The book I read to research this post was Rail Centres: Sheffield by Stephen R Batty which is a very good book which I bought from Amazon. Sheffield is one of the great industrial centres of Britain not to mention one of its biggest cities. It's famous for its steelmaking especially cutlery although nowadays and not mentioned in this book and like many big cities in Britain is going through a transformation. Anyway initially in the steam age Sheffield almost missed as George Stephenson although a renowned railway engineer wanted a 2 3/4 mile tunnel in one place and a very gentle gradient on the railway when asked to design a railway for this city. This resulted in an estimation for a huge amount of money that potential weren't interested in footing the bill for. In 1840 another engineer was asked to design a railway and he suggested cuttings instead of tunnels and a slightly sharper gradient, which with trains becoming more feasible seemed alright, but this brought the price down. Anyway over the next 50 years Sheffield become a major railway junction linking up places like Hull, Liverpool & London. When one of the railways was being built, a tunnel was being constructed and collapsed and 7 workers were able to jump clear but 6 workers died. I did really enjoy this book which is a worthy addition to the Rail Centres series.

The book I read to research this post was The Thaxton Branch by Peter Paye which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. Peter is an expert on the history of the trains in Eastern England and worked for British Rail for many years. Thaxton is a small town in Essex that is now very much part of the London commuter belt. In times past it was a major wool and cutlery manufacture centre in Britain. In fact it is rather remote for getting coal to this area otherwise it may very well have developed into a major cutlery centre like Sheffield. A railway was built here which used the legal definition of light railway which exempted it from a lot of the rules normal railways had to follow which made it viable. A plan went to the planning office for a London to Edinburgh line that would pass through here but it wasn't taken particularly seriously and several other routes were also submitted before a final one was accepted. When the railway was built as a branch line from Elsenham to Thaxted there was 1 goods train & 1 mixed train per day and the rest were passenger trains. This line is approximately 10 miles long and eventually succumbed to competition from the National motorcoach service which started running coaches here from 1920. Nowadays there is a bus service here just once a week and it is the classic case of a small town that has been drastically changed by economic pressures within Britain. The nearest fairly big town to here is probably Bishops Stortford. I really enjoyed this book and apparently it was the first book written by Peter although later he wrote a second edition.

The book I read to research this post was This Is York Major Railway Centre which is more a special magazine than a book. In this post I will focus more on writing about York than a review. York was connected to the railways quite early on because there was a railway around Newcastle & George Hudson had the foresight to see what was needed when they were building a railway from London was a long distance railway. He also helped orchestrate the building of the railway station & main hotel for rail travellers which were both very impressive. Hudson went on to manage the railway company when it became a regional company but dabble in underhand practises even by those days standards and eventually got the sack. A man called Leeman was responsible for catching him out and the National Railway Museum is on Leeman Street, a road dedicated to him. For many years Hudson was villified in York and it's only more recently a road has been named after him. York was the only place in Britain where you could see Atlantic expresses in 4 liveries. Carlisle had the edge in that 7 companies ran to the Citadel station but both places were a train spotters dream. At one stage at the museum there was a fire which claimed one of The Mallard's A4 sister locomotives. Of course the A4 was the fastest steam locomotive ever built and The Mallard which is on display here is the fastest steam locomotive ever and holds the world record. There are numerous steam railways privately run in Yorkshire. The Derwent Valley Railway used to have light in the title but this confused many people into thinking it was a narrow gauge railway which probably lost them business.