LONDON NORTH EASTERN (LNER)

IN STOCK

The fifth in a series with the simple old fashioned aim to showcase top quality photographs reproduced at the largest possible size, in order to celebrate some of the best-loved steam classes. Full-page shots are presented in a landscape format and come with comprehensive captions. The emphasis throughout is on the engines in service and the book has been arranged in chapters in chronological order starting with the batches of the class as built. The final five chapters show the engines at work from 1935 onwards on the principal routes where they were used. All engines in the class are covered at least once.

When the LNER decided to introduce a high-speed service between London and Newcastle, the public had no inkling of what would appear in September 1935. More engines were built for additional streamlined services and also for general express work, but they will always be noted for their high-speed exploits culminating in MALLARD’s world record in 1938.

After the Second World War, the A4s took some years to regain at least some of their pre-war brilliance, but they enjoyed a final few years at the top after they were all fitted with Kylchap double chimneys in the late 1950s. They even had a final fling in Scotland working expresses between Glasgow and Aberdeen from 1964 until 1966.

The pictures have been selected mainly from Brian Stephenson’s Rail Archive Stephenson with the remainder from Rail-Online.

Author: John Jennison
First published: End of June 2022
Edition: 1
Cover: Hardback , A4 , 148 pages , 0 in colour
ISBN: 978-1-911262-46-6
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Second in a series which has but a simple aim, to use top quality photographs reproduced at the largest possible size to celebrate some of the best-loved steam classes. Full-page shots are presented in a landscape format and are backed up by comprehensive captions.

A class first emerging from Doncaster Works in 1922, the non-streamlined Pacifics were the LNER’s principal express passenger engines for more than a decade. The design underwent continuous development during its early years, particularly the introduction of long-travel valve gear and higher pressure boilers in the transformation from A1 to A3 class. Although put into the shade from the mid-1930s by the streamlined A4s they remained the backbone of the LNER passenger fleet, but were ousted from many of their former duties after the second World war as new Thompson and Peppercorn Pacifics were built. However, the A3s were to enjoy a real Indian Summer from the late 1950s, their performance transformed by the fitting of Kylchap double chimneys.

Author: Jon Jennison
First published: 10th.November 2020
Cover: Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-911262-40-4
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By Mike Fell OBE

ISBN 978-1-911262-14-5

This is the third Irwell Press book written by Mike G. Fell OBE concerning ports and their railways. The previous two have covered King’s Lynn and Goole. Mike, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, was in charge of the Port of Hull for sixteen years from 1987 until 2003 and previously was a stevedoring operations manager at the port for three years from 1977 to 1979. The book describes and graphically illustrates the history of the port and its railways from the time of the opening of Queen’s Dock in 1778 until the present day. One of the book’s chief aims is to dispel the widespread notion that Hull was only a fishing port. The fishing industry was once very important to the City of Hull but it actually formed only a small part of the port’s overall commercial activities. Hull’s success was founded on its ability to offer excellent facilities to increasingly larger ships which traded worldwide with a great variety of cargoes and the export of coal from the South Yorkshire coalfield, all of which arrived by train.

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NOW OUT OF PRINT (OOP)

By Paul Anderson

Irwell Press first published Great British Railway Station King’s Cross in 1990, before ‘the biggest urban renewal project in Western Europe’ got under way and ‘The Cross’ metamorphosed into the restored and enhanced modern wonder of today. The seediness, the littered grimy streets and ‘Norf London’ working class air has utterly vanished which is in a way a shame but the old place has gained, well, take a look round Cubitt’s stolid building, once mirrored but now conjoined by the Gothic pile across the road and judge for yourself what it might have gained. That ‘biggest urban renewal project in Western Europe’ back in 1990 many saw it as a dire threat, with proposals to demolish the Great Northern Hotel and other outlandish mortifications but in the end it has all gone rather well and the stations, King’s Cross and St Pancras are happily safe as long as there is a London - remember, for many years both lived under the threat of annihilation. Their fate could so easily have been that of Euston, just up the road.

Author: Paul Anderson


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OUT OF STOCK

OUT NOW

Mike Fell will be signing

copies of his book on

Wednesday 11th May at the

Yorkshire Waterways Museum,

Dutch River Side, Goole, DN14 5TB

12 noon to 3pm

ROYALTIES TO THE SOBRIETY PROJECT.

By Mike G Fell OBE

This work follows a similar style to that adopted for the authors previous book An Illustrated History of THE PORT OF KING’S LYNN AND ITS RAILWAYS published by Irwell Press in 2012. As such it is not intended to be a definitive history of the Port of Goole but, like its predecessor, an informative and graphic portrayal of the port from its inception to the present day including its railway connections, past and present. The author enjoyed the privilege of being responsible for both ports. Insofar as Goole is concerned, he was Assistant Docks Manager there from March 1983 until June 1984 and had overall responsibility for the port, along with the much larger Port of Hull, from 1998 until his retirement on 31 March 2003. The following year, he was appointed as non-executive chairman of RMS Europe Group Limited, a stevedoring company operating the Boothferry Terminal in Goole and the owner of two wharves on the River Trent at Flixborough and Gunness. he held that position until July 2007 when, following a successful management buyout, he finally said goodbye to the port transport industry as a means of employment after a career spanning 37 years. However, its fascination remains undiminished especially as its importance, rather amazingly, remains largely unrecognized notwithstanding the fact that some 95% of UK trade is handled through seaports. This amounts to an astonishing total of 560 million tonnes of cargo annually all of which arrives and departs from the ports around our coastline. The ports on the Rivers Humber, Ouse and Trent play an increasingly major part in the UK economy, greater than any other group of ports around a single estuary. The Port of Goole, some 50 miles from the open sea, continues to have an important role to play.

Paperback - colour throughout

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By PETER TOWNEND - Shed Master King's Cross, Top Shed

An unusual book – ‘Much of it’ ... ‘written by other people’ as author Peter Townend puts it. After the success of Top Shed (Ian Allan, 1975 and 1989) he completed a further work entitled East Coast Pacifics at Work (Ian Allan, 1982). The publishers requested that various chapters might be contributed by other people writing about their own involvement and experiences with these locomotives, but this resulted in a book much larger than anticipated and the contributions were not included. Now, with the passage of over thirty years the material has gained in historical interest and is seen here for the first time.

The contributors, men of the time and all providing unique insights into the Pacifics, their construction and their working, read like a roll-call of the Gresley East Coast Age; many well known, others not so.

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Not the Three Tenors, but the Three Accompaniments. The Book of the A4 Pacifics is undergoing yet another reprint and as these things do the three A4 Photographic Accompaniments (published 2006) after a long run, contrived to go out of print, a happy/unhappy event spurred on by the interest from the ‘Great Gathering’ of the A4s at York this year.

They are thus still in demand and with more A4 ‘Gatherings’ scheduled later in the year, the three books have been ‘gathered ‘ in the own right, into

The Book of the A4 Pacifics Accompaniments Compendium, 176 pages at a cost-busting £19.95. Opportunity has been taken to incorporate some minor corrections and additions along with some new photographs.

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By Peter Coster CEng. MICE MCIT

In April 2012 it was 90 years since home-going passengers at Kings Cross were astonished at the presence of a huge, handsome express steam locomotive standing on the empty stock roads, the like of which they had never seen before. It was GREAT NORTHERN, awaiting inspection by the GNR Directors. This year will be the 90th year since the third of these locomotives emerged from Doncaster Works – ‘The Plant’ – 1472, later 4472, soon to be named FLYING SCOTSMAN. These three anniversaries we hope to commemorate with this New Book of the A3s. The story of the class was set out in the original ‘Book Of’ the A3s by the same author; he has now put down the history of each individual locomotive, summarising events, together with personal comments. Even now, while the history of the class is generally complete, there is a trickle of new information on the details of individual locomotives, revealing more about their use and particularly during the sad business of withdrawal and disposal.



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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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Latest in the ‘Book Of’ series, presenting a comprehensive history and full sequence of works visits together with several photographs of every individual engine. ‘A handsome locomotive, firmly in the Gresley tradition of handsome designs’ and that is certainly true of the LNER B17 4-6-0s. ‘Good engineering should look good, and Gresley never set his hand to a design which looked less than very good.’ Again certainly true.

The engines had a relatively brief time at the forefront of express working, mainly on the Great Eastern and Great Central Sections and eventually all were concentrated at former GE depots. This rendered many of them remote from enthusiast eyes though fortunately the selection of one for Royal trains meant they came to be closely observed indeed. The Queen preferred to travel from Kings Cross to Sandringham, avoiding all the ceremony necessary when she entered the City of London, wherein lay Liverpool Street, the terminus otherwise considered the natural setting-out point for Kings Lynn and the Royal Estate. A B17, later rebuilt like ten others into B2 form was kept at Cambridge for the Royal workings and when not so engaged visited Kings Cross daily, most notably on the Cambridge ‘beer trains’ which could get a bit raucous.

Their names were large estates in the LNER countryside and on reading, the list it feels like an ancient copy of Debrett’s. In 1935 naming policy changed abruptly and the last 25 were named after prominent football clubs in areas served by the LNER. Thus the engines got both the nickname ‘Sandies’ (after the first one, SANDRINGHAM) and ‘Footballers’.

Author: Peter J. Coster C.Eng, MICE, MCIT
First published: 26 May 2021
Cover: Hardback , 200 pages
ISBN: 978-1-911262-31-2
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IN STOCK

By Peter Coster

With the second book of the pair examining the engineering and operation of the GNR main line from Kings Cross to Doncaster over the years, we turn our attention away from the metropolis towards the countryside. I have not repeated the preface of Part One, but the comments apply equally to Part Two. This is not a detailed history of the GN main line, but an engineering and operational commentary.

However, it would not be possible nowadays to write a reflective account of this nature without acknowledging the enormous archive of historical material from the many authors who have already written on this subject and I am happy to do so. As I wrote in Part One, the definitive work was that of Charles H Grinling, "The History of the Great Northern Railway". Then there was the work of such as John Wrottesley, R A H (Bob) Weight, F A S Brown, E A J Neve, W A Tuplin and others, latterly Dr Ben Brooksbank. To all these I give my grateful thanks.

While my knowledge of the GN main line is good, it is not infallible, and where there is doubt over any issue or caption, I have said so. Anecdotes were part of the working railway at all levels and I have included a selection where it seemed apposite, as I recall them together with my own memories. Comments and clarification should be forwarded to Irwell Press in the usual way. My grateful thanks go to friends and colleagues over the years, particularly Ken Haysom, formerly Assistant Chief Civil Engineer on the Southern Region of BR and previously Divisional Engineer at Kings Cross.

This has been assembled for your interest, nostalgia and perhaps even amusement. This is my tribute to generations of "GN men and women" who built and ran a good railway that I remember with admiration and fondness.

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NOW OUT OF PRINT (OOP)

By Peter Coster

The sum of all the books ever published on the Great Northern Railway from Kings Cross to Doncaster, its successors the LNER, then the Eastern Region of British Railways, and now including Railtrack and Network Rail, together with the engineers and their locomotives, if laid end to end, would take us well down the line itself, maybe even beyond it. And that's without the outpourings of the Internet.

This is different; a book about the GNR, of course, but from the engineering and operational perspective in particular, continuing from the last days of the GNR up to the present time. It is a description of the heritage that our predecessors created, their skill, experience and occasional mistakes, judged intelligently (it is to be hoped) with hindsight.

The two volumes describe the GNR main line in the form of a journey northwards to the centre of the universe for aficionados, Doncaster; Part One takes us as far as Welwyn Garden City. Inevitably, for one whose acquaintance with the 'GN', as we called it, started a quarter of a century after the company's demise, it is seen through the prisms of engineering knowledge and personal experience. It is illustrated with Ordnance Surveys of the period in most cases, although some post-date the 1922 Grouping, complemented with photographs.

It describes what would now be termed the 'infrastructure' of the GNR existing at the time of Grouping, describing the methods of construction used, the implications for subsequent maintenance and renewals and the methods used, over the decades up to the present. The commentary continues with subsequent events on the working railway up to more recent times, particularly methods on maintaining the working railway, with anecdotes from that working railway.

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