The depot
Essays on locomotives and the workshops that built them: the engines that set records, the works that made them and the economics behind the lines.
- The Beeching report
In 1963 a report proposed to close some five thousand miles of the British railway network. Many of its closures went ahead.
- Railway Mania
In the 1840s Britain's investors poured money into railway shares, and then the bubble burst.
- Mallard and the steam speed record
On 3 July 1938 a streamlined engine ran down a slope in Lincolnshire at 126 miles an hour. No steam locomotive has officially gone faster.
- Swindon Works
A Wiltshire village became a railway town when the Great Western chose it for its locomotive works in the 1840s.