Harz Railways Bookzines, Books and others of interest

[dunnyrail]

1 was recently in view of my interest in Irish Railways advised (by one of my regular operators) to buy the second edition of The Tralee & Dingle Railway, written/updated by Michael Whitehouse of Tyseley fame. The original was written by his father some 60 years ago. The price of this new edition from Lightmoor Press is £60 but it is an excellently produced tome and covers pretty well all that has or may ever been found out about the line. The pictures from the original book have been superbly updated and enlarged with many new ones found and included in the tome. For myself it was once recommended a worthwhile buy, I got it from Amazon thus saving postage costs. One again might wonder at the price, but I paid £35 for the original from Robert Humm back in 1997 when I was desperate to get info on the line at the after building my TnD 2-6-0, Coach and sundry Cattle Trucks from the line for my expected then Irish line whenever I got round to moving from Leagrave. Time moves on and that 15mm Scale line on 45mm track never got built, but I still love all things Irish Narrow Gauge. Below you can see both books. Original of course to the right.

 

[dunnyrail]

Today this popped through the letter box. I had been wanting it for a while and even considered joining the LnY Society for a year as it was a joining gift. But time passed and I forgot it then it popped back to my conciseness by a means that I totally forget now. Anyhow a webb search found a copy at MDS Books so it was purchased.

As a former Railway operator the title intrigued me, would it live up to that title? On opening it certainly did with even better 3 of the opening paragraphs an in depth discussion about how the LnY Control Offices were run. These became pretty well the de-facto way that control offices were run on the LMR for many many years into the BR era. When I joined BR in 1964 the Euston control office still had the boards up with plastic pins supporting small cards with train details that used to move up and down the boards as the trains progressed. This system only died when Signal Power Boxes were created. The rest of the book and subsequent editions are details of the Goods trains that work each of the Stations. I truly hope the series gets completed and moves on to Passenger Trains as well.

My Grandad as related to in previous posts was a LnY employee and would have been fascinated by this as he was on the Wagon repair side of the railway.