Key Books

Class 66/0 In the late 1990s, most of the current locomotives in use on the national network were becoming very tired and evermore unreliable. It w...

Britain’s Preserved Railways The preserved heritage museum railways of Britain are thriving. There is nostalgia for the steam locomotives of a bygo...

Railways in Northern Lincolnshire: Four Decades of Change Set against the contrasting rural and industrial scenery of northern Lincolnshire, this b...

Grand Central Grand Central is an innovative and pioneering railway open-access operator with a relatively short, but varied history. Beginning ope...

Class 67s In the late 1990s, English, Welsh & Scottish Railway (EWS) ordered a large fleet of 250 Class 66 locomotives to replace a variety of ...

Railways of South and West Scotland The West Coast Main Line and the line from Kilmarnock south to Gretna were both built to ensure that passenger ...

Rail Freight: Scotland In the early 1980s, Ravenscraig steel works was the biggest source of rail freight north of the border. Wagonload freight st...

Railways of South West Scotland: Two Generations of Photography Two generations of railway photography of the southwest of Scotland from 1960–80 an...

West Coast Main Line Locomotive Haulage The West Coast Main Line (WCML), which runs from London Euston to Glasgow Central with branches to Manchest...

Class 59s In the mid-1980s, one of British Rail’s major customers of heavy block trains, Foster Yeoman, suggested the unusual arrangement of runnin...

Class 442: The Wessex Electrics First introduced in the late 1980s, the Class 442s were like nothing that had been seen before in terms of Southern...

Irish Railways: The Last 60 Years By the end of the 1950s, steam had already mostly disappeared from passenger work in the Republic of Ireland, yet...

Class 47s: From Inverness to Penzance 1982–85 The Class 47 diesel locomotives were a mainstay of British Rail with 512 built in the 1960s. They wer...

Cornish Rail: St Austell to Penzance This, the second of two volumes covering the railways of Cornwall, follows the railway through the beautiful ...

The Railways and Britain’s Nuclear Industry This book is about the important role played by the nation’s railways in Britain’s nuclear industry and...

The Last of the Welsh Coal Trains Despite the substantial decline of coal mining in the UK over the last three decades, until recently, coal was s...

Rail Freight: Wales and the Borders The changes to rail freight in Wales and the Borders since the 1980s have been dramatic and often the result o...

Canadian Pacific in the Rockies The Canadian Pacific Railway was built to unite all the Canadian Provinces with a transcontinental line running fro...

Railways of Central Scotland 2016–20 The last two decades have seen many changes to the railways of Central Scotland with different ownership of p...

Western Class Locomotives Unusually for a large class of locomotives, all Western Class locomotives had the same prefix. They were designed by and...

Class 70s In the late 2000s, Freightliner was looking to expand its locomotive fleet towards more powerful and fuel-efficient locomotives. The new...

Czech and Slovak Railways: Three Decades of Change, 1990–2020s The Czech Republic and Slovakia emerged as independent countries in 1993, as joint ...

Railways of Central Scotland The five years to each side of the millennium were a period of great change on the railway network with the advent of ...