£24.95

In October 1993 Dennis Lovett was seconded by InterCity to work part time on the North London Line Modernisation Project as Communications Manager, joining the project team full-time when InterCity headquarters closed in March 1994. He suddenly found himself working on a piece of railway about which he knew very little and soon discovered that this was a line with a very complex history indeed. He found throughout his railway public affairs career that it was important to read up on lines such as this, in order to have the answers, so that when journalists and others asked the questions, he either knew the answer or where to find it in the quickest possible time!

He would often attend meetings or brief journalists about the project, when questions would inevitably be asked about the line’s past. The modernisation of the North London Line in the mid-1990s created a great deal of attention and in order to understand its future, it was necessary to get to grips with the past. Over the two years he worked on the project, such information was collated. It was not then the intention to produce a book but as the project passed to others, he was persuaded that the collected information should be placed before a wider audience. Little did he realise that when his day to day involvement with the project finished, that it would take so long to achieve the desired result or that it would continue to be of interest ten years after the first edition was published.

168 pages, Hardback
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£19.95

By Ian P Peaty

The geology of Leicestershire is dominated by the igneous rocks which form the beautiful Charnwood Forest, immediately to the west of Leicester city. The eastern boundary is formed by the river Soar and its navigation on a north-south line. Running in this river valley is the former Midland Railway four track main line to Derby and Nottingham. To the east are the Lower Lias beds which reach a depth of over nine hundred feet and have been actively worked for over a hundred years. This activity is now conducted underground and the modern works, producing plaster products, are at Barrow-on-Soar, opposite the railway sidings of the Lafarge granite stone loading terminal.

To the west, at Coalville, coal has been extracted in and around the appropriately named town. The renowned Snibston Mine is now a museum under the management of the Leicestershire Museum Service. Other collieries were at Whitwick, where there was also a granite quarry, and a few miles south there were Ellistown, Ibstock, Desford, Nailstone and Measham Collieries; further west was the well known Moira Colliery near Burton-on-Trent. The east-west extent of the granite area is eight miles and north-south it extends for some sixteen miles. At the northern extremity was the Shepshed quarry while the southern-most quarrying took place at Stoney Stanton and Narborough, bounded by the old South Leicester line of the LNWR.

All the coal collieries and the granite quarries of any size were once served by railways; many of the quarries had their own railway networks, complete with a wonderful range of locomotives and private owner wagons, employing several different gauges. Today the largest granite quarry in Europe, Mountsorrel, lies on the north-eastern boundary; it still has a considerable private railway system in the ownership of the giant French aggregates business Lafarge Aggregates. On the western and southern areas, another firm, Aggregates Industries, have smaller railways, at Bardon Hill and Croft Quarries. Close to the coal measures is Stud Farm rail ballast loading plant; formerly owned by Tarmac Ltd, a narrow gauge railway connected it to the quarry at Markfield.

Paperback 88 pages
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£11.95

By Ian Sixmith, Richard Derry

The 57XX engines: 87XX, 96XX, 97XX

Being a part of the Irwell Press ‘The Book of the Pannier Tanks’

Intended to Make Up into a Set as a Volume in the Famous ‘Book

Of’ Series

No.1 94XX

No.2 57XX (36XX, 37XX, 46XX)

No.3 57XX (57XX, 67XX, 77XX)

No.5 16XX

No.6 1366, 15XX (expected Summer 2012)

No.7 54XX, 64XX, 74XX (expected Autumn 2012)

The vast army of modern (post Grouping) pannier tanks is thus

dealt with over several volumes in a highly collectable series.

56 Pages, Card cover
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£11.95

AVAILABLE END OF MAY

By Adrian Booth

For this book (fourth in his Industrial Railways in Colour series) attention is turned to Scotland, the country that (in the form of Ayrshire) witnessed early personal memories of BR steam, plus events that were significant in his then-youthful developing interest in industrial railways.

From his home in Yorkshire, he had regularly gone north of the border for holidays since his early teens and, as he was preparing this book, many personal memories came back to mind. Things such as his first-ever visit to Scotland (as a fourteen year old) when train-spotting interests led to his family eating a sandwich lunch beside the Stranraer to Ayr line, where he witnessed the thrilling spectacle of double-headed ‘Black 5s’ on a northbound passenger train. By the time he was sixteen, he was organising his own tours and recall that the BR Scottish Region was very friendly towards railway enthusiasts and would issue shed permits by the handful to private individuals such as himself, particularly if the week’s tour involved purchasing an all-line ‘Railrover’ ticket. He visited Ayr several times, because he loved watching ‘Crabs’ working on the local coal trains.

64 Pages, Hardback
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£27.95

AVAILABLE END OF MAY

43000 - 43161

By Ian Sixsmith

When a class of engine is christened by enthusiasts ‘Doodlebugs’ or ‘Flying Pigs’, amongst a number of other less than admiring nicknames, there is an implication that the LMS Ivatt Class 4 2-6-0s were not the most admired of locomotives. Little has been written about them compared with their more glamorous brethren and it seems that in their early days there was some confusion about their purpose. They were the last steam design produced by the LMS and intended as a replacement for the 4F freight engines, but much of their time was spent on passenger work. They were quickly re-designated mixed traffic engines by their new British Railways owners and this book uses ‘4MTs’ as an appropriate short-hand for these 2-6-0s.

In their early days the 4MTs had something of a Jekyll and Hyde existence: although fitted with all the post-war labour-saving fixtures and equipped with well-intended creature comforts for the enginemen, there was obviously something amiss in their proportions because they were often chronically short of steam. It took several years and some Swindon magic to make a few simple but transformational changes to put them right. After that, they settled down and became widely travelled and generally well regarded, at least by railwaymen if not by enthusiasts. As is now standard in the Book of series a large chunk of the material by volume comes from the Engine History Cards and Engine Record Cards aided and abetted by information begged and borrowed from a number of sources, and backed up by a large number of photographs.

250 Pages, Hardback
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£29.95

THIRD REPRINT AVAILABLE END OF MAY

The years now leave few memories of the 'North Cornwall', a meandering railway from Halwill Junction in West Devon to the River Camel Estuary at Padstow on the Cornish Coast. Some may recall a West Country Pacific edging its way round Slaughterbridge, by Brown Willy, with two or three coaches from the 11.00am 'Atlantic Coast Express' from Waterloo. Yet few now remember a pair of Adams 0-6-0s struggling up the Carey Valley with a cattle special for Halwill and Exeter. Photographs of recent years show T9 4-4-0s with the Up 'Perishables' at Camelford say, or Tresmeer. Empty platforms, guard looking at his watch...

Author David Wroe died suddenly in 1995 eight months before the launch of his book on the North Cornwall Railway. It went out of print in 1997 and has been much sought after since. Without the possibility of David carrying out his own update on the book several people volunteered to help relaunch the title adding in much new information, maps, diagrams, timetable and, most importantly, photographs unavailable to David in the 1990s. The original book was constrained to156 pages whilst the updated version totals nearly 400.

Don't forget that in 2009 TVP will be releasing the first of two progammes covering the former Southern routes west of Exeter with a detailed commentary by Mike Arlett. BY SOUTHERN TO THE FAR WEST will retail at £16.95
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£28.95

RICHARD DERRY with Ian Sixsmith

Second Edition; greatly upgraded and expanded including new sixteen page colour section

Scarcely can a railway board have entered on such a time of frustrating maintenance work, disappointing performance, lows mixed with thrilling highs, uncertainty, expense and worry with such an innocuous phrase - 'Ten New Main Line Locomotives'. They were two sides of a coin, the Merchant Navy Pacifics - love 'em, hate 'em, scorn versus adulation; seldom could the phrases 'brilliant steaming' be conjoined so often with 'heavy maintenance', or the words 'exhilarating performance' with 'caught fire'*.

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£11.95

3. The 57XX engines: 57XX, 67XX, 77XX

Being a part of the Irwell Press 'The Book of the Pannier Tanks'

Intended to Make Up into a Set as a Volume in the Famous 'Book

Of' Series

No.1 94XX

No.2 57XX (36XX, 37XX, 46XX)

No.3 57XX (57XX, 67XX, 77XX)

No.4 57XX (77XX, 96XX, 97XX) expected early-2012

No.5 16XX

No.6 1366, 15XX (expected early 2012)

No.7 54XX, 64XX, 74XX (expected mid 2012)

The vast army of modern (post Grouping) pannier tanks is thus

dealt with over several volumes in a highly collectable series.

Paperback 56 pages

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