Over four hundred pages for the history of a railway that's less than one and a half miles long might seem like overkill, and it will almost certainly be too much information for some readers, but in my view this is set to become a classic of the genre. Gillham gives us a good mix of technical, social and organisational history: he's clearly just as interested in the railway's crucial role in transporting commuters between Waterloo station and their offices as he is in the part it played as one of the first electric tube railways, or its anomalous status as a tube line owned and run by a main-line railway company.

Because of its relative simplicity, the "Drain" often gets cited as a case-study for a transport system: this book would certainly give you most of the data you would need for such an exercise. ( )