Which is you favourite Railway Book.

[Nearholmer]

On the District Controller books: I'm a fan, too.

 

I wouldn't want a collection, but the one on the Tunbridge Wells area has filled lots of gaps in my knowledge about operations in East Sussex in the pre-Beeching period. It's turned a few fleeting mental snapshots from childhood into a rich picture, and if I was to suddenly "go 00", I would probably attempt to create a model of Tunbridge Wells West.

 

Kevin

[Andy Kirkham]

To continue on the subject of Gone with Regret, I unexpectedly came upon a passage that shed an interesting light on the author's background in the pages of a biography of the poet R.S.Thomas (The Man who Went into the West by Byron Rogers)

 

The Beherends [George's parents] had lived near them [the Thomases] near Eglwys Fach [somewhere near Machynlleth]. 'What a joy,' wrote Elsi Thomas. Having built the chapel at Burghclere, which they filled with the paintings of Stanley Spencer, they had moved from their large house there to one in Wales, which, being smaller, had Spencer's paintings and those of Henry Lamb hanging frame to frame, 'Louis Behrend had bought many of Stanley's paintings to prevent them from reaching the public before it was ready to receive them,' wrote Elsi in a sentence that tells you something about her attitude to art, but a lot more about her. When the  Behrends moved from Eglws Fach they gave her Henry Lamb's The Gleaners. 'They had an ogre of a son called George who was only interested in the money value of these treasures ...'

 

'What people didn't realise was that my parents had squandered all their money on that mouldy chapel,' said George Behrend (author of seventeen books, four of them on railways), and from that moment on I began to warm to George. 'And then Behrend and Co. which had had rice mills in Egypt, and exported cotton seed, collapsed in 1959. People didn't know that, they assumed that if you put up chapels you could afford to do anything. They put the whole Ballet Rambert up for much of the War. Those dancers were scroungers, though not so much of one as Stanley Spencer.' His parents, said George Behrend ruefully, had been raving mad about art.

 

The chapter of Gone With Regret entitled The last days of the Corris  is headed by an extract from one of Thomas's poems:

 

                                                                                                                                 It is too late to start

                                                                                                                                 For destinations not of the heart.

[laurenceb]

I have a copy of British Light Railways by RW Kidner dated 1938, interestingly on the flyleaf is a forthcoming book The Railways of The Isle of Man by LTC Catchpole. It is stated that Catchpole only wrote one book I am wondering what happened to the second or if something happened to Catchpole during the Great unpleasantness.

[Nearholmer]

One possible explanation is that Mr Catchpole may have found himself "pipped at the post" by another author, immediately after the war. I've got a slim, but very good, book about the IoMR by ...... er ....... I can't remember, McMillan maybe ....... published, IIRC, in 1946, and it seems to have been 'the standard work' until Boyd produced a more detailed one.

 

K

[laurenceb]

Possible, the other book listed for publication in 1939 was The Taff Vale Railway by DS Barrie. Anyone know when that was first published?

[The Stationmaster]

Possible, the other book listed for publication in 1939 was The Taff Vale Railway by DS Barrie. Anyone know when that was first published?

 

February 1939 according to the list of editions inside the book itself.  The Second Edition was published in January 1950, Reprinted in 1963 and 1969  (and possibly later but my copy is the 1969 reprint).

 

P.S. The Taff Vale volume was the second one in Oakwood's 'Railway History' series the first being 'The North London Railway' so that might have preceded the Taff Vale book into publication.