Oxford Companion to British Railway History by Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle

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RailroadTreasures offers the following item: Oxford Companion to British Railway History by Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle The Oxford Companion to British Railway History by Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle Dust Jacket 1997 591 PagesSeveral attempts have been made in Britain to produce an encyclopaedia of railways. Only two achieved publication: C. Hamilton Ellis’s Pictorial Encyclopaedia of Railways (1968), which covered the whole world, largely in terms of 900 pictures; and the Encyclopaedia of Railways (1977), edited by 0. S. Nock, and containing more detailed and comprehensive articles by a panel of authoritative writers, but again world-wide in scope.There has long been a need for a work of reference covering the development of the British railway system in one substantial volume; the means by which it was promoted and financed; the technical devices and methods used in its building and operation; the lives of some of the people who planned, constructed, and ran it, their achievements and shortcomings; and the part it played in the history and development of the country in peace and war. It is important that such a work should stretch well beyond describing the railways in their physical terms, in addition to providing an account of the growth, consolidation, and eventual contraction of the system.The published literature on the subject is very large, and the excellent bibliography compiled by George Ottley lists 13,000 entries. Their quality, however, varies considerably. There are important topics that have hardly been touched, and it must be remembered that the national archives relating to railways became available for study only in 1952. We hope that at some points the Companion offers a useful enlargement of knowledge, resulting from the exploration of these arid other unpublished records. With great reluctance, we decided to confine the scope of the book to Great Britain-i.e. England, Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. We should have liked to include Ireland, but the history of railways there has been in a number of important respects so widely different from elsewhere in the British Isles that a disproportionate part of our space would have been taken up in exemplifying and explaining its peculiarities. We do, however, offer accounts, under several headings, of the relationships between British and Irish railways, and the traffic between them.Most accounts and studies of British railways have been approached from one of two viewpoints: from outside or inside. ‘Outsiders’ have looked at them mainly as a means of economic and social change, on a level with other contributors to the growth of the national economy such as the textile, coal, and power generation industries. ‘Insiders’ have studied them because they have a strong interest in railways as such.Much favours both approaches. No one can fully appreciate railways, accurately and fairly, without a good understanding of how they work in all their many and varied aspects, what has governed their development, and the impact they have made. Those looking from the outside have seldom revealed a strong interest in these things, which sometimes has affected judgements on what the railways did for the community. Conversely ‘insiders’, by concentrating mainly on railways as entities, especially in the mechanical field, have often shown little interest in the traffic that was carried, or its importance to the areas being served.The Companion seeks to look at British railway history from both points of view: from external assessment and internal observation, examining what the railways have done, or not done, for the country, and the technologies they used in providing their services. In doing so it aims to set the railways in their context, displaying them and their multifarious activities as elements in the life, work, and thought of Britain in the past and in the modern world.In planning this book our next decision concerned its time-span. Obviously it had to begin with the first recorded railway in 1603-4. In view of the widespread changes inaugurated by the Railways Act, 1993, the commencement of privatization of British Railways in April 1994 seemed an appropriate time at which to stop, although in a few instances we have gone beyond that date in order to give proper meaning within the context of the particular subject.One of our hardest tasks was to decide how to allocate space within the predetermined total number of pages. In setting lengths of contributions we were particularly conscious that, over a total span of 400 years, it was in 1830-1914-the ‘Railway Age’-that railways made their greatest contribution to the economic, political, and social life of Britain; a period, moreover, for which there is more copious and informative evidence than for the years before or since.In the field of civil engineering and construction, special attention has been given to methods and structures. The treatment of mechanical engineering extends over all types of traction (excepting a very few freaks): from wind, horses, and men to gravity and cable haulage; steam, petrol, and diesel locomotives; pneumatic power; and electricity. Attention has also been paid to the services the railways provided and the vehicles they used. Emphasis is given to equipment that proved outstandingly successful, or was influential in development. All principal safety devices are discussed-notably signalling and brake systems-as well as a number of the accidents that occurred.In other areas, treatment has had to be equally selective. It is a characteristic of British railways that whilst they tended to increase or create uniformity in life and business, their working was in some ways highly individual more so than in most of Europe, where there was state control. The developments they helped to bring about showed much diversity too. For example, their effect on the communities they served varied greatly, yet clearly this must be discussed. But how widely? Which towns should have specific articles allocated to them? London and the largest cities obviously require surveys, as do the ports that the railways served most fully; seaside resorts, some of which they did much to create; ‘railway towns’ built by or for them. In the end we have included articles on 43 towns.Again, turning to railway companies, by 1865 there were 366 authorized in Great Britain, though the lines of some of them were not yet built. The number then steadily declined, principally through the absorption of smaller companies by larger ones. When the big statutory amalgamation took place in 1923 it combined 120 into four, from 27 `constituent’ and 93 ‘subsidiary’ companies which are listed in Appendix I. But it still left nearly 50 small independent companies, possessing their own rolling stock. How many of these various entities deserved separate articles? Clearly all the chief pioneers that were subsequently absorbed into larger companies demanded attention, like the Kilmarnock & Troon, the Stockton & Darlington, the Liverpool & Manchester, and the London & Birmingham, together with later important lines, such as the Chester & Holyhead and the Blyth & Tyne. We therefore give separate accounts of each of the constituent companies of the four large groups, together with a number of the subsidiary companies, and others that merit inclusion. The selection of companies which had already been absorbed by amalgamation before 1923 is our own.
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