Railway Lovers Companion, a superb compendium edited by Brian Morgan, whose own characteristic writing is included just a couple of times.
The pieces have a literary quality as well as railway interest. Amazingly, I asked for it as a 9th birthday present, having thumbed one in a bookshop. 42 shillings I see in 1962. I still have it.
With Mr. Morgan's name cited as above (can I be an obnoxious nitpicking pedant? : the gentleman's first name
Bryan, not Brian) -- I can't resist a bit here in the "effusion" bracket, about my effectively lifelong favourite railway book: Morgan's 1955 work
The End Of The Line -- which, coincidentally, I discovered in 1962.
Mr. M. and I would seem to all intents and purposes to be "twins" in our railway-type likings: fond above all of rural branches and light railways, of standard or narrow gauge -- the more that a line describable thus, ought by all sensible canons, never have come into being at all; the more charming it is to such as us ! Morgan seemingly spent the half-dozen-plus years up to 1955, travelling around large areas of western Europe (part of the mentioned material by him in
The Railway-Lover's Companion, is his comments from
TEOTL on that era's general rail scenes in France, Italy, and West Germany) in search of attractive and -- in many countries, rapidly vanishing -- light railways; and wrote delightfully of his findings, in
TEOTL. In my opinion, the guy is a poet-in-prose, and writes divinely; in tandem with the rail-related material, he sets forth wonderfully the scenic, and man-made, beauties, of the places which he visits -- plus, many shrewd and humorous observations on national features and traits.
Morgan would appear to have had a particularly pronounced love of France, which he very successfully passed on to me. I find
TEOTL's chapter on France, the most appealing of all those in the book -- also, heartbreaking: France's once colossal kilometrage of independent light railways, of varied gauges, began to dwindle rapidly in the 1930s; surprisingly much remained at the end of World War II, but the decline over the decade between then and publication of Morgan's book, was cataclysmic -- and much mourned in the book, by the author -- his words to the effect of: only rags-and-tatters left by 1955. (The French metre-gauge has held up better between then and now, than Morgan's tone sixty-plus years ago would have had one, likely, mentally making projections -- present situation "not good, but could be worse".)
I've always regretted that Morgan never produced a
The End Of The Line II -- he would have had potential material for same. The first volume basically covers "middle western Europe": there would remain the Nordic countries (which he briefly and favourably mentions), and Greece: with the Cold War at its height in the 1950s, the Soviet bloc would have been out of the question for one of Morgan's tastes of roaming around as the fancy took him. I understand that in the 1950s, Yugoslavia was open for "go-as-you-please" tourism for Westerners; but that part of the world has always been reckoned "no picnic", especially for railfans. And Morgan seems to have been a rather quirky fellow, very clear on what he liked and wanted, and otherwise. Per mentions in
TEOTL, he had no use for Spain / Portugal: surprisingly, what he saw and heard second-hand of their railways suggested predominantly to him, that they were boring; plus, he seemed to have a prejudice against anything broad-gauge -- re any width above four-feet-eight-and-a-half, he didn't want to know. As with many artists, one feels: often an awkward cuss -- but one forgives the bod a lot, for the sake of their "product".
