Wyrleybart
Established Member
This book by Mike Hollick and being published by the LNWR Society on 17th July, documents the traction changes from the 1950s to the late 1960s to the railways in the West Midlands. The scope is pretty much the LNWR boundaries stretching from Rugby in the Eastto just shy of Stafford, and encompassing Stourbridge and Nuneaton and Mike has set out to document the changes from an ostensibly steam railway to that where modern traction was chosen to replace. Mike has spent an awful lot of time in research at Kew studying thousands of British Railways documents and memoranda to establish the truth about how the transition came about.
I have yet to see the 144 page book which includes 16 pages of colour photos so this is a kind pf preamble, but I am told to prepare to read some disappointing history about one of my favourite classes of loco - the 2500hp BR/Sulzer type 4s. There is an awful lot of history documented in "Changing Engines" about why some of the decisions happened - much of it political demands to save huge amounts of money, which is why dieselisation and electrification happened the way it did.
I believe Mike has spent at least the last fifteen years visiting the Records office at Kew to harvest facts and information about the the railways in the West Midlands and Warwickshire and I am hoping for more publications like this. Mike hopes that railway bookshops and preserved railways will retail this book, so my suggestion is to keep your eyes open if you are a particular enthusiast of railway history in this part of the world, or more generally just interested in the transition from steam.
I have yet to see the 144 page book which includes 16 pages of colour photos so this is a kind pf preamble, but I am told to prepare to read some disappointing history about one of my favourite classes of loco - the 2500hp BR/Sulzer type 4s. There is an awful lot of history documented in "Changing Engines" about why some of the decisions happened - much of it political demands to save huge amounts of money, which is why dieselisation and electrification happened the way it did.
I believe Mike has spent at least the last fifteen years visiting the Records office at Kew to harvest facts and information about the the railways in the West Midlands and Warwickshire and I am hoping for more publications like this. Mike hopes that railway bookshops and preserved railways will retail this book, so my suggestion is to keep your eyes open if you are a particular enthusiast of railway history in this part of the world, or more generally just interested in the transition from steam.