involved so much engineering ability that it was only a short step from such restorations to building complete engines. (I often wonder if steam locomotives would have lasted as long as they did if insurance requirements had been as strict in times past as they are now; I am sure that some superannuated engines that were farmed out to potter around on branch lines and in isolated yards did not get the benefit of new boilers roughly every ten years, as happens now.) (In fairness, I have seen instances of preserved diesel locomotives that the phrase 'patched-up rust bucket' would apply to; but that's another story.)

Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book immensely (the author had me in the introduction when he cited one of my favourite books in any category, Bryan Morgan's The End of the Line, even though that book is resolutely Continental in outlook whereas Williams' book is just as resolutely British), and I can recommend it as an exemplar of how to write about railways for a general readership.… (altro)

Here we are again, back on the slow trains of a vastly changed rail system in a once great Britain, now, from this author’s own descriptions a more sad and sleazy world with only a remnant of the whole cloth that enthusiastic volunteers maintain with any human and humane train services, with the rest given away to ”Privatization”. At least Michael Williams miraculously still finds trains that travel through beauty and human-sized landscapes although he rather strains our joint-journeying with him by the inclusion of the London Light Docklands Railway with their computerized driverless trains, similar to those soulless trundles we endure in our airports.

There are still ‘heritage’ railways left in the UK, nicely described here, among those operated by road-haulage barons, Deutsch-Bahn and Virgin with their “lindo” trains that leando over so far the passengers get sicko – or perhaps it is the food offered in their “shops” - no restaurant or buffet car service anymore. (See Eleven Minutes Late - http://www.librarything.com/work/book/83824280 )

Despite dedicated and enthusiastic research and a commitment to support the efforts of the community and railway conservationists and a need, that we readers can share, to find worth and value in public transport, Williams’ writing becomes plaintiff and beseeching, betraying the blowsy state of this once great network. After thoroughly enjoying his work (his second in a series we can only hope he continues) it is one of his own selected quotations from another author, Paul Theroux, that the truth of the ‘special pleading’ most rings true:-
”There is an English dream of a warm summer evening on a branch line train. Just that sentence can make an English person over 40 fall silent with the memory of what has become a golden fantasy of an idealized England.”

How true and how sad.… (altro)