The Changing Face of Britain’s Railways 1938-1953: The Railway Companies Bow Out

This is a profusely illustrated account of the period from 1938 to 1953, containing over 90,000 words with 200 mostly unpublished illustrations, ranging from Thurso to Hayling Island, and from Dingle to Wisbech provides a stunning exploration of the fifteen years that shaped the future of Britain’s railways. By using contemporary records, and exploring developments on British Railways, in Ulster and in Ireland, Robert Hendry has drawn parallels that shed new light on what really happened. We meet Robin Riddles, the last steam locomotive engineer, Col Eric Gore Browne, an outspoken railway chairman, Frank Pope, who closed more than half the system he ran in a few months, Bill Allen, a union man turned employer, and George Howden, who was in turn a civil engineer, a mechanical engineer, a manager, and railway board chairman. With the wealth of authoritative data that appears in this book, Robert Hendry questions the long accepted allegation that railway managers, who had done a superb job in time of war, lost touch with reality. He suggests this argument was a product of old company loyalties, political expediency, and a failure to study the facts, and that the Railway Executive, the men who ran BR from 1948 to 1953, were not the fools that some writers claim, but responsible men who had been put in an impossible position, and almost succeeded in doing the impossible.