Times Mapping The Railways

Product Description

Follow the development decline & revival of Britain s railways through a unique collection of old & new maps commentaries & photographs. The story is traced from early waggonways through the steam era to today s diesel & electric railways. Over a hundred railway maps: Railways appear in almost every type of topographical map available throughout the nineteenth & twentieth centuries. Detailed Parliamentary plans were drawn up for many hundreds of proposed railway schemes (plenty of which never got past the drawing board). Once built the Ordnance Survey then plotted the lines onto their map sheets covering Britain. Cartographers such as John Barthomolew & Son Cruchley & Bradshaw were commissioned to draw vast numbers of railway maps during the boom years. Maps were produced as an aid to the management of the railways to promote the railway companies networks & to enable passengers to plan their journeys & understand the passing scene as they gazed from the carriage window. Twenty-four mileposts describe the history of the railways: Alongside the maps are a series of milepost features which give a detailed description of key events eras & personalities in the history of Britain s railways. The nineteenth century saw the foundations laid for our modern railway network with huge building projects constructing thousands of miles of track bridges & tunnels. This expansion slowed in the early twentieth century as competition from the car & the lorry began to bite. The railways made an enormous contribution to the World Wars then underwent massive re-equipment after nationalization before changing drastically following the infamous Beeching Report of 1963. The modern era has seen an expansion of the network again with the building of the Channel Tunnel & the re-opening of a significant number of lines closed under the Beeching axe many as heritage railways.