Great Days of the Express Trains by David St John Thomas & Patrick Whitehouse
Hard cover with dust jacket
Copyright 1990 Greenwich Editions
208 pages
CONTENTS
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Passing Through 18
2 BY TRAIN AND PLATFORM 22
The Named Expresses 30
3 THE ANATOMY OF THE EXPRESS TRAIN 33
Llandudno Excursion 39
4 SLEEPERS AND NIGHT TRAINS 47
The Search for Improvement: Tests & Trials 59
5 SAUNTERING AT LONDON TERMINI 65
Excursions Ever Further 81
6 CHANGE HERE FOR JOURNEY'S END 89
Luxury Trains and Streamliners 101
7 DAY TRIP TO LONDON 110
Allocations 123
8 AN ENGINEER ON THE FOOTPLATE 128
Precursors to Heathrow 138
9 CROSS-COUNTRY INSTITUTIONS 142
Wartime Train Services 162
10 SUMMER WEEKENDS 164
Special Occasions 175
11 KEEPING THEM MOVING:
OPERATING AND CONTROL 178
The Train Now in a Hurry . . . 188
12 LIFE AT THE SHED 190
The Fastest Trains 197
13 SERVING KENT WITH STEAM 201
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 206
INDEX 207
The great express trains of yesteryear, often heavier and traveling longer nonstop distances than is common today, knitted Britain together using the most colorful as well as powerful locomotives and took thousands of journeys which dramatically changed their lives.
A companion volume to the best-selling, much-praised The Great Days of the Country Railway which is again reprinted to mark this work's publication.
The great express trains of yesteryear, often heavier and travelling longer nonstop distances than is common today, knitted Britain together using the most colourful as well as powerful locomotives and took thousands on journeys which dramatically changed their lives. Here we recapture the days when the train journey was the most eagerly-anticipated part of a holiday, when the expresses reflected the character of the lines they served and there was great individuality in carriages, restaurant cars and their fare, station organisation - and everyone took a keen interest in the performance of each day's run by the select named trains.
With main chapters recapturing the great days of express trains in their many moods, 'fillers' highlighting more specific matters and some individual trips, a wealth of anecdote and comment in the 'snippets' in the outside column (a popular feature of the works by these two authors), a feast of colour and black-and-white photographs with expansive captions, tables and other ingredients of reference value, this book itself promises a great and sustained journey. It has been guided by a team of well-known experts and includes material contributed by those who helped run as well as travel by the great trains. Step on board!
The '150' series on the four great railways (GWR, LMS, LNER, SR) by David St John Thomas and Patrick Whitehouse was recently completed by the publication of LNER 150. This extract is typical of literally hundreds of readers' letters about the series:
`I must write at once to congratulate you. It is a marvellous work, and entirely reflects the whole being, the real ambience, of the LNER. I can truly say this in solemn judgement, without being patronising, as I served in reasonably senior BR positions on LNE territory.
But the real 'oscar' is not the one book, but the quartet, in the way that within the corporate format of the series, uniformity of treatment serves to delineate and bring out so well the differing characteristics of the four companies.'
All are in the same style with main feature in-depth chapters with real reference value covering history, engineering, locomotives and rolling stock, train services and the like, between-chapter shorter items focussing on particular aspects of the railway, the background or behind the scenes events, and dozens of what might be called 'snippets' - new items of the time, anecdotes unusual events, extracts from railway documents -all bringing the railway in its various forms vividly to life. They are illustrated with many black-and-white photographs, as many as possible not previously published, and a selection of colour illustrations portraying the railways in more recent times with the development of colour photography, including one or two cases rare between-the-wars colour pictures. They are volumes for reading and dipping into and are expected to continue high in railway book sales for many years.
