@rogerfarnworth -- the book sounds potentially, a fine read; and as per mention in your linked item, chimes in with recent discussion on these Forums about the interestingly disproportionate-seeming number of the clergy, who are railway enthusiasts. Also mentioned therein by you, Nicholas Whittaker's
Platform Souls -- which I rate as a grand book: the author is a writer of some talent -- in "
P.S." he tells movingly and entertainingly about steam-chasing in the last few years of said mode of traction on British Railways; and also much, equally interestingly, about a range of other things which came his way in, if I calculate rightly, the first forty-odd years of his life.
"Good stuff" though
Moved by Steam would appear to be; I think I'll refrain from reading it. At the risk of seeming to "come the old soldier" in a superior (and unjustified) fashion -- it would appear that as regards birth-date, I have maybe half a decade on Messrs. Inwood / Smith / Whitaker: which gave me the chance of witnessing in childhood, not just what seems to me the dismal last knockings of BR steam in its terminal few years; but the final years of the period before that, when steam was virtually ubiquitous, and a great deal of Great Britain's rail system was still "there and operating", not colossally diminished from its long-ago peak. For a couple of reasons: I date 1959 as when, for me, the rot really started to set in -- both re line closures, and the decline of steam. Whittaker on the last few steam years; was for me, absorbing but sad -- frankly, I feel like "taking a pass" on being made miserable all over again by reading about Inwood and Smith's, fascinating no doubt, doings between 1962 and (please pardon my levity here), "Sixties-tail-end Doomsday ".
rogerfarnworth.com
