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9780719065668_1_pre.qxd 29/01/2008 12:36PM Page i

British railway enthusiasm

9780719065668_1_pre.qxd 29/01/2008 12:36PM Page ii

STUDIES IN
POPULAR
CULTURE
General editor: Professor Jeffrey Richards

Already published

Working-class organisation and popular tourism, 1840–1970

Susan Barton

Leisure, citizenship and working-class men in Britain, 1850–1945

Brad Beaven

The British Consumer Co-operative Movement and film, 1890s–1960s

Alan George Burton

Railways and culture in Britain

Ian Carter

Relocating Britishness
Stephen Caunce, Ewa Mazierska, Susan Sydney-Smith and John Walton (eds)

From silent screen to multi-screen:

a history of cinema exhibition in Britain since 1896
Stuart Hanson

Smoking in British popular culture, 1800–2000

Matthew Hilton

Popular culture in London, c. 1890–1918:

the transformation of entertainment
Andrew Horrall

Horseracing and the British, 1919–39

Mike Huggins

Amateur operatics: a social and cultural history

John Lowerson

Scotland and the music hall, 1850–1914

Paul Maloney

Films and British national identity: from Dickens to Dad’s Army

Jeffrey Richards

Looking North: Northern England and the national imagination

Dave Russell

The British seaside holiday: holidays and resorts in the

twentieth century
John K. Walton
9780719065668_1_pre.qxd 29/01/2008 12:36PM Page iii

British railway enthusiasm

IAN CARTER

Manchester University Press

Manchester
9780719065668_1_pre.qxd 29/01/2008 12:36PM Page iv

Copyright © Ian Carter 2008

The right of Ian Carter to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7ja, UK
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 6566 8 hardback

First published 2008

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external
or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee
that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/14pt Adobe Garamond

by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong
9780719065668_1_pre.qxd 29/01/2008 12:36PM Page v

STUDIES IN
POPULAR
CULTURE

There has in recent years been an explosion of interest in culture and cultural
studies. The impetus has come from two directions and out of two different
traditions. On the one hand, cultural history has grown out of social history to
become a distinct and identifiable school of historical investigation. On the
other hand, cultural studies has grown out of English literature and has
concerned itself to a large extent with contemporary issues. Nevertheless,
there is a shared project, its aim, to elucidate the meanings and values implicit
and explicit in the art, literature, learning, institutions and everyday behaviour
within a given society. Both the cultural historian and the cultural studies
scholar seek to explore the ways in which a culture is imagined, represented
and received, how it interacts with social processes, how it contributes to
individual and collective identities and world views, to stability and change, to
social, political and economic activities and programmes. This series aims to
provide an arena for the cross-fertilisation of the discipline, so that the work of
the cultural historian can take advantage of the most useful and illuminating of
the theoretical developments and the cultural studies scholars can extend the
purely historical underpinnings of their investigations. The ultimate objective of
the series is to provide a range of books which will explain in a readable and
accessible way where we are now socially and culturally and how we got to
where we are. This should enable people to be better informed, promote an
interdisciplinary approach to cultural issues and encourage deeper thought
about the issues, attitudes and institutions of popular culture.

Jeffrey Richards
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For Siân, whose journey ended too soon

9780719065668_1_pre.qxd 29/01/2008 12:36PM Page vii

Contents

List of table, maps and figures page ix

General editor’s foreword xi

1 Introduction: the railway enthusiast’s life-world 1

2 The railway book (and magazine) mania 24
3 Associated life 55
4 Train spotter: the last pariah 88
5 Preserved lines: playing trains or running a business? 109
6 Blood on the tracks 146
7 Modelling and engineering 192
8 The rise and fall of the toy train empire 214
9 Standards, schism and skill: exclusive brethren 238
10 A dying fall? 264

Bibliography 292
Index 308
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9780719065668_1_pre.qxd 29/01/2008 12:36PM Page ix

List of table, maps and figures

Table

9.1 Selected model railway gauges, scales and gauge/scale ratios page 240

Maps
6.1 Building the Welsh Highland 148
6.2 The Welsh Highland in 2005 163

Figures
2.1 Allen & Unwin book titles and railway titles 26
2.2 Total number of books and railway books published,
1990–2002 27
2.3 Average number of books and railway books published,
1939–44 to 1991–93 28
2.4 New railway titles and non-railway titles published by the
Locomotive Publishing Company 30
2.5 New railway titles and non-railway titles published by
Percival Marshall 30
2.6 New railway titles, other transport titles and non-transport
titles published by The Oakwood Press 31
2.7 All railway titles and non-railway books published by
Ian Allan 33
2.8 New railway titles published by David & Charles 34
2.9 New railway books and booklets published by Peco 36
2.10 New railway and non-railway titles published by
Bradford Barton 37
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x List of table, maps and figures

2.11 New railway titles and non-railway titles published by

Patrick Stephens 38
2.12 New railway titles published by Oxford Publishing
Company and Wild Swan 39
2.13 New railway titles and non-railway titles published by
Middleton Press 40
2.14 New railway titles and non-railway titles published by
Atlantic Transport 41
2.15 New railway titles published by Irwell Press 42
2.16 Founding dates for British railway magazines listed in
Willings Press Guide 2006 48
3.1 Local model railway clubs, 1950–2000 67
3.2 Founding decade for current British local model
railway clubs 71
5.1 British preserved railways opened and closed, 1950–84 115
5.2 Preserved railways and related attractions open to
the public, 1960–2003 115
5.3 Annual turnover, Heritage Railway Association member
organisations, 1996 117
5.4 Percentage of voluntary workers to all workers by
tourist attraction category, England, 2003 127
6.1 Passenger journeys on Festiniog Railway and Welsh
Highland Railway trains, 1970–92 166
10.1 Selected railway magazines’ audited circulation,
1965 and 2003 267
10.2 Norfolk Railway Society membership, 1956–2000 271
10.3 Attendance at Darlington Model Railway Society’s annual
exhibition, 1977–2002 273
10.4 Scalefour Society members’ years in the hobby, 1993
and 1998 277
10.5 Scalefour Society members’ preferred modelling period,
1993 and 1998 279
10.6 Visitor trends by attraction category, England, percentage
change 2002–3 283
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General editor’s foreword

There are by now countless scholarly studies of the railways, their rolling stock,
their routes, their company histories, their economic and social influence, their
all-round mystique. But to date there has been no scholarly study of what
Ian Carter calls ‘the fancy’ – the multi-faceted world of the railways as a
hobby. It is perhaps because of the cultural disdain attached to the term ‘train
spotter’ which dismisses the legions of enthusiasts, largely male, who spend
hours on draughty platforms noting down engine numbers as they pass, as
nerds, social, and even worse, sexual inadequates. But train spotting is only
part of the vast, labyrinthine and largely unknown world of railway hobbyists
laid bare and scrupulously analysed by Ian Carter. Writing as a lifelong en-
thusiast with a global experience of the railways, he combines his unashamed
enthusiasm for the subject with unparalleled knowledge and admirable and
clear-sighted scholarly rigour. It turn he examines and dissects the overlap-
ping layers of this world of specialist railway book and magazine publishers,
railway modellers, train spotters and the volunteers who run preserved steam
lines. He explores the ups and downs, policies and strategies of the publishers
who are household names in the ‘fancy’ (Ian Allan, David and Charles and
Oakwood Press, for instance) and makes a realistic assessment of their achieve-
ments and their prospects. Carter analyses the torrent of abuse and ridicule
directed at train spotters, but also evokes the joys and satisfactions of that activ-
ity. He gives a balanced and well-argued account of the practical problems
facing preserved lines when the needs of preservation confront the demands
of practical operation and where gradually what began as a social movement
has been transformed into a branch of the tourist industry. As an exemplary
case study, he tells the cautionary tale of the forty-year struggle to revive the
Welsh Highland Light Railway, picking his way sure-footedly through the
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xii General editor’s foreword

extraordinary tangle of company rivalries, internecine strife and vintage skul-

duggery. The author uncovers, beneath the surface of lovable eccentricity in
the world of railway modelling, the fiercely fought battles over scale and gauge
and the cut-throat rivalry of major manufacturers. The book ends with a gloomy
prognostication of the decline and eventual extinction of the whole railway
fancy as we move further and further from the steam age which gave it birth.
Witty and affectionate, compulsively readable and valuably illustrated by shards
of autobiographical reminiscence, this book is also shrewd, thoughtful,
balanced and well-informed. It is a monument of painstaking and patient
scholarship, which fills a gap in the existing literature and will unquestionably
remain the definitive account of its subject.

Jeffrey Richards
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Introduction: the railway

enthusiast’s life-world

ankind may be divided into two categories,’ Gilbert Thomas wrote

‘M sixty years ago: ‘those who are railway-lovers and those who are not.’ 1
This book is about the first group. Though unsympathetic readers may think
railway enthusiasm trivial, we must take this topic seriously if we are to under-
stand twentieth-century British experience. For a cohort of young men was
recruited through postwar years’ massive train spotting craze then worked its
way through the life cycle, energising a wide range of other activities in the
broad railway fancy from railway modelling, railway history and preserving
bits of lines abandoned by British Railways to collecting old bits of railway
equipment and squirrelling away old model trains. By the late 1970s railway
modelling alone was judged to be male Britons’ premier indoor leisure activity.
Two decades later, one informed observer judged that between three and five
million citizens entertained some more-or-less serious interest in railways.
Given these figures, we might expect British social historians to have taken
a close interest in the railway fancy. We would be disappointed. Almost no
academic books, and precious few journal articles, examine activities which
enthralled so many twentieth-century British men. Among academics no less
than general commentators, cold contempt replaces engaged interest. Consider
pathetic William Empson, principal buffoon in Winston, Peter Tinniswoode’s
comic novel. With his oatmeal cardigan and cavalry twill trousers, his LNER
bow tie and his clanking GWR cufflinks, William is no style pioneer. He sits
quietly in a corner at home, listening to train recordings on his Walkman.
When this palls he makes notes in his ‘ “silly little school exercise book.” ’2 For
William is a railway historian. His tomes on the Cheshire Lines Committee and
on railways in the Low Countries enjoy solid reputations. ‘ “I’m extremely
well-regarded among aficionados of the railway book genre,” ’ he insists. ‘ “I
get letters. Fan letters.” ’3 Like most authors, he suffers setbacks: the lurcher
9780719065668_4_001.qxd 29/01/2008 12:37PM Page 2

2 British railway enthusiasm

belonging to Winston, his bossy elder sister Nancy’s live-in lover, eats the
manuscript for William’s new book about the Great Eastern Railway. Rising
above this disaster, he plunges into research for new monographs on the light
railways of County Antrim, and on the Manchester, South Junction and
Altrincham Railway.4
A worthy quasi-academic life, surely: the Victorian scholar/gentleman’s last
fling? Far from it. Though William’s royalties support the Empson household
in its comfortable bickering, both Nancy and Winston despise him. For Nancy
he is ‘a hopeless, helpless, congenital, incurable drip.’ ‘ “He writes these silly
little books about railways,” ’ she reports. ‘ “That’s his profession. Imagine a
grown man devoting his whole life to bemoaning the passing of the shunter’s
pole and the heavy mineral tank locomotive.” ’5 Earthy Winston concurs, berat-
ing ‘ “them bloody silly books about railways including points and signals” ’
written by this ‘ “pathetic little twat.” ’6 Things do not improve after William
rejects Winston’s proposal that he should prostitute his art by writing a bodice-
ripper about women ticket collectors on the Somerset and Dorset Joint
Railway; but this always was an impossible project. Lawrentian Winston may
know all that there is to know about women (for his sort of man, at least),
but William knows nothing. He is a bachelor. This will not change – for though
physically middle-aged he is retarded emotionally.7 ‘ “William used to collect
conkers,” ’ Nancy tells us. ‘ “Hundreds of them. Thousands. Then he turned
his attention to train-spotting. It was the autumn of the age of steam, and I
don’t think he’s ever recovered from it.” ’8 This novel’s blurb delivers the coup
de grâce. Though a respected railway historian, here William Empson is reduced
to ‘an avid train spotter.’ In a classic article, the American sociologist Everett
Hughes explained how ‘certain statuses have developed characteristic patterns
of expected personal attributes and a way of life.’ 9 So it is with British railway
enthusiasm. Popular discourse reduces manifold activities in the broad railway
fancy to one master status trait: train spotting. ‘Our hobby has an appalling
public image in this country,’ Iain Rice told the Scalefour Society’s genteel
railway modellers, ‘perpetually saddled with a tabloid-press stereotype long on
grubby macs, duffle bags, general social inadequacy and with snide undertones
of repressed maturity and other unspeakable deviations.’10
We see this truth clearly if we compare railway enthusiasm with a leisure
activity sharing remarkable consanguinity with it: bird-watching. Both activ-
ities train the observer’s eye to capture jizz – a rapid, informed glance which
separates a chiffchaff from a willow warbler, a Southern Railway N class Mogul
from a U. Both activities can be done close to home in Britain, but both
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Introduction 3

provide famous locations bubbling with riches (the RSPB reserve at Minsmere;
Crewe Station’s platforms). Each has its specialised argot, its cant. Bird-watchers
speak of LBJs – little brown jobs; railway enthusiasts of Duffs, Streaks and
Space Ships. Each group has its internal hierarchy. Adepts owning broad inter-
ests in the modern railway’s ramified machine ensemble patronise those who
merely collect engine numbers (train spotters – or, ‘loosely’, says the OED,
gricers); experts on particular birds’ ecology despise twitchers who merely
collect species, solemnly adding them to ‘life lists’. In both cases, this dis-
paragement is unmerited. ‘Twitchers are not ornithologists – any more than
trainspotters are engineers,’ Colin Garratt tells us; ‘but both have a superb
knowledge of their subject.’11 However adept in their wider fields, twitchers
and spotters both collect valueless objects, lacking any stamp collector’s defence
that his or her albums will fetch a good price. Both gricers and twitchers love
vagrants, whether a slowly dying bird storm-tossed from its distant usual range
(where this species may abound) or a particular locomotive mooching around
far from its normal stamping ground. As average disposable incomes rose over
recent decades, and as wide-bodied jets reduced the real cost of long-haul travel,
both twitchers and gricers ventured ever further abroad, hunting either the
last vestiges of steam traction or yet more bird species to add to that life list.
Despite these striking similarities, birders will not acknowledge kinship with
railway enthusiasts. ‘Birdwatching is not . . . a form of trainspotting,’ one recent
feathered tome insisted.12 A second mourned that technological advances risk
reducing ‘this wonderful pastime [bird-watching] to the mechanistic time-
tabled drudgery of the ultimate anorak’s pursuit – train-spotting.’13 So much
in common, so such an urgent need to distinguish oneself from the pariah.
One reason for this defensive tic lies buried in the etymological odium which
enthusiasm bears. An unlovely conjugation looms: I study railways; you are
a railway enthusiast; he is a train spotter.

Enthusiasm: a concept’s career

Can enthusiasm be a good thing? In 1959 the railway writer and painter
C. Hamilton Ellis dedicated his satire Rapidly Round the Bend – a book clearly
modelled on Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That (1930) – to

The Enthusiasts, those noble souls who make day trips from Plymouth to Boat
of Garten to see Ben Alder, who put on decent mourning when British Railways,
Southern Region, breaks up Beachy Head, who contemplate, with a desperate
urge, the advance of the Edgware Express into Belsize Park because they think
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4 British railway enthusiasm

they have lost their third-class single from Chipping Norton to Pershore
(Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, No 0032, dated November 5,
1859, with firework burn on reverse side).14

Odd people, clearly. What makes them tick? ‘It’s interesting that, these days,
everyone’s got an opinion about exactly what it is that makes model railways
so enjoyable,’ Bob Barlow told his magazine’s readers. ‘It’s almost as if there
are factions beavering secretively away like research scientists in an effort to
isolate the very essence of the hobby. Perhaps we’ll soon see the publication
of an authoritative paper revealing the mystery – a tiny, glistening droplet in
a test-tube labelled “enthusiasm.” ’15 Suggesting that enthusiasm is a compound
keen to yield its secrets to competent chemical analysis, Barlow fails to notice
this notion’s deep-dyed polemicism. For most of its career ‘enthusiast’ was
not something which one called oneself; it was an insult to be flung at people
of whom one disapproved, often radically. Even today we catch ideological
odour’s whiff. ‘He is an absolute enthusiast,’ Ian Sansom reports of genteel
TV smallholder Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s paean to seasonal food. ‘And
there’s always something rather disturbing about enthusiasm.’16
Why should this be? Like hairy Hugh’s penchant for a neo-peasant lifestyle,
the answer lies deeply rooted in British social history. Extrapolated from the
original Greek, in 1677 an enthusiast was ‘One who is (really or seemingly)
possessed by a god; one who is under the influence of prophetic frenzy’ (OED).
This was no neutral description. In the theology-struck seventeenth century,
enthusiasm was mainstream Anglicanism’s principal ideological stick with which
to beat Quakers and other dissenting sects ‘with their rude challenge to all the
institutional churches.’17 Note how, from the beginning, English usage tied
enthusiasm to fanaticism. This link still taints the railway life-world. G. Freeman
Allen described a 1953 commemorative trip north from King’s Cross behind
two preserved Ivatt locomotives. ‘Our reception at Peterborough was the
climax,’ he reported. ‘Frenzied shrieks from the engines suggested that some
G.N. stalwarts were in danger of immolating themselves under the Atlantics’
wheels in uncontrolled enthusiasm.’18 In polite discourse, enthusiasm’s pejor-
ative overtones moderated modestly as nonconformist churches revealed them-
selves less disruptive to good, solid, Tory social order than had been feared.
A steady drift to secular registers meant that by the mid-eighteenth century
an enthusiast had become ‘A person full of enthusiasm about something or
someone; a visionary, a self-deluded person’ (OED). Close kin to hobby – another
word rooted in insult19 – today enthusiasm retains a pejorative overtone, still
whiffing faintly of religious fanaticism’s brimstone after three centuries’ rubbing
9780719065668_4_001.qxd 29/01/2008 12:37PM Page 5

Introduction 5

by the secular mundane. Like ‘plonker’ or ‘wally’, this is no sobriquet for

one’s friend. ‘A railway enthusiast,’ George Ottley thunders in words which
could have fallen from any bigoted seventeenth-century latitudinarian divine’s
lips, ‘is one who is burdened with an unbridled obsession for the aesthetics
of railways and for the collecting of their ephemera – tickets, numberings,
renumberings, bits of old locomotives – especially nameplates – and any
and every imaginable item of discarded bric-à-brac, including buttons from
guards’ old tunics.’20 Along with his mentor Professor Jack Simmons, Ottley
struggled to make railway history a respectable academic practice. In vain. ‘Most
railway historians,’ we read in The Journal of Social History, ‘have remained
“trainspotters” to a man, combining the enthusiasms of the hobbyist and the
econometrician in scholarly mimicry of that singular British type.’21

Peculiarities of the British

Is this a singular British type? Visit a bookshop in Japan, and marvel at serried
ranks of books (all impenetrable to monoglot English people) serving that
nation’s teeming railway enthusiasts. Or enjoy the mass of high-quality ama-
teur writing about North American railroads. Or read that Maigret novel in
which Xavier Martin spends three months building ‘an exact reconstruction
of St-Lazare Station, with all its tracks, its suburban trains and its expresses,
its signals, its signal-boxes’ as a window display for Paris’s Magazins de
Louvre.22 Or contemplate that splendid beer-swilling Bohemian, the composer
Antonin Dvorák. His railway obsession dated from 1850 – when, aged nine,
he saw the railway from Prague to Kralupy open through his home town.
Lodging later with his railwayman uncle Václav Dusik’s family in Prague,
he cultivated his uncle’s workmates. Always on first-name terms with a host
of main-line drivers, he took care to know who drove which train on which
day. While dominating Prague’s musical life from his Conservatoire chair
much later, this living national treasure still remained fascinated by railways.
Prevented one day from making his usual pilgrimage to the city’s main station,
he sent his favourite student, Josef Suk, to collect the number of the loco-
motive hauling his favourite train. Himself no railway enthusiast, Suk duti-
fully noted the number: but took it from the tender, not the locomotive. This
solecism almost cost him the chance to marry Dvorák’s daughter.23 Retired
to the country, Antonin ‘rarely went to Prague unless it was to interview an
engine-driver.’ Train spotting at the Vinohrady Station on one such visit in
1904, he caught the cold which killed him: this man who ‘often said that he
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6 British railway enthusiasm

would give all his symphonies had he been able to invent the [steam] loco-
motive.’24 Many other nations can proffer examples of railway enthusiasm then
– but Britain gave the modern steam railway to the world. Does that fact sup-
port claims about a ‘peculiarly British love of trains,’ or that ‘the railway train
has assumed a place in British society without parallel in the rest of the world’? 25
Does it explain Britain’s hordes of railway enthusiasts, or their not infrequent
eccentricity? Where else would a stolidly middle-class late Victorian pater-
familias try to slip broad-gauge GWR locomotive buffers past household author-
ities under the specious claim that these were, in fact, piano stools?26
‘There is an entire strata [sic] of society living its entire life at 00 scale,’
Scotland on Sunday reported (14 March 1999), ‘and a totally consuming exis-
tence it would appear to be.’ Though widely disparaged, the British railway
enthusiast’s life-world remains stubbornly lively and commodious.27 One may
break down the railway fancy into different sectors for analytical purposes –
separating enthusiasts for the modern prototype from those interested in her-
itage railways, railway toys, railwayana, model railways or model engineering;
contemplating different provinces in the railway publishing industry – but enthu-
siasts ignore these distinctions.28 Eminent railway historians build cutting-edge
model layouts. Officers in national organisations celebrating the current rail-
way scene collect ancient artefacts and belong to line societies celebrating dead
companies. Many model railway club members spend weekends as volunteer
workers on preserved lines. Many professional railwaymen also devote much
spare time to running preserved railways, working alongside these amateurs.
The railway enthusiast’s life world is a single space pocked with many cran-
nies; but none can predict which nooks any particular individual will inhabit.
This is controlled by chance, knowledge, location and prior inclination. One
example makes the point. C’est moi, I am afraid.
Like so many others, train spotting was my first roost. Along with most
boys in my primary school class, I spent weekends and holidays in the early
fifties haunting lineside fences, watching the trains go by and collecting
engine numbers. Though ignited by the prototype’s blazing magic, my rail-
way interests soon widened. I started reading railway history. (Indeed, for much
of my youth I read little else, to the considerable detriment of my school work.)
Though irremediably cack-handed, I was raised in Luton’s light engineering
artisan culture. It needed little effort to browbeat my engineer father to take
an interest in railway modelling. He tried to fob me off with second-hand
Hornby 0 gauge clockwork tinplate, but I was having none of that. Together
we started building a 00 gauge electric layout in the family house’s roof space.
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Introduction 7

Freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, this was no ideal location. Perhaps
that explains why this layout never was finished (but is any layout ever finished?);
though the fact that I still spent so much time perched on the station fence
at Leagrave, or luxuriating as 3F exhaust steam blasted up my short trouser leg
on the Waller Avenue footbridge, probably had something to do with it.
Two epiphanies and one big fright marked my teenage years. Epiphanies
first. Our family’s 1955 camping holiday was spent in Snowdonia. Escaping
parental oversight, one day I invested a modest sum in buying a short journey
behind a Simplex petrol tractor from Porthmadog across the Cob to Boston
Lodge. This was the reborn Festiniog Railway’s first running season. As some
recompense for the journey’s brevity – little more than one mile each way –
passengers were invited to wander around Boston Lodge works while their
train was prepared for its return journey. Abandoned to rust and dust nine
years earlier, the Festiniog’s steam locomotives still snoozed in their running
shed. Over there were Prince and her sisters, George England’s ancient and
engagingly tiny saddle tanks with their incongruous tenders; over here the
Festiniog’s astounding double Fairlies, hulking beasts overwhelming their tiny
‘Welsh two-foot’ track. Both the Englands and the Fairlies looked nothing
like any other locomotive I had seen. For an impressionable railway enthusiast
this was sheer magic, akin to a medieval historian stumbling on slumber-bound
Urthur Pendragon and his knights in their cave, waiting for imperilled Britain’s
call. Utterly entranced, I joined the Festiniog Railway Preservation Society on
the spot, and agitated for J.I.C. Boyd’s magisterial two-volume line history
as a Christmas present. (This episode makes my argument in this book’s Chap-
ter 6 particularly poignant.) My second epiphany was standard-gauged. In 1960
Luton Town played an away cup tie against Leicester City. Returning to Leicester
Midland station with my father and his engineer friends late in the evening,
we found our football special packed to the gunwales – except for one wholly
darkened and largely unpeopled coach. Having grabbed seats, the question
loomed: how to turn the lights on? All those skilled engineers were flummoxed.
Not me. Years spent closely observing the steam railway’s machine ensemble
meant that I knew just where the light switch was, and how to work it. Pausing
only to borrow a plastic ballpoint pen from somebody, I rammed its blunt
end into the appropriate square keyhole, and turned. And lo! There was light.
This was my one moment of technical approbation from my father and his
friends: not to mention eyelash-fluttering admiration from a small squad of
teenaged female Hatters fans. My railway fright came two years after that.
On 22 October 1962 I sat up late to listen to John F. Kennedy’s speech to
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8 British railway enthusiasm

the American people. I went to bed understanding that the US Navy would
intercept any Soviet freighter carrying missiles to Cuba, but not appreciating
what this action might portend. I soon knew. Lying there, I could hear ICBMs
roaring back and forth across the sky. It took a good hour of sweaty terror
for my railway knowledge to kick in, telling me that I was listening to distant
trains of empty loose-coupled steel mineral wagons banging their way north-
wards to Toton yard along the Midland Railway’s London extension.
Railway interests receded in my late teens, supplanted by beer, girls and
politics. More than a decade later they revived. Settled in an academic life, and
with a young family (if one wholly unsuitable for a railway enthusiast – two
daughters), I looked around for a hobby to relieve sociology’s joys and lunacy.
I did not have far to look. From the early seventies I renewed my interest in
both railway modelling (though as an ‘armchair modeller’: once cack-handed,
always cack-handed) and in prototype railways. I have been a member of the
Historical Model Railway Society and the Scalefour Society for more than
two decades now. Teaching in Aberdeen University for thirteen years, I watched
many colleagues go south for conferences by air. I never joined them, pre-
ferring to take the train. Always interesting, these journeys could steepen into
fascination: as when a derailed wagon on Selby’s swing bridge diverted all East
Coast Main Line traffic westward through Burton Salmon. My Deltic-hauled
train duly trundled south from York, then swung right. But an inattentive
signalman switched this train to the Leeds–Hull line. Soon we were alarmed
by detonators exploding up front, and by our massive Deltic inching left around
an astoundingly tight turn with her wheel flanges screaming. Our train crept
into Selby station: north from that derailed wagon on its bridge, and facing
north. Back up to York we went, for the Deltic to run round her train and
try once more to cross the Humber. Though we arrived in London very late
that day, this tardiness paled against one northward journey. Taking the Aberdeen
sleeper one Saturday night (never a bright idea, for British Rail reserved Sundays
for heavy track maintenance), we stormed from King’s Cross into Gasworks
Tunnel. The usual trip loomed: up the East Coast Main Line to Edinburgh,
then across the Forth and Tay bridges. Not this night. Never sleeping (always
my fate on sleepers) I watched entranced as we took the Hertford Loop to
Stevenage, then swung right at Peterborough for Doncaster via Lincoln. Things
calmed down to Newcastle; but we left Dobson’s magnificent trainshed not
north for Edinburgh but west for Carlisle. Ignoring the direct Beattock line,
we travelled GSWR metals to Kilmarnock then took the Caledonian’s Glasgow
ceinture to Stirling, Perth and Dundee. Unsustained by food from restaurant
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Introduction 9

car or buffet, we passengers all were famished by the time our train crawled
into Aberdeen’s Joint Station vastly behind schedule: but – for a railway enthu-
siast at least – what a wonderfully bizarre journey! Though East Coast joys
ended when I took my family to New Zealand in 1982, travelling back to Britain
for research trips and on leave meant that my long-suffering wife and I have
savoured many sites of railway interest: the Colorado narrow gauge and British
Columbian tourist trains; a Derby-built HST set lost in remotest New South
Wales; creaking Amtrak in Massachusetts and skimming Shinkansen in Japan;
express train travel (ha! ha!) and the Darjeeling and Himalaya Railway’s peerless
quiddities in India; cutting-edge urban rapid transit systems in Washington,
Singapore and Kuala Lumpur; that astounding model railway which the Swiss
call their full-sized railway system. Britons moan about their railways today,
but I am happy just to ride it day after day on my Britrail pass, cruising from
Aberdeen to Penzance, from Kyle of Lochalsh to Dover, as scenery unrolls
past my window and the professional railway’s life-world engulfs me. It is only
in very recent years that train spotting’s stigma has got to me so deeply that
I stop craning my neck as my Cardiff-bound train heels to starboard from
the West Coast Main Line towards Shrewsbury, while I try to note down num-
bers from all those rotting Duffs at Crewe South diesel depot.
As a reward for (fairly) good behaviour, in late 1993 and early 1994 I was
granted sabbatical leave from university teaching. To strengthen family har-
mony I had spent my previous leave period in Swansea, my wife’s home town.
Now it was my turn to decide where we went. Not a problem. It had to be
York. I told my academic colleagues that the local university’s history and
sociology departments’ excellence attracted me; but I lied. After a quarter cen-
tury spent writing about a range of different things (from Scottish agrarian
history to New Zealand’s first director of broadcasting) I now proposed to
indulge myself with scholarly work on railways. There could be no better place
to begin this task. York was George Hudson’s town, the base from which that
ingenious crook built a large chunk of early Victorian Britain’s railway net-
work. Even after Dr Beeching’s butchery more than a century later, York
remained an important rail junction where snaking lines from Scarborough,
Harrogate, Hull and Leeds intersected the East Coast Main Line. Two
significant preserved railways lay close to hand: the historically important
Middleton Railway in grimy Leeds and the North York Moors Railway – a
‘stuffed steam’ industry leader – at leafy Pickering. Pre-grouping railway com-
panies’ gaudy liveries might long have deserted the place by the time I arrived
on leave, but one still could saunter in William Peachey’s elegantly curved
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10 British railway enthusiasm

York station, that peerless trainshed-cum-cathedral, and dream of what once

had been while enjoying the current scene. W.H. Smith’s newspaper kiosk
on the principal up platform still carried a bewildering display of books
covering the modern prototype, heritage railways and railway modelling, and
regular weekly or monthly fixes from the astoundingly prolific railway mag-
azine trade. With headquarters functions for, successively, the North Eastern
Railway, the LNER and British Railways’ North Eastern region located here
(to say nothing of running sheds and engineering facilities), a veneer of tourist-
luring public relations guff about big old walls and big old churches could
not conceal the truth that, since Hudson’s time, a huge chunk of working-
and middle-class York folk had earned their crust from railway work: hence
the shelves of railway history monographs in the local public library. Rich
pickings among remaindered and out-of-print titles could be found – at a price
– in York’s many high-quality second-hand bookshops. And then there was
that institution which draws every serious British railway enthusiast to this
city again and again: the National Railway Museum. The world’s largest and
finest transport museum, a place loaded to the gills with artefacts and company
records, this place also boasts expert staff and a magnificent specialist research
library. It was the NRM and its Jack Simmons Library which drew me to
York for my sabbatical leave, both as scholar and as railway enthusiast.
I tell you these things not (as some might suspect) so that you may summon
the men in white coats, but to make two serious sociological points. First,
that you hold an emic text in your hands: a book written from within the
culture which it seeks to understand, an ethnography describing a life-world
for those unfortunate enough not to live in it. Second, while my railway enthu-
siast biography is mine own, its broad outline tallies with those for many other
men from my generation. British railway enthusiasm is a social phenomenon.
Thus one magazine’s staff blue-pencilled the first paragraph of many submitted
articles, because they played such minor variations on the grand theme of why
and how a particular model layout’s builder first became interested in rail-
ways.29 We each think our biography unique: but, as C. Wright Mills taught
us, and whether or not we appreciate the fact, much of our experience is closely
patterned. And good sociology flourishes where biography intersects history,
like the York and North Midland meeting the Great North of England Railway.30
Thus while this book offers a cultural history of British railway history, by
following the empirical trace of a single male British generation’s movement
through the life cycle it also shows what I think good sociology – that remark-
ably Protean academic enterprise – should look like. What happens next to
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Introduction 11

railway enthusiasm (or, indeed, to sociology) as my generation falls off the

twig, only time will tell. That’s what makes human life interesting.

Two life-worlds

On with the emic. What does British railway enthusiasm’s life-world look like?
Railways are their own life-world. ‘They are segregated from the rest of the
nation,’ David Thomas reported in 1963,

and yet they serve it. They are self-contained, definable, understandable even by
attentive amateurs and therefore welcoming to escapists; yet they are ubiquitous,
infinitely diverse, complex within their own limits and wrapped in their own
mystique. They have their own language, their own telephone network, their
eating houses, factories and estates; they have their own slums, places, mausoleums
and rustic beauty; they offer majesty and meanness, laughter, wonder and tears.31

This all is true; but we must recognise that this is a double world.32 Thomas
squirts most ink at one half: that occupational community 33 inhabited by pro-
fessional railway workers of all grades, from the humblest porter or shunter
to the most exalted engineer or box-wallah. This is a tightly regulated life-
world built around mechanical engineering, civil engineering and a rigorously
line-managed workforce operating rigorously controlled train services. A place
marked by iron discipline enforced by accountants’ demands for more profit
(or, rather too often in recent decades, for smaller losses) and by webs of
state regulation inherited from stern Victorian days. Down the years, many
commentators have sought to describe and analyse railways’ occupational com-
munity;34 but it is easy to exaggerate its self-sufficiency. As David Thomas
noted in passing, and as Eric Treacy, ‘the Railway Bishop’, insisted more openly,
this world ‘is by no means closed to those not of it who are prepared to appre-
ciate it and learn more about it.’35 Its bastard child, the British railway enthu-
siast’s life-world, intricately interlards the working railway’s occupational
community. That urge which Treacy identified – to learn as much as possible
about the professional railway world’s quiddities – informs many amateur enthu-
siasts’ life project. Of course, this traffic is not all one-way. Many working
railwaymen have displayed – and do display – strong amateur enthusiasm for
railways, as modellers and as preserved railway volunteers. More than that,
in a pattern deeply familiar from the nation’s well-developed preserved rail-
way sector, when John Major’s government geared up to privatise British Rail,
familiar tensions between nostalgia and nostophobia (rejection of the past)
structured struggle within the professional railway industry.36
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12 British railway enthusiasm

‘We are a strange crew,’ Bryan Morgan mused in 1956,37 ‘we who are
captivated by what to many is just a rather slow, grimy, uncomfortable and
antiquated means of getting about.’ Not only strange, but – these days, at least
– heavily stigmatised. Not without cause, some insiders urge. ‘The trouble
is,’ ‘Brigantes’ suggests,

that the media will never take us seriously while the majority of railway enthu-
siasts bring these things upon themselves by their own immature attitude and
behaviour. I do not, therefore, find it the least surprising that the world at large
seems to regard us as a bunch of benign ‘nutters’ – let’s face it, many of us are!38

Bitter experience taught Tom Rolt the same lesson. Revered by enthusiasts
for his pioneer effort in reviving the Talyllyn Railway, he did not return this
admiration. ‘Whatever you do you cannot please the railway enthusiasts,’ dying
Rolt wrote. ‘They contain more wrong-headed cranks per thousand than any
other body of men I have ever encountered.’39
Only large-scale survey work could test Tom Rolt’s sour epidemiological
conclusion; but ‘thousands’ lies at the bottom end of suitable orders of
magnitude. For Britain’s railway fancy remains surprisingly populous. In the
mid-1990s informed estimates judged that between three and five million Britons
entertained a significant interest in trains and railways: a figure inferior only
to fishing and gardening as broad leisure activities.40 Other nation states also
boast lots of railway enthusiasts, but have numbers approached ten per cent
of the entire population in any of these? Certainly, British railway enthusiasm
was a very significant cultural phenomenon in the twentieth century’s second
half. Later chapters show that train spotting was the default interest for one
entire generation of British boys, providing rich pickings for Ian Allan through
his ABC spotters’ books. A purported ‘railway books mania’ supported spe-
cialist book and magazine publishers in modest comfort while attracting
general publishers’ interest at particular times. These tomes’ content varied
widely. Spotters’ books listed the number (and, if worn, the name) of every
locomotive in public service. Elsewhere, volume after volume offered advice
on how to build a model railway, or how to photograph full-sized trains, or
how to do a host of other railway-related things. From the 1970s, distinc-
tions between austere scholarly and amateur railway publishing began to wither,
as enthusiasts poached ever more insistently in academic pastures up to and
including the Public Record Office at Kew – and started decorating their texts
with footnotes, that academic fetish.41 Amateurs’ books were written for and
by enthusiasts, interpreting David Thomas’s first railway life-world for folk
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Introduction 13

in his second. Strangely, while many tomes claimed to serve the enthusiast,42
few sought to anatomise him. Founded on (if not quite born from) the Beeching-
era railway network’s contraction, today Britain’s astoundingly well-developed
‘stuffed-steam’ preserved railway industry pumps tens of million tourist pounds
into the British economy each year. Specialist artists live well by conjuring
(usually heavily romanticised) images of dead railway landscapes for bereaved
enthusiasts. Multitudinous railway artefacts – from tinplate toy trains and
exquisite hand-made locomotive models to railway companies’ advertising posters
and defunct locomotives’ nameplates – sell at auction for ever more astounding
sums of money. Beyond the crudely economic, a fascination with railways forms
the cultural frame through which huge numbers of twentieth-century British men
(and rather more British women than one might expect) came to apprehend
the world. Not for nothing did a recent BBC poll declare Isambard Kingdom
Brunel the greatest Briton who ever lived. Of course, this heart-warming judge-
ment was obliged to ignore IKB’s inconveniently French parentage.

The Rough Guide to Anoraksia (1993–4 edition)

How well-furnished is the British railway enthusiast’s life-world? Can it

supply vocabularies of meaning and motive sufficient to sustain mature,
well-balanced human beings? Let us attempt a thought experiment. In 1994
Matthew Engel told The Guardian’s readers that ‘The British have a unique
sentimental attachment to their trains. Babies are weaned straight off the breast
and on to Thomas the Tank Engine. Anoraksia is the national disease.’43 As
if this were a country rather than a disease (and we shall see that many
people think that it is a disease), let us visit Engel’s imaginary country. What
might one man’s day look like here? Since railway enthusiasm is a leisure activ-
ity we will drop in on him on Saturday, to avoid all that boring stuff about
earning a living. To house him properly, we will buy him Dunrolling. This
property, its owner’s estate agent gushed, is

a fascinating and unusual home, ideal for the railway enthusiast, as it is an extremely
comfortable bungalow formed around two Victorian Railway Coaches . . . The
coaches are an 1878 London and South Western Composite and an LSWR guards
van. Much of the original character still remains such as the mahogany doors,
luggage rack, pretty pull down handbasin etc. . . . It is not hard to imagine when
you are at the property all the interesting places these coaches must have been
to in their life time and the Victorian and Edwardian people who travelled on
them in the romantic age of steam.44
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14 British railway enthusiasm

‘Romantic age’ forsooth! We are getting far too close here to all that female
stuff about relationships. To escape it, we will make our enthusiast single – for
which woman in her right mind would shack up in Dunrolling’s masculine
delights (all that mahogany) with a train spotter? And how could she wash her
hair in a pull-down washbasin, even one blazoned with that magic cipher,
‘LSWR’?
Another Saturday dawns. Shower and shave. Plod to breakfast. Admire the
‘signed and numbered’ prints of oil paintings on the kitchen wall, none painted
more than ten years ago but all celebrating steam locomotives which departed
decades ago to that Great Scrapyard in the Sky (or, perhaps, in Barry, South
Wales). Admire ranked commemorative Coalport railway plates on the kitchen
dresser, above a fine collection of pewter booze flasks flaunting enamelled train
paintings.45 Notice how well Wedgwood’s Thomas the Tank Engine china looks
on this ‘Chateau’ dining table, crafted in Elland Station Yard by Jarabowsky,
creator of ‘the original railway sleeper furniture.’ 46
With breakfast over, try to synchronise your three pocket watches. Number
One is ‘a beautiful replica French Railwayman’s Full Hunter,’ finely engraved
with an image of ‘an early French Pacific locomotive.’ Number Two is no
replica, but ‘a piece of Russian history,’ a watch ‘formerly used on the Russian
State Railways.’ Note the winged wheel on the watch face and the ‘massive
Russian 4-10-2 locomotive’ embossed on the case.47 Pity that the Russian watch
insists that it is half past ten and the French ten past eleven; but one must
suffer for clockwork style. Correct them with your third timepiece, Mondaine’s
‘Official Swiss Railway Watch’; that quartz-regulated miniature copy of the
stripped-down high-modernist clock adorning each SBB platform, all controlled
from a bunker deep in the orderly Swiss soul.
Regular to time as any Swiss train, the morning mail thumps through your
mahogany door. Yet more catalogues to scan. See: this year’s commemorative
horse-brasses celebrate the South Eastern and Chatham Railway and the North
Eastern Railway.48 Lots more railway phonecards to collect. Lots more rail-
way stamps to collect. Lots more tapes and compact discs of chuffing and
rumbling trains to collect. Would a replica Midland and Great Northern Joint
Railway Firebucket Notice fill that empty space above that brass luggage rack?49
Look at these drifts of members’ magazines from railway preservation soci-
eties,50 from railtour organisers, from railwayana collectors and auctioneers,
from associations of railway modellers minutely divided by scale, gauge, and
degree of attachment to historical and dimensional fidelity.
Amble out to the shops. Survey the current batch of weekly, monthly or
bi-monthly British railway magazines on public sale at the newsagent’s. How
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Introduction 15

many does that make? Twenty-five? In one month?51 Who buys them all? And
who buys these pin-up locomotive postcards, bursting from their stand like
page three girls? Look at these peculiar birthday cards. In Beverley Godding’s
Toad’s Great Escape 52 the fat bounder belts along on a bright blue standard
gauge freight engine, pursued by the law’s myrmidons on what looks suspi-
ciously like a two-foot-gauge single Fairlie locomotive. Ridiculous! Audrey
Tarrant’s The Railway Station 53 shows us a meticulously depicted GWR small
prairie and B-set slowing to a country halt. The stationmaster is a hedgehog?
The train’s driver and passengers are rabbits? Who has been smoking what to
produce an image like this? Ooh, look – a proper railway Christmas card.
‘Seasons greetings from Llandrindod Wells,’ it says in stamped gilt. How nice:
a card from that bizarre Victorian spa town with its crudely ‘re-Victorianised’
station on the LNWR’s Central Wales line. So what, on this card, is that
Southern Railway Bulleid ‘Spam Can’ doing in mid-Wales? That way madness
lies; so on to the bookshop for a sanity transplant. Floods of new railway books
still pour out here, bedside reading to fill the void until next month’s swag
of magazines arrives. Paddle in this flood for a bit, then it’s on to Tesco’s to
buy a Train Spotter Memorial Lunch: one pork pie and one bottle of Tizer.
After this frugal repast, wash up the elderly London Chatham and Dover
Railway cutlery which you filched so nimbly from Holburn Viaduct’s refresh-
ment room in the early 1960s. Careful with the crockery – those Art Deco
LNER Silver Link plates cost a small fortune today at auction. An empty after-
noon yawns. What about a spot of train spotting down at the local station?
Still some diehards doing that, even if yesteryear’s youthful hordes have yielded
to a scatter of portly, balding, middle-aged men. But passing trains grab your
attention ever less insistently. Steam is long gone, of course, except for the
rare ‘heritage’ special. Once invaluable in sustaining spotters’ interest while
the next passenger train trundled towards you miles away down the line, by
the mid-nineties locomotive-hauled freight services wither by the year. Fewer
and fewer passenger trains even have separate diesel and electric locomotives
on the business end. In their place pullulate unaccountably mobile sausage
strings – diesel (and, where equipment allows, electric) multiple units. These
things are much despised (as plastics) on platform ends. But one tiny virtue
shines through the gloom as enthusiasm for the prototype flags. Plotting its
botched privatisation, the Major government has forced British Rail to break
its monolith into several shadow companies. Seeking to establish corporate
identities, these limping bodies have covered BR’s old puritan plain blue livery
with bright – ‘horribly garish’, surviving puritans mutter – multicoloured
paintwork.54
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16 British railway enthusiasm

Too depressed by contemporary railway politics to contemplate the proto-

type? Consider a trip to some temple dedicated to ‘stuffed steam’ – or, increas-
ingly these days, to ‘stuffed diesel’. One standard guide offers 52 public service
preserved railway lines in Great Britain, supplemented by 56 shorter rides,
26 museums and three miniature lines.55 If none from these riches appeals
then check out more fugitive events: adverts for railtours in all directions
in The Railway Magazine, information in Railway Modeller about the many
hundred national and local model railway exhibitions held each year. There’s
sure to be something for you here, wherever you live and whatever the season.
Time for tea. Dream about a proper place for a proper railway tea. It might
be less splendid than le Train Bleu, the Gare de Lyon’s Belle Epoque fine-dining
restaurant, but Liverpool Street’s Rowland Emett-ish elevated teashop cum
eyrie would be a fine setting in which to while away an hour over tea and
buns – were it not closed for renovation. What about franchised Casey Jones
takeaway bars on many British Rail stations, its name whiffing faintly of the
Illinois Central’s exotic dangers? On reflection – or, more probably, recalling
earlier visits to Casey Jones outlets – perhaps not. So what about The Fat
Controller (a nice Thomas pun there), that greasy spoon on Rye Station; or
the spiffy privatised café on Lewes Station, serving good food in a space pro-
perly decorated with Brighton Line photographs? Best of all, dream about
Brief Encounter, the National Railway Museum’s café. Remember distraught
Celia Johnson rushing out from Carnforth Station’s refreshment room in David
Lean’s movie, as genteelly raging English hormones thrust her towards a West
Coast Main Line express’s rushing path. Imagine munching sandwiches in
today’s Brief Encounter while feasting your eyes on S.W. Johnson’s (Celia’s
remote ancestor, perhaps?) Spinner and her train of Bain coaches. With her
douce fragility, S.W.’s Spinner perfectly evokes winsome Celia.
The long evening yawns. Does one of the many organisations to which
you belong have a meeting tonight? A fair chance of that, with specialist
magazines listing multitudinous local British railfan, model engineering and
railway modelling clubs. Don’t fancy going out? Then what about watching
a video? Choose one from a host of rail-focused movies – or, for addicts, a
cab-window run along the Settle and Carlisle, the West Highland or some
other classic line.56 If this palls then search George Ottley’s astounding bib-
liography, that monument to semi-amateur scholarship, for railway history
references to find next week.57 Is this too demanding? Then pull out a railway
jigsaw puzzle to pass the time. Dozens of these, mostly showing Great Western
steam-hauled expresses rushing past sunny summer beaches, or the same
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Introduction 17

company’s branch passenger trains trundling through tranquil sylvan autumns.

Is this a shade too dull? Call up another fanatic and invite him over to chal-
lenge you in a railway board game. Lots of these too, both as chase games –
Great Western Railway Game, Great Game of Britain (in British Rail and Big
Four versions), Orient Express – or strategy games like Australian Rails, British
Rails, Indian Rails, Empire Builder, Eurorails, Railway Rivals, 1829 (Britain),
1830 (USA), the fiendishly complex 1835 (Germany), or 1853 (India). Don’t
feel like talking to somebody else? Then work on your railway thematic stamp
collection.58 Sort through your chocolate box filled with pre-grouping, Big
Four and British Rail ‘Edmondsons’: pasteboard passenger, workmen’s, dog
and bicycle tickets.59 Sort through your other chocolate box, stuffed with rail-
way uniform buttons. Riffle through your row of box files packed with old
railway notices and handbills, with outdated preserved railway timetables and
model railway manufacturers’ catalogues.60 If all else fails, drool over your list
of ‘copped’ railway vehicles, past and present.61 If ept technically, update your
current cop list electronically, using Terry Watson’s pioneer PC database pro-
gramme.62 Or link to the infant Internet and call up the ‘dedicated bulletin
board for trainspotters.’63 Fancy playing a railway computer game? Choose
a favourite year from the mid-fifties to the early nineties then spend happy
virtual hours controlling a strategic signal box, gumming up traffic at a busy
location somewhere between Glasgow and Cornwall. Want to build a railway
business empire rather than tie the working timetable in knots? Pull Railroad
Tycooon from the hard disk, choose between British and American scenarios
and try to out-manipulate George Hudson or Jay Gould. Eyes tired from star-
ing at the monitor too long? Turn on the ghetto-blaster and chill out to train
music’s varied riches, in genres from classical through jazz to folk, or to Gresley
conjugated three cylinder valve gear’s melodious shout as an A3 blasts north
through Gasworks Tunnel.64
And so to bed. Amble back through Dunrolling’s corridors, past walls filled
with railwayana steadily accreting exchange value. Pass original and replica
brass locomotive number and name plates. Pass cast iron locomotive and wagon
building plates, bridge plates and warning signs. Pass wooden and iron station
signs. Pass your world-topping collection (all three of them) of Great North
of Scotland Railway track chairs, scavenged from Kemnay station’s ruins. Pass
necrophiliac paintings of long-dead steam engines commissioned – at con-
siderable cost – from Guild of Railway Artists members.65 Pass framed repro-
ductions of high art railway paintings, from Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed
(1844) through Egg’s Travelling Companions (1862) and Monet’s Gare Saint
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18 British railway enthusiasm

Lazare series (1877) to Ravilious’s Train Landscape (1939).66 In the bedroom,

drop your small change in this earthenware Mumbles Tramway money box,
commemorating vandal Swansea Corporation’s wilful slaughter of the world’s
first passenger-carrying railway.67 Sip your cocoa from this bone china mug
celebrating The Great Bear, third in an interminable series from Thamesdown
Borough Council’s Great Western Railway Museum. Slide beneath your
Thomas the Tank Engine duvet cover. Admire the railway frieze circling your
bedroom above serried display cabinets housing model railway locomotives,
coaches and wagons ranging from battered old toys through mass-market
manufacturers’ products to scratch-built stock for that layout of Frocester Station
(broad gauge Bristol and Gloucester Railway in the mid-1840s, just after the
Midland Railway pinched it from under the Great Western’s nose) which you
still might get round to building some day. Pick up a railway book to lull
you to sleep. Lots of these.68 It could treat some aspect of railway economic
history: always a reliable soporific. But it could be more entertaining than this,
drawn from a vast literature on railway history, engineering and operation.
It could be fiction. Though Britain lacks a canonical railway novel to set
alongside Zola’s La Bête Humaine, great draughts of railway material still lie
unplumbed in academically deprecated genres like comic and crime fiction,
and in often abominably inept poetry.69 Lulled by bad poets’ gentle hooting,70
drift off to sleep after another hard but exhilarating day in British railway enthu-
siasm’s life-world.

Notes
1 Gilbert Thomas, Paddington to Seagood: the Story of a Model Railway, London,
Chapman & Hall, 1947, 9. In Britain today love/hate seems more common, among
enthusiasts no less than passengers: Gayle Letherby and Gillian Reynolds, Train
Tracks: Work, Play and Politics on the Railways, London, Lang, 2005. But was it
not ever so? For as R.C.H. Ives suggested long before privatisation’s nonsenses
(‘Railway rarebits,’ in H.A. Vallance (ed.), The Railway Enthusiast’s Bedside Book,
London, Batsford, 1966, 220–1), ‘The British have a peculiar attitude towards
railways, an attitude which is a curious mixture of affection and cynicism.’
2 Peter Tinniswoode, Winston, London, Arrow, 1992, 100.
3 Tinniswoode, Winston, 64, 75.
4 Building on Frank Dixon, The Manchester, South Junction and Altrincham
Railway, Lingfield, Oakwood, 1973, of course; and anticipating Stephen Johnson,
Lost Railways of County Antrim, Catrine, Stenlake, 2002.
5 Tinniswoode, Winston, 177, 8.
6 Tinniswoode, Winston, 57, 178.
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Introduction 19

7 Like Burton, that sad soul who finds only solitary romance on any new branch
line: Richard Collier, ‘First class romance,’ in Charles Irving (ed.), Sixteen Up, London,
Macmillan, 1957, 216– 22.
8 Tinniswoode, Winston, 8.
9 Everett C. Hughes, ‘Dilemmas and contradictions of status’ (1945), reprinted in
Hughes, Men and Their Work, Westport, Greenwood, 1981, 102.
10 Scalefour News, 77, 1992, 17. ‘Railway Preservationists are stereo-typed as being
either spotty-faced youths playing at Hornby trains with a touch of megalomania,’
an editor noted of a different amateur railway practice, ‘or elderly dim-wits trying
to re-create the long forgotten past, trying to succeed where Beeching failed’: Journal
of the Association of Railway Preservation Societies, 182, 1984/5, 3.
11 Colin Garratt, British Steam Nostalgia, Wellingborough, Stephens, 1987, 7.
12 Simon Barnes, How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher: to the Greater Glory of Life, London,
Short, 2004, 161.
13 Mark Cocker, Birders: Tales of a Tribe, London, Vintage, 2001, 124.
14 C. Hamilton Ellis, Rapidly Round the Bend, London, Parrish, 1957, 7. For
another, and even feebler, pastiche of Sellar and Yeatman see William Mills, 4ft
8 1/ 2 and All That: for Maniacs Only, London, Ian Allan, 1964.
15 Model Railway Journal, 62, 1993, 81.
16 The Guardian Weekly, 10 –16 July 2003.
17 R.A. Knox, Enthusiasm: a Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference
to the XVII and XVIII Centuries, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1950, 4. This remains
the standard work on enthusiasm as an ecclesiological category.
18 G. Freeman Allen, ‘Nine miles at 90 m.p.h.,’ in P.B. Whitehouse (ed.), Railway
Anthology, London, Ian Allan, 1965, 118.
19 See pp. 88–9.
20 George Ottley, A Bibliography of British Railway History, (1965), 2nd edition, London,
HMSO, 1983, 17. For guards’ buttons – should your inclination lie that way – see
David J. Froggatt, Railway Buttons, Badges and Uniforms, London, Ian Allan, 1986.
21 Peter Bailey, review of Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination
(1999), The Journal of Social History, 34, 2001, 993.
22 Georges Simenon, Maigret Has Scruples (1938), translated by Robert Eglesfield,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962, 10.
23 H.-H. Schönzeler, DvoRák, London, Boyars, 1984, 141–2.
24 Gervase Hughes, DvoRák: His Life and Times, London, Cassell, 1967, 193; John
Clapham, DvoRák, Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1979, 196.
25 K. Taylorson, The Fun We Had: an Inside Look at the Railway Enthusiast Hobby,
London, Phoenix, 1976, 6.
26 R.S. McNaught, ‘Railway enthusiasts,’ Railway Magazine, 1951, 269. But
McNaught goes on to identify (271) enthusiasts’ relics which make these ersatz
piano stools seem mundane – a flake of paint taken from the first LNWR
‘Claughton’ to appear at Liverpool’s Lime Street Station, and the mummified wick
from a GWR ‘Dean Goods’ on near-front-line service in France in 1917. Clearly,
we are in hagiographic territory here.
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20 British railway enthusiasm

27 For the notion of the life-world see Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The
Structures of the Life-World, translated by R.M. Zaner and T. Engelhardt, London:
Heinemann, 1973; for recent developments see Martin Endress, George Psathas
and Hisashi Nasu (eds), Explorations of the Life-World: Continuing Dialogues with
Alfred Schutz, Dordrecht, Springer, 2005.
28 ‘It is generally recognised that about two-thirds of followers of the current British
Rail Scene are also modern-image modellers’ (Railway Modeller, March 1987, 114).
29 Railway Modeller, March 1988, 97.
30 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, New York, Oxford University Press,
1959, xx.
31 David St J. Thomas, ‘Friend or foe?’ in Gilbert Thomas and David St J. Thomas,
Double Headed: Two Generations of Railway Enthusiasm, Dawlish, David & Charles
and London, Macdonald, 1963, 99.
32 Ian Marchant’s title (Parallel Lines: Journeys on the Railway of Dreams, London,
Bloomsbury, 2003) insinuates that professional railwaymen’s and enthusiasts’ life-
worlds never meet. This is not true.
33 For the notion of occupation community see Martin Bulmer (ed.), The Occupa-
tional Community of the Traditional Worker, Durham, University of Durham
Department of Sociology, 1973.
34 Major examples include William M. Acworth, The Railways of England, 5th edi-
tion, London, Murray, 1900; C. Hamilton Ellis, British Railway History, two
volumes, London, Allen & Unwin, 1954–59; Jack Simmons, The Railway in England
and Wales, 1830–1914: the System and its Working, Leicester, Leicester Univer-
sity Press, 1978; Simmons, The Railway in Town and Country, 1830–1914,
Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1986; Simmons, The Victorian Railway,
London, Thames and Hudson, 1991; Frank McKenna, The Railway Workers,
1840 –1970, London, Faber, 1980; Nicholas Faith, The World the Railways Made,
London, Bodley Head, 1990; Faith, Locomotion: the Railway Revolution, London,
BBC, 1993.
35 Eric Treacy, Steam Up!, London, Ian Allan, 1949, 20. ‘This book has been writ-
ten by enthusiasts for enthusiasts,’ an editor reported (Vallance (ed.), The Railway
Enthusiast’s Bedside Book, 7). ‘Of some dozen contributors, more than half are keen
amateur students of railways, experts whose knowledge has been acquired through
profound personal interest. The rest are professional railwaymen of the type that
may well be called enthusiasts, because they are so obviously in love with their
work and enjoy telling others about it.’
36 Tim Strangleman, ‘The nostalgia of organisations and the organisation of nostalgia:
past and present in the contemporary railway industry,’ Sociology, 33, 1999,
725–46. Not until July 1997 did a Tory transport spokesman admit that rail
privatisation had been a ghastly mistake. Light breaks, even in the Stupid Party.
37 Bryan Morgan, The End of the Line, London, Cleaver-Hume, 1956, 12.
38 Model Railway Journal, 17, 1987, 254.
39 L.T.C. Rolt, Landscape with Figures, Stround, Sutton, 1992, 220. Or, as Steve
Broadbent urged, ‘It does appear that railway preservation is populated by more
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Introduction 21

than its fair share of intolerants, bigots, morons and vandals’: Journal of the Association
of Railway Preservation Societies, 204, 1990, 5.
40 John Scott-Morgan of Ian Allan Ltd, personal communication.
41 Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: a Curious History, London, Faber, 1997.
42 Examples include Geoffrey Body, Railway (and, in some years, and Steam) Ent-
husiasts’ Handbook, Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1968–77; P.M.E. Erwood
(ed.), Railway Enthusiast’s Guide, London, Ronald, 1960 (2nd edition, Sidcup,
Lambarde, 1962); Bryan Morgan (ed.), The Railway-Lover’s Companion, London,
Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963; Vallance (ed.), The Railway Enthusiast’s Bedside Book;
O.S. Nock, The Railway Enthusiast’s Encyclopedia, London, Hutchinson, 1968. Note
that all these books date from years between 1960 and 1968. This is significant.
43 The Guardian, 28 February 1994.
44 Quoted in Model Railways, January 1983, 50–1. Does that remarkable line of
grounded Great North of Scotland Railway four-wheeled coach bodies still pro-
vide squatters’ housing on a dirt lane outside Kemnay, Aberdeenshire? And does
the name Dunrolling not pander to tabloid journalists’ idiot typifications? What
about a name which only cognoscenti will recognise – like Ais Gill, Southend Model
Railway Club’s secretary’s residence (Railway Modeller, May 1975, 159).
45 By Victory Products, advertised in Steam Railway.
46 Frequently advertised in The Observer’s colour magazine.
47 Both available from Clockwork and Steam at Oxford’s Old Marmalade Factory,
and widely advertised both in posh Sundays’ colour supplements and in railway
magazines.
48 From T.E. Keegan of Kidderminster. Both these companies died in 1923.
49 From Procast of Cleckheaton.
50 In 1993, card indices in the Jack Simmons Library at the National Railway Museum
listed 57 current magazines published by societies seeking physically to preserve
lengths of British railway track, or to conserve (and, in some cases, to replicate)
steam, diesel or electric locomotives. A further 50 magazines went to members of
societies dedicated to celebrating particular railway companies or locomotive
factories. Of course, one should not imagine that the society magazine is limited
to Anorakia’s domain. The Writer’s Handbook 2005’s ‘Literary Societies’ section
ran to a full 20 pages, listing some 150 bodies devoted to celebrating particular
more-or-less forgotten writers’ work: The Times Literary Supplement, 30 July
2004, 14.
51 January 1994 issues, all purchased in December 1993 from W.H. Smith’s kiosk
on York station.
52 Spaxton, The Merlin Press, 1986.
53 London, Medici Society, 1991.
54 ‘What BR lacks in customer (what happened to passengers?) convenience, and
comfort it more than makes up for in variety of liveries and stock’: Scalefour News,
80, October 1992, 3.
55 These categories are organised hierarchically. Public service lines provide ‘a pas-
senger service between two or more stations with public access,’ shorter rides ‘a
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22 British railway enthusiasm

passenger service on a short length of line, on a regular basis, with public access
at only one point.’ A museum, by contrast, ‘does not offer a passenger service on
a regular basis, if at all’; though ‘some sites may offer rides . . . on miniature rail-
ways’: Alan C. Butcher, Railways Restored: Guide to Railway Preservation, 1992–3,
Shepparton, Ian Allan, 1992, 2. Notice how the experience of travelling by pre-
served train is elevated over the act of merely contemplating railway artefacts.
56 Full (very full, indeed) details of movies and some videos will be found in
John Huntley, Railways on the Screen, 2nd edition, Shepparton, Ian Allan, 1993.
That year’s catalogue from The Signal Box (Coalville) listed 789 current British
‘line-run’ railway videos, with a further 516 offering racy foreign delights.
57 George Ottley, A Bibliography of British Railway History, 2nd edition, HMSO, 1983;
Ottley, A Bibliography of British Railway History, Supplement, London, HMSO,
1988.
58 Anon., Collect Railways on Stamps, London, Stanley Gibbons, 1990. And then there’s
the latest number of the specialist journal Railway Philately to read, of course.
59 Michael Farr, Thomas Edmondson and His Tickets, Andover, Farr, 1991. This is a
perverse interest, since stern rules required that tickets be given up at a journey’s
end so that different railway companies (or, after nationalisation, different regions)
could calculate their share of the loot. In Britain, Victorian railway companies
epitomised tooth-and-claw capitalist competition: but even they were forced to
combine for several purposes from 1842, through the Railway Clearing House.
The term ‘pre-grouping’ identifies the period before 1923 – when, with strong
state backing, a host of separate railway companies were merged into four con-
glomerates: the Great Western, Southern, London Midland and Scottish, and London
and North Eastern systems.
60 William Fenton, Railway Printed Ephemera, Woodbridge, Antique Collectors’
Club, 1992.
61 In Ian Allan’s plump Combined ABC, the gricer’s bible, until 1989. Sic transit
gloria mundi: by 1993 the enthusiast had been reduced to skinny pamphlets
published by Platform 5 and by Metro Publications.
62 Guardian, 2 September 1993. At this time Watson offered three data files –
for British locomotives, for British diesel and electric multiple-unit sets, and for
British coaches. A data file for French locomotives was in the works.
63 Guardian, 1 January 1994.
64 Ian Carter, ‘Train music,’ The Music Review, 54, 1993, 279–90; catalogue for
Transacord lineside recordings in Model Railways, February 1982, 68.
65 Guild of Railway Artists, The Great Western Collection, Poole, Blandford, 1985;
To the Seaside, Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1990; Beverley Cole and the
Guild of Railway Artists, Along Artistic Lines: Two Centuries of Railway Art,
Penryn, Atlantic, 2003. Formed in 1979, the GRA currently contains around a
hundred members, mostly art-school-trained.
66 Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: the Epitome of Modernity, Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 2001, 119–21, 261–3, 268–9.
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Introduction 23

67 Charles E. Lee, The Swansea & Mumbles Railway, South Godstone, Oakwood, 1954.
Operated as a horse-powered passenger service from 1807, in 1960 the Swansea
and Mumbles (by then an electrically powered tramway) fell victim to the local
authority’s impetuous desire to widen Mumbles Road for those damned horseless
carriages.
68 In 1993 one mail order transport bookseller, Midland Counties Publications of
Hinckley, took 388 new railway titles into stock. Eighty per cent of these dealt
with British railways. Whitaker’s Books in Print reported that 238 new railway books
were published in Britain in 1993, supplemented by 60 new editions of older titles.
69 Carter, Railways and Culture.
70 The classic collection of clunking verse finds space only for a few choice nibbles
from T. Baker’s 200-page monstrosity, ‘The steam-engine; or the power of flame’
(1857): D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, The Stuffed Owl: an Anthology of
Bad Poetry, 3rd edition, London, Dent, 1948, 193–8. Specialised railway poetry
anthologies (Kenneth Hopkins (ed.), The Poetry of Railways, London, Frewin, 1966;
Peggy Poole (ed.), Marigolds Grow Wild on Platforms, London, Cassell, 1996) offer
more dross than this, strewn thick among rare golden nuggets. With bombast intim-
ately interlarding mawkish sentimentality, is Horatio Brown’s ‘To a Great-Western
broad gauge engine and its stoker’ (‘So! I shall never see you more, / You mighty
lord of railway-roar’) (Hopkins, Poetry of Railways, 35–6) the worst British railway
poem ever written?
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The railway book

(and magazine) mania

Mania, what mania?

ot in Ottley’ is the proudest claim any British railway bibliophile can

‘N slide among his text’s footnotes, for George Ottley’s work is a major
peak in British railway scholarship’s eccentric range. As a staffer working in
the British Museum Reading Room, this man was obliged to undertake bib-
liographic research. Though no prior enthusiasm drew him to this task, in
1952 he began ‘Ottley’s Folly’, trekking through British railway literature’s
trackless wastes.1 Supplemented twice in the forty years since his first huge
volume appeared, Ottley remains the railway fancy’s bookish arbiter.2 Looking
back on his long labours, how did its creator judge the state of British rail-
way publishing? ‘One’s first impression upon entering a railway bookshop,’
he urged in 1988, ‘is that nobody reads books today, for so much of what is
on sale consists of albums of illustrations with captions and a brief introduc-
tion the only textual support.’ 3 ‘Middle-depth writing’ by men like Cecil J.
Allen and Ossie Nock – let alone solid scholarly writing about Britain’s rail-
way heritage ‘in the fullness of all its aspects, woven in the weft and warp of
social and economic development’ – had drowned in a flood of egregious pap.
Standards fell as this flood rose, with too many railway books displaying
dismal quality. Just one good deed lightened this naughty world. Working in
close collaboration with Philip Unwin, his publisher and a fellow-enthusiast
for pre-grouping railways, C. Hamilton Ellis produced ‘a succession of hand-
some, covetable works, well illustrated with colour plates by Hamilton Ellis
himself.’4 ‘Further books by other authors followed,’ he tells us, ‘but it was
Hamilton Ellis and Philip Unwin who were joint pioneers of what may be
called the ‘Railway Book Mania’ which ran from 1947 to the trailling off of
popular and mid-depth railway history writing in the 1970s.’5 Like the annals
of the poor in Gray’s Elegy, George Ottley makes British railway publishing’s
history short and simple.
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The British railway book (and magazine) mania 25

These are useful stalking horses for opening up investigation of the railway
book trade’s broad shape. Evidently enough, Ottley entertained little sympathy
for any publisher who pumped out mere picture albums, deprecating his
‘ability to recall to the reader/purchaser the railway scenes of his childhood,’
and his complacent willingness to seek ‘no balanced presentation of a subject
. . . : “Put in what you have managed to find and just leave out the rest” seems
to be the general rule.’6 Working with (and, once he had transferred to Leicester
University to work with Jack Simmons, for) people who sought to establish
railway history as a respectable academic enterprise, Ottley disparaged those
who did not share his professionalising itch. As an academic who has ambled
around the railway fancy’s varied provinces for more than half a century, when
I wear my social historian’s hat I can sympathise with his exasperation at Bradford
Barton’s and Ian Allan’s 1960s loose collections of photographs thrown
together almost without linking text. But as a long-term armchair railway
modeller I know that even feeble collections like these accrete value over time,
recording particular iterations of the British railway’s machine ensemble for
later-comers to study. Ottley could not appreciate this, for he declined to include
railway modelling in his bibliographic remit.7 This meant that he could know
nothing about amateur scholarship’s remarkable flowering in this field. Long
interested in the Midland Railway, I stumbled on this amateur scholarship
through Bob Essery’s pioneer study of that company’s goods vehicles.8 Essery
earned his crust as a salesman, but he moved confidently through local and
national archives which professional historians had thought their private pre-
serve. I began to notice that almost all articles in the fastidious Model Railway
Journal carried footnotes, and that these were creeping into mass-market maga-
zines like Railway Modeller. Somewhat later, while writing the biography of
a man who galvanised Chester’s artistic life for a couple of years, I sought old
photographs in Cheshire’s record office. ‘Certainly,’ said the counter assistant.
‘Railway or other?’ Does one need to report that railway photographs had been
catalogued first, and much more comprehensively, because they were sought
so more often? Amateur historians had shamed self-pluming professionals. Once
active in the History Workshop movement – a bunch of seventies academic
radicals bent on encouraging working people to take their own experience seri-
ously as ‘real history’ – I came to realise that by working diligently on fine-
grained railway history former-fireman Essery and his chums did what we merely
preached: and all without our knowledge or our ineffable patronage. Anybody
familiar with British railway book publishing over the past sixty years must
judge George Ottley’s strictures wildly overstated, a twitch from academic
status anxiety.9 As the following discussion of The Oakwood Press, David &
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26 British railway enthusiasm

Charles, Oxford Publishing Company and Wild Swan (to name just a few
houses) will show, twentieth-century British railway book publishing often was
a much more impressive activity than Ottley recognised.
What about his second point: the pivotal significance of C. Hamilton Ellis’s
friendship with Philip Unwin? Ellis certainly adorned British railway writing.
Formally trained as an artist, and cloaking solid engineering knowledge with
an easy belle-lettrist literary style, Ellis wrote a long string of books in his career
as a railway journalist. The British Library lists 42 railway titles published over
54 years, all still worth reading today. His first title, Highland Engines and
Their Work, appeared from the Locomotive Publishing Company in 1930.
Wartime years saw three books (one written jointly with Charles Hadfield),
appear from Oxford University Press. Not until 1947 did Hamilton Ellis
publish The Trains We Loved, his first title for Allen & Unwin. George Ottley’s
praise for this work, and for Ellis’s later books published by Philip Unwin, is
judicious; but it urges a fidelity between author and publisher which evidence
denies. Ellis’s 42 railway books were published by 17 houses. He wrote only
14 of the 88 railway books published by Allen & Unwin between 1946 and
1999. If this was a special relationship between author and publisher then
that relationship was singularly open. Nor does George Ottley’s chronology
survive scrutiny. Based on COPAC data, Figure 2.1 shows that, far from Allen
& Unwin unleashing a flood of railway books after 1945 (or, in Ottley’s
earlier formulation, after 1955), this house published very little railway mater-
ial in these years. Not until the early 1960s did railway book totals reach
double figures. Apart from a dip in the early 1970s (almost certainly caused
by Allen & Unwin’s directors sharing many others’ opinion that steam traction’s
death would doom British railway enthusiasm) the number of new railway

2000 30

20
1000
10

0 0
1946– 1956– 1966– 1976– 1986–

All titles Railway titles

Figure 2.1 Allen & Unwin book titles (left) and railway titles (right)
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The British railway book (and magazine) mania 27

titles from this house stayed in double figures to the mid-eighties, then
evaporated. But this graph carries a second lesson, too. If Allen & Unwin
meant little for railway publishing, then that insignificance was reciprocated.
This was a general house producing books over a huge range of subjects, with
railway topics bulking very small in the total. Of course, none of this is to
deprecate Hamilton Ellis’s writing. Nor is it not to honour Allen & Unwin’s
action in publishing some Ellis titles, along with work from other important
mid-twentieth-century railway writers.10 But this connection cannot bear
the weight which George Ottley loads on it. His ‘Railway Book Mania’ had
little to do with Allen & Unwin; nor, a fortiori, with those other general non-
fiction publishers who pushed out a handful of railway books each year when
conditions seemed unusually propitious.11
But did a Railway Books Mania ever exist? Ottley’s insult puns that
celebrated 1840s railway share panic, which itself recalled the seventeenth-
century Dutch tulip mania and anticipated our recent global dot.com fiasco.
Was postwar British railway book publishing a greed-fuelled Gadarene rush
like these eruptions of market irrationality? We need good data to answer this
question, but they exist only for dates after 1990: the year when Whitaker’s
Book List’s summary tables began to tally the total number of British railway
books published each year. Using Whitaker’s data, Figure 2.2 shows that 298

150,000 600

100,000 400

50,000 200

0 0
1990 1995 2000 2005

All books Railway books

Figure 2.2 Total number of books (left) and railway books (right)
published, 1990–2002
Source: Whitaker’s Books in Print, London, J. Whitaker, 1991–94. 1994 to
2002 data per Helen Jones of Neilson Bookdata, Stevenage.
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28 British railway enthusiasm

railway titles hit shop shelves in 1990. Numbers fluctuated between 409 and
235 over following years: levels sufficiently elevated to impress folk outside
the railway fancy. This is useful evidence, but from a time-slice too brief to
test Ottley’s confident assertion that the return of peace in 1945 unleashed a
flood of railway publishing. Can we find another way to test this assertion?
Comparing the average number of British books published each year for
periods from 1939–44 and 1990–3 with the number whose titles begin with
the word ‘railway,’ Figure 2.3 provides a much longer time series.12 It shows
that the number of railway books with titles beginning ‘railway’ rocketed once
wartime restrictions eased. Totals levelled off in the late forties and fifties, then
rose again before levelling off across the next three decades at figures roughly
twice those for the earlier period. A priori, this might indicate support for
George Ottley’s argument; but we must not be carried away. Enriching rather
few people and ruining many more, the early Victorian Railway Mania gripped
large sectors of British society. But Ottley’s Railway Book Mania was very small
beer in the broad publishing trade. Figure 2.3 shows clearly that postwar Britain
saw not a Railway Book Mania but a Book Mania tout court,13 with railway
books a tiny proportion of all tomes published. We must reverse George Ottley’s
point. Had railway books not enjoyed some share in the astounding increase

100,000 60

80,000

40
60,000

40,000
20

20,000

0 0
39–44 48–52 53–57 63–67 68–72 73–75 76–80 81–85 86–90 91–93

All books Railway books

Figure 2.3 Average number of books (left) and railway books (right)
published, 1939–44 to 1991–93
Source: calculated from Whitaker’s Five-Year Cumulative Book List,
London, J. Whitaker, for various dates to 1973– 75; from annual
Whitaker’s Book Lists for later years.
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The British railway book (and magazine) mania 29

(1608 per cent) in book titles published between 1939–44 and 1991–93,
then – given the postwar train spotting craze and all which followed – this
absence really would need investigation.
No Railway Books Mania, then; but books do matter in British railway
enthusiasm. This remains a literate practice, with books and magazines stitch-
ing together the railway fancy. There is nothing new in this. ‘Railway pub-
lishing,’ says R.M.S. Hall, ‘has almost as long a history as the railways on
which it feeds.’14 The last word in onrushing modernity, Victorian railways
riveted imaginative writers’ attention in genres from poetry to detective fiction.15
Specialised works served segmented Victorian audiences, from timetables and
travel guides for travellers through technical treatises for engineers and
administrators to Herepath’s Railway Journal and Bradshaw’s Railway Manual
for promoters, financiers and speculators.16 Then, from the nineteenth cen-
tury’s last decades, publishers spotted a lucrative book and magazine markets
in railway enthusiasm’s swelling ranks. Sometime Lecturer in Railway Eco-
nomics at the London School of Economics, William Ashworth’s The Railways
of England (1889)17 would have been conned by some railway professionals;
but by far more amateurs. W.J. Gordon’s Our Home Railways (1910) was aimed
four-square at amateur readers, as were two compendious part works pub-
lished in the next quarter century.18 The magazine trade saw a string of titles
emerge, beginning with Moore’s Monthly Magazine (1896) – soon to become
The Railway Magazine – and The Locomotive Magazine (1897). These served
amateur enthusiasts.

Books

Pioneers
Though it can tell us nothing about print runs, analysing material from COPAC,
a gargantuan on-line union catalogue maintained by Manchester University,19
shows us how British railway book publishing changed its shape across the
twentieth century. Both established around 1900, two firms dominated that
century’s first half. They had different strategies. Owned in 1945 by A.R. Bell
and W.G. Tilling, ‘a couple of real old railway nutters,’20 the Locomotive Pub-
lishing Company (LPC) pushed out a regular stream of new titles. Figure 2.4
shows that this house concentrated tightly on prototype railway matters: only
two from 76 titles treated other subjects.21 As the years turn, a roll-call of
early twentieth-century British railway writing’s great figures emerges from LPC’s
list: Ahrons, Bird, Ellis, Lewin, Dendy Marshall, Maskelyne.22 After Ian Allan
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30 British railway enthusiasm

15

10

0
1895– 1905– 1915– 1925– 1935– 1945– 1955–

Figure 2.4 New railway titles (dark shading) and non-railway titles
(light shading) published by the Locomotive Publishing Company

purchased this company in 1951, a new generation’s talent glowed in its list
– until Allan shut down LPC.23 Carrying the name of a man largely respon-
sible for turning model engineering and railway modelling from discreet
personal interests to organised hobbies, we should not be surprised to find
railway books emerging from Percival Marshall’s Neal Street premises – that
‘hideous office-block’ with its ‘almost Dickensian austerity.’24 Leafing through
railway modelling and model engineering tomes up to the 1960s, references
to Marshall’s books leap out at the reader, annihilating all other publishers’
products. Henry Greenly and Curly Lawrence (‘L.B.S.C.’) led Marshall’s model
engineering charge alongside a galaxy of important early railway modelling
writers: Greenly again, John Ahern, Edward Beal, Ernest Carter. Dazzled
by this array, we might be tempted to imagine Percival Marshall a second
Locomotive Publishing Company: a house tightly focused on railway pub-
lishing. We would be disabused. As Figure 2.5 shows, railway matters were
far less prominent here than we might expect, a tiny element in the 357 new

80

60

40

20

0
00– 10– 20– 30– 40– 50– 60– 70– 80–

Figure 2.5 New railway titles (dark shading) and non-railway titles
(light shading) published by Percival Marshall
9780719065668_4_002.qxd 29/01/2008 12:38PM Page 31

The British railway book (and magazine) mania 31

titles published by Percival Marshall between 1899 and 1984. The weight of
this house’s list always lay elsewhere: in general engineering to 1939, in tourism
from 1945 to 1965, in field sports during its death throes. Percival Marshall
mattered much more to the railway fancy than the railway fancy mattered to
Percival Marshall.25

New chums
Each driven by one man’s personal enthusiasm, three houses dominated the
mid-century: The Oakwood Press, Ian Allan and David & Charles. Roger
Kidner is an unjustly occluded figure in British railway publishing’s history.
The founder, with Michael Robbins, of The Oakwood Press, he anticipated
by more than half a century today’s flourishing railway self-publishing indus-
try; for Kidner himself wrote thirty of his press’s first 38 books.26 This was
a challenging business in the mid-1930s, and not one from which one could
make a living. He wrote and published for his private delight while earning
a crust by working for other publishers, and, after 1945, in advertising and
public relations. Oakwood Press books’ title pages bear shifting publication
locations, for they emerged from stations on Kidner’s grand residential tour
of the Home Counties. Over many years he distributed copies to booksellers
directly from his various homes’ garages and sheds. If this suggests vanity
publishing then that suspicion is unworthy. Though himself a broad trans-
port enthusiast rather than a railway specialist, Kidner’s association with his
school friend Michael Robbins drew a galaxy of older and younger railway
historians – D.S. Barrie, J.I.C. Boyd, George Dow, Charles Lee, Colin Maggs,
Jack Simmons – to his authoritative list of railway line histories: that cultural
form which Oakwood pioneered. Figure 2.6 shows that Kidner’s was no spe-
cialist railway publishing house on the Locomotive Publishing Company’s model.

80

60

40

20

0
1930– 1940– 1950– 1960– 1970– 1980– 1990–

Figure 2.6 New railway titles (dark shading), other transport titles (light
shading) and non-transport titles (unshaded) published by The Oakwood Press
9780719065668_4_002.qxd 29/01/2008 12:38PM Page 32

32 British railway enthusiasm

His debut publication was a photographic pamphlet illustrating London

independent bus companies’ vehicles. Before wartime conditions supervened
he also published one book on lorries, and one on ships. Postwar expansion
brought little change except modest financial subvention through opportunism
(from the late forties his press sprouted a modestly sprightly sub-list servic-
ing record collectors and then, much more bizarrely, a market research sub-
list over a few years after 1957).27 With their small footprint and slim format
in a soft binding – until Kidner risked case binding a longer book, picking
a real winner in the first instalment of James Boyd’s imperial survey of Welsh
narrow gauge railway history 28 – Oakwood volumes always insinuated a becom-
ing modesty. But with a total COPAC list extending to 475 titles published
between 1931 and 1999, this was an important imprint. Its 368 railway titles
always stood at the heart of this house’s business, but it is best seen as a
railway-focused transport publisher – with a mere 34 non-transport volumes
supplementing 441 transport titles. As Figure 2.5 shows, specialised railway
publishing actually strengthened when R.W. Kidner sold his press to another
private enthusiast in 1985.
If Kidner was The Oakwood Press’s onlie begetter then (continuing the
Shakespearean motif ) Ian Allan bestrode mid- and late twentieth-century British
railway book publishing like a colossus. The 654 new railway monographs
which COPAC records for Ian Allan Ltd between 1944 and 1999 far exceed
any other publisher’s total – even leaving out Allan’s gratifyingly sloshing cash
flows from annual ABC stock lists, without which any train spotter would
have felt improperly dressed. Yet we must not leave ABCs out of account,
for they laid firm foundations for this man’s fortune. In 1942 he published
his first pamphlet, listing the Southern Railway’s locomotives’ numbers and
names. Its commercial success soon spurred companion booklets on the other
Big Four railway companies’ stock, on London Transport’s tube stock, then
on a host of other topics.29 With a huge train spotting craze building, founda-
tions had been laid for twentieth-century Britain’s most important transport
publishing house.30 By 1949 Allan’s railway titles dominated the market.31
His railway ABCs sold in prodigious quantities: two thousand for the 1942
Southern volume, rising within five years to fifty thousand for the LMS, forty
thousand for the LNER, thirty thousand for the Great Western and twenty-
five thousand for the Southern.32 And Allan always could rest confident of
repeat business here: since newly constructed locomotives replaced scrapped
veterans, every assiduous spotter had to buy each year’s edition. After nation-
alisation, the complete set of regional pamphlets33 could be purchased bound
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 Primeval, ii, 33;
Prometheus and, ii, 431;
Religious symbol of every nation, ii, 104;
Sacred sign, i, 342;
Serpent of eternity, on, i, 442;
Sûrya bound on, ii, 590;
Symbol in India, most sacred, ii, 103, 619;
Tau and, ii, 588;
Wan, now, ii, 587;
Water pouring through, ii, 34;
World-symbol, as, ii, 621.
Svayambhû, or universal spirit, i, 83.
Svayambhû-Nârâyana, the self-existent, ii, 136.
Svâyambhuva, or self-existent, i, 199, 268, 402, ii, 157, 324, 325,
335, 340, 386.
Swan, Darkness, in, i, 602;
Double, i, 381;
Eternal, or Kâlahamsa, i, 47;
Eternity, of, i, 384, 388, ii, 488;
Hansa, i, 108;
Leda assumes shape of a white, ii, 129;
Life of, i, 600;
Priapic, of Leda not, i, 383;
Rosecroix, symbol of, i, 109;
Space name of Brahmâ, in, i, 384;
Vehicle used by Brahman, i, 47;
White, ii, 20.
Swans of Myorica, ii, 815.
Swanwick, Mrs. Annie, quoted, ii, 430, 437.
Sweat, Animals first produced from, ii, 190;
Drops of, grew, ii, 20, 21, 139;
Earth, animals produced from, of, ii, 365;
Shiva, of, ii, 47, 132;
 Third race formed from, ii, 186;
Torments of their, i, 631, ii, 639.
Sweat-born, Androgynes and, ii, 187;
Astral bodies, descendants of, ii, 146;
Commentary on, ii, 344;
Egg-born, produced, ii, 182;
Evolution of, ii, 139;
Evolvers of, i, 492;
Fathers of, ii, 122, 124;
Hermaphrodites descended from, ii, 33;
Mânasa spurned, ii, 21, 180;
Nârishâ, ii, 185;
Primeval appearance as, ii, 154;
Progeny of second race, ii, 128;
Purânas, in, ii, 184;
Second or, race, ii, 157, 174, 183, 355;
Secret doctrine and, ii, 193;
Third race, of, ii, 71, 207, 208.
Sweden, Atlantis of Plato, said to be, ii, 420;
Pre-Lemurian continent, part of, ii, 819;
Runic writings in, ii, 361;
Shores of, have risen, ii, 831.
Swedenborg, Elemental vortices and theory of, i, 143;
Intuition of, i, 143;
Mercury and, ii, 742;
Mysticism of, ii, 46;
Quoted, i, 682, 683, ii, 36, 740.
Swift and radiant one, i, 63, 162.
Swedish scientist, ii, 420.
Swiss cattle, Descent of modern, ii, 300.
Sydic, Sadic, Cronus or Saturn, ii, 409, 410, 411.
Syene, Well of, i, 230.
Sylla, Augurs, in days of, ii, 545.
Sylphs derided, idea of, i, 663.
Symbol or symbols, Abstractions, represents, i, 675;
Adam-Adami a manifold, ii, 45;
Adam of dust, of, ii, 479;
Adami manifold, ii, 473;
Allegorical, of pentacle and curtain, i, 150;
Ancient, ii, 39;
Ankh or life, for, ii, 34;
Ante-christian, Gnostic, ii, 480;
Anthropomorphized, generative, ii, 534;
Aquatic, of elements, ii, 611;
Archaic, i, 674, ii, 101;
Ark, of the female generative principle, ii, 147;
Arkite, ii, 151, 152;
Aryan religion did not rest on physiological, i, 141;
Astoreth, of nature, ii, 485;
Astral light, of, i, 275;
Astronomical, i, 715, ii, 129, 579, 655;
Atlas, of the fourth race, ii, 518;
Bible astronomical, i, 715;
Bird, of an enormous, ii, 653;
Bi-sexual man, of, ii, 138;
Borrowed, ii, 505;
Castor and Pollux, of brotherly devotion, ii, 130;
Cat, of moon, ii, 583;
Chaldæan form of, ii, 476;
Church fathers disfigure, ii, 103;
Circle and its diameter, of, ii, 566, 584;
Confucius, of, i, 475;
Conventional, i, 674;
Cosmic Gods, of, i, 500;
Cosmical significance of, i, 324;
Cosmogonical, ii, 46;
Cow as, ii, 436;
Creative triad, of, i, 299;
Creative God, Jehovistic, i, 379;
Cross, of, ii, 571, 573, 576, 577, 588, 593, 615, 619, 620, 691;
Cube a, of angelic beings, ii, 83;
Cycle, of racial, i, 450;
Defunct, of, i, 240;
Deity, of, i, 139, 370;
Diamond, many faced, i, 323;
Divine, ii, 417;
Divine and earthly wisdom, of, ii, 393;
Divine cross, a, ii, 615;
Double-sexed organ, of, ii, 496;
Draco, of guide and director, ii, 35;
Dragons of, ii, 40, 396, 397;
Eating sacred, ii, 220;
Egyptian, in New Testament, i, 411;
Egyptian cross and circle, of, ii, 577;
E Delphicum, ii, 613;
Elements, of spirit, i, 498;
Emblem, and, i, 324;
Esoteric, in every national religion, i, 477;
Esoteric teaching needs, ii, 85;
Esoteric truths expressed in identical, ii, 613;
Eternal law, of an, i, 716;
Eternal Monad does not stand as a, ii, 633;
Evolution of universe, of, i, 672;
Explanation of chief, i, 326;
Facts, are, i, 427;
Female principle, of the, ii, 484;
Fohat, i, 136, 736;
Forest for man’s life time, ii, 674;
Four-lettered, ii, 28;
Generation, of, i, 250, ii, 493;
Generative and creative power, of, ii, 132;
Geometrical, i, 671;
Globe, number six, of our, ii, 614;
Glyphs, become, i, 68;
God and nature, of, ii, 376;
Great Bear, of, i, 248;
Hairy, ii, 661;
Hermes-Mercury, of, ii, 571;
Hidden deity, of, i, 373;
Hindû and Chaldæan religions, ii, 401;
Hindû, ii, 45;
Holy of Holies, of, ii, 491, 492;
Human existence, of, ii, 587;
Human Monad cannot be rendered by chemical, constitution of, i,
200;
Human races, of, ii, 507;
Hydrogen, ii, 111;
Identical meaning of, i, 412;
Ideographs, ii, 617;
Idea-language and, i, 327;
Imaginary and feminine, ii, 584;
Immortal being, of, i, 284;
India, transplanted from, ii, 225;
Initiates, for, ii, 521;
Injustice, of eternal, i, 242;
International, ii, 586;
Interpretation to, ii, 25;
Jod forefinger and Lingam, of, ii, 133;
Jehovah, of, ii, 404, 569;
Kârttikeya, of, ii, 654;
Kosmos, of evolution, of, i, 475;
Life and power, of, ii, 35;
Life, Ashvattha tree, of, ii, 676;
Lingam, of, ii, 133, 578;
Logos, of, i, 235, 431;
Lotus, of, i, 406, ii, 494;
Lunar, i, 425;
Male and female principles, of, ii, 33;
Male, figure four is, i, 68;
Marriage formerly a, i, 674;
Master, examined by, i, 326;
Matter, of, i, 678;
Mercury in Grecian Mythology, of, ii, 31;
Misconceived, ii, 840;
Moon as, i, 249, ii, 434, 486;
Mundane egg, of, i, 384;
Mundane fire, of, ii, 138;
Mystic nature cow’s horns, of, ii, 35;
Nature, language taught by, i, 341;
Nature profaned, of, ii, 494;
Nucleus of truth concealed by, i, 504;
Number seven, of life eternal, ii, 616;
Numerals of Pythagoras, were, i, 386;
Occult sciences, used in, ii, 565;
Ogdoad, of, ii, 614;
One principle, of, i, 459;
Ophidian, ii, 371, 404;
Orientalists misunderstand, ii, 602;
Origin of measures, of cross, ii, 590;
P, of paternity, ii, 607;
Pagans, of, i, 102;
Paganism, classical, of, ii, 276;
Past, present and future, of, i, 678;
Patriarchs are, ii, 409;
Pentacle, of our five root-races, i, 150;
Pentagon, of man, ii, 609;
Perfect man a, i, 267;
Personification of cross, ii, 590;
Phallic, i, 140, 512, ii, 47, 65, 89, 381, 488, 593;
Physiological, ii, 106, 617;
Pisces, a, i, 717;
Powers, of, ii, 404;
Presence, of abstract, i, 31;
Primary signification of, ii, 667;
Psycho-physiological, significance of, i, 324;
Pyramid, of, ii, 384, 677;
Pythagorean, ii, 583, 584;
elements, of four, ii, 576;
Quaternary, of, ii, 608, 631;
Quarters or Ram’s head and horns of, ii, 192;
Religions, i, 101, 262, ii, 567, 655;
Ritualistic worship, of, ii, 49;
Roman archaic, ii, 480;
Sacr’ marks on, ii, 488;
Sacred and secret knowledge of, i, 153;
Sarcophagus as, ii, 482, 484;
Scarabæus, of human life, ii, 582;
Second race of mankind, for, ii, 185;
Secret cycle and initiation, of, ii, 652;
Semi-savage tribes, used by, ii, 458;
Sexual significance of, ii, 555;
Sidereal, ii, 582;
Similarity of Pagan and Christian, i, 441;
Solar and lunar years, of, ii, 409;
Square, of four sacred forces, i, 159;
Space, chaos, theos, kosmos, of, i, 367;
Spirit, of, i, 382;
Spores of science, of, ii, 180;
Svastika, of, ii, 62, 104, 106;
Steps are, i, 138;
Sun, of, ii, 41, 119;
Superstition, of, ii, 791;
Swan as, i, 382;
Tau of, ii, 622, 625;
Tetraktys dual, ii, 27;
Titan, of finite reason, ii, 430;
Triangle, of, i, 138, 236, ii, 606;
Triadic and tetradic, ii, 638;
Tribes of Jacob and Zodiac, of, i, 714;
Trinity, of, i, 240;
Triple flame, of Shiva, ii, 626;
 Truth, of, ii, 634;
Truths, land marks of pre-historic, ii, 821;
Universal presence, of, ii, 586;
Universal abstract nature, of, ii, 492;
Universal, i, 358, ii, 478;
Universality of, i, 500;
Verity, of eternally living, i, 900;
Virâj and Horus, male, ii, 495;
Water, of, i, 494, ii, 68, 598;
Wheat as, ii, 390;
Womb, of, i, 285;
Yoni, of exoteric Hindûism, i, 285;
Zeus, of, ii, 434.
Symbolical, Attributes, ii, 575;
Caduceus, i, 601;
Consonant, i, 413;
Creation, accounts of, ii, 85;
Creed, Pagan, ii, 409;
Genesis, is, ii, 444;
Holy of Holies, meaning of, i, 674;
Imagery, ii, 746;
Key to allegory of Enoch, ii, 561;
Language, i, 409, 418, 428, ii, 26, 474, 654;
Light in, sense, ii, 41;
Man, Yima, ii, 644;
Mystery language, ii, 606;
Mysteries in nature, figures of greatest, ii, 77;
Numbers, i, 68;
Personages, ii, 136;
Place, Adytum, ii, 481;
Record of human races, ii, 454;
Records of science, ii, 46;
Thought, ii, 350;
White island, name, ii, 71.
Symbolism, Antiquity of, ii, 371;
Archaic, ii, 467, 469, 634;
Astronomy, and, ii, 449;
Chapters on, i, 51;
Christian, ii, 485;
Concrete, of egg becomes, i, 319;
Cosmic, ii, 157;
Circle, of, ii, 580, 584;
Cross, of, ii, 580, 622;
East, of, ii, 98;
Esoteric, i, 141, 326, ii, 456;
Evolution, of, i, 319, 321;
Genesis, contained in, ii, 405;
Gnostic, Ophis of, i, 102;
Gnostics, based on tenets of, ii, 407;
Hidden, ii, 491;
Hindû, ii, 607;
Hindû deities, in, names of, i, 119;
Iao and Jehovah, of mystery names, ii, 565;
Identity of, ii, 665;
Ideographs, and, i, 321;
Initiates, knowledge, of, ii, 458;
Inner sense of, ii, 492;
Language now called, i, 328;
Large-eared statues, of, ii, 354;
Mahâbhârata, of, ii, 251;
Manus and Kabiris, of, i, 703;
Max Müller’s view of, i, 322;
Mazdean, for Flood, ii, 645;
Mosaic allegories and, ii, 131;
Mystery names, of, ii, 491;
Occult, i, 96, 293, ii, 394;
Ocean of popular, ii, 529;
Œdipuses of, ii, 569;
Old world, of, ii, 575;
Origin of Pagan, ii, 478;
Prehistoric races, of, i, 384;
 Primitive, of Kabalistic books, ii, 566;
Prometheus, of, ii, 441;
Psycho-metaphysical, ii, 600;
Puzzles of, ii, 613;
Pyramids, finding expression in, i, 677;
Recent work, in, i, 588;
Rishis and Pleïades, of, ii, 581;
Rules of, ii, 443;
Sacred, of reawakening universe, i, 47;
Sacred books veiled in, i, 7;
Septenary in religious, ii, 629;
Seven keys of, ii, 350;
Serpents and dragons under different, ii, 370;
Solar deities, of lunar and, i, 387;
Stages of, i, 68;
Stanzas attached to, i, 496;
Sun in, i, 699;
Svastika, of, ii, 104, 106;
Traditions that have outgrown, ii, 204;
Triangle, of, i, 676;
Truths revealed to different nations under special, i, 20;
Universal, ii, 457;
Water, deluge, etc., of, ii, 327.
Symbological, Fallen angels, legend of, ii, 287.
Symbologists, Adam Kadmon and, ii, 489;
Âryan, ii, 581;
Christian, i, 717, ii, 121;
Cross and Biblical, i, 721;
Gerald Massey, i, 436;
H. P. B. disagrees with, i, 321;
Jehovah and, ii, 569;
Modern, ii, 442;
Mysteries, ignorant of, i, 436;
Mythopœic age, and, i, 287;
Norwich, ii, 450;
 Of our day, i, 353;
Pre-Christian, ii, 620;
Purânas, may study with profit, i, 223;
Scoff of, ii, 368;
Serpent and, ii, 35;
Sun with, ii, 130;
Superficial, ii, 621.
Symbology, Adytum, of, ii, 481;
Ancient scripture and, i, 323;
Ancient Hebrew, i, 326;
Anugîtâ, in, ii, 674;
Aspects, of, i, 323;
Chaldæan scriptures, of, ii, 478;
Colours of temple curtain, of, i, 500;
Egyptian, i, 390, ii, 609;
First three races, of, ii, 131;
Heathen, of, i, 138;
Hindû, i, 730;
Kabalistical, ii, 565;
Kings of Edom, of, ii, 746;
Knowledge hidden from profanation by, ii, 473;
Lunar, i, 284;
Men of research in department of, i, 343;
Nodus, in study of, i, 144;
Pentateuch, of, i, 140;
Persian, ii, 653;
Religious, ii, 485, 645;
Sacr’, of, i, 35;
Sacred, ii, 113;
Seven departments of, ii, 323;
Seven keys to, ii, 494;
System of sidereal, ii, 581;
Writers of epistles well versed in, ii, 800.
Synagogue, Zohar in the rendering of, ii, 484.
Syncellus, Eusebius charged with forgery by, i, 10.
Synchronistic, Abydos, table of, ii, 384;
Manetho, tables of, ii, 410;
Tables, ii, 732.
Synesius initiated into the mysteries, i, 27.
Synodial, month, i, 719.
Synoptics, Egyptian symbols and Pagan doctrines, incorporated into,
i, 411.
Syria, Ad-on, or Lord of, ii, 46, 47;
Druses of, ii, 30;
Esoteric schools of, i, 7;
Gnostics of, ii, 483;
Initiates of, ii, 589;
Kabalists of, ii, 478;
Mandrake in, ii, 30;
Nabatheans came to, ii, 477.
Syrians, Egg symbol among, i, 385;
Gnostics, Christian, i, 234;
Goddess, Aster, ii, 46, 47;
Indian figures, acquainted with, i, 387;
Rulers, world of, i, 469;
Worlds of, ten, i, 470.
Syrianus, quoted, ii, 633.
Syro-Chaldæan, Magic, i, 445.
Système Nouveau, quoted, i, 691, 692.
Systemic, Vortices of Kepler, i, 683.
Systolic property of boundless unity, ii, 46.

Taaroa, the creative power, ii, 203.

Tabernacle, Curtain of, i, 150;
 God, designed to contain, ii, 316;
High Priests of, ii, 476;
Host, prepared for, ii, 439;
Jehovah, for, ii, 566;
Maker of, ii, 116;
Measurements of, ii, 573;
Moses, of, i, 371, 420;
Sidereal cycle and form of, i, 334;
Square, i, 150.
Table-lands of Tibet, ii, 643.
Tables, Astronomical, i, 723, 726, 729, ii, 33;
Conjunction of 1491 in western, i, 725;
Geological periods, of, ii, 750;
Hindûs, of, i, 724, 727, 728;
Manetho’s ii, 410;
Nassireddin, of, i, 722;
Purânas and Bible, of, i, 358;
Siamese astronomical, i, 729;
Stone, in ark, ii, 43, 496, 558;
Synchronistic, ii, 732, 752.
Tablets, Assyrian, ii, 65;
Brick-clay, ii, 731;
Buddha, of, ii, 441;
Chaldæan, ii, 2, 56, 64;
Cosmogonical, ii, 57;
Cutha, ii, 55, 58;
Richardson and Gest, i, 419;
Smaragdine, ii, 115, 587;
Smith quotes from, ii, 154.
Tad in Sanskrit is that, i, 106, 595.
T’Agathon, one of a quaternary, ii, 634.
Tahiti and Polynesian continent, ii, 234.
Tahitian, Ivi, ii, 204;
 Stature of, ii, 346;
Tradition, ii, 203.
Tahmurath, or Taimuraz, king of Persia, ii, 415, 416, 417.
Taht-Esmun, moon-god of Egyptians, i, 248, ii, 669.
Tail, Catarrhine, of, ii, 706;
Comet, of, i, 549, 664, 665;
Dragon, of, i, 433, ii, 367;
Fœtus, in human, ii, 723;
Problem, ii, 722;
Rudimentary, ii, 343, 719;
Serpent and its, i, 600, 704, ii, 531;
Stars of heaven, whose, drew a third part of the, ii, 509.
Tailless ape, ii, 692, 706.
Tails in Bundahish, men with, ii, 671.
Taimuraz, or Tahmurath, ii, 415, 417.
Taine, H. A., ii, 349.
Tairyagyonya creation, i, 481.
Tait, Professor, quoted, i, 526.
Taittirîya Brâhmana, quoted, ii, 186, 526.
Taittirîyaka Upanishad, quoted, i, 352.
Taka mi onosubi no Kami, i, 234.
Tales of Derbent, quoted, ii, 415.
Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors, quoted, i, 457.
Taliesin, quoted, ii, 397.
Talisman, Cross, of, ii, 588, 621;
Ophite creed, from, i, 442;
Porcelain, of, ii, 455;
Preparation of, ii, 476.
Talk across ocean, i, 611.
Tallies found with bones of men, ii, 769.
Talmud, quoted, i, 26, 374, 449, 474, 496, ii, 274, 403, 406, 476;
Adversary, the, on the, ii, 501.
Talmudic, Axiom, ii, 125;
Jews, ii, 494;
Scheme, ii, 481;
Sectarianism, ii, 483.
Talmudists, i, 449, ii, 27, 340, 560;
Jews, successors to the initiated, ii, 654.
Tam, Adam in Tamil, ii, 143.
Tamas, Insensibility or, i, 352, 357, 371, 584.
Tâmasa, Elements are, i, 354;
Intellect unenlightened by, i, 354;
Spiritual darkness, i, 400.
Tamaz, Adam Kadmon, ii, 47.
Tamiel taught astronomy, ii, 393.
Tamil, Bagavadam, edition of, ii, 656;
Calendar, ii, 71, 72;
Continents, references to sunken, ii, 340;
Tam in, equals Adam, ii, 143.
Tâmrâ, wife of Kashyapa, ii, 191.
Tamtu, or Belita sea, ii, 485.
Tanian Judæan, i, 224, ii, 492.
Tanais, Plutarch on the, ii, 816.
Tañhâ, Desire to live, ii, 115;
Senseless life, ii, 116.
Tanjur and Kanjur of Northern Buddhists, i, 11.
Tanmâtras, Esoterically, i, 625;
Five, i, 277, 358, 585, 676;
Rudimental principles, or, i, 488, 490;
Second or elemental creation, i, 481;
Subtile elements, or, i, 357.
Tantalus in infernal regions, ii, 414.
Tântric, five Ma-kâras, ii, 612.
Tântrika, Superstition, i, 568;
Worship, Mahâ Vidyâ and, i, 192.
Tântrikas of Bengal, i, 180.
Tao, genius of moon, i, 631.
Tao-ists of China, ii, 584.
Tao-te-King, by Lao-tse, i, 9, 512.
Tapas, or religious devotions, ii, 183.
Taphos, or tomb, ii, 481.
Tapirs, Ungulate mammals and, ii, 777.
Tapo-Loka, ii, 335.
Târâ, Jupiter’s wife, ii, 147;
Priest’s wife, ii, 49;
Secret knowledge, personification of initiate into, ii, 524;
Târakâ, wife of Brihaspati, or, ii, 49.
Târadaitya, Abode of, ii, 425;
Demon, a, ii, 422;
Purânas, of, ii, 421.
Târaka, Dânava demon, ii, 399;
Kârttikeya, conqueror of, ii, 655;
Râja classification, i, 182;
Râja Yoga of India, ii, 637;
Târâ or, ii, 49;
Titan, ii, 580;
 Vanquisher of, ii, 400;
War, ii, 523;
Yoga system, ii, 627.
Târaka-jit, Kârttikeya called, ii, 400, 655.
Târakâ-maya, Age of, i, 451;
Indian allegory of, ii, 401;
War in heaven, or, ii, 49, 66.
Târaka-Râja-Yoga, i, 181.
Tarana, Hindû year, ii, 72.
Targum of Jonathan, quoted, ii, 588.
Targums handed down by Hebrews, ii, 588.
Tarija, giants of, ii, 797.
Tarim, Basin of, i, 16;
Tiles and cylinders at, i, 8.
Tartakamala, Venkata Krishna Rao, referred to, ii, 54.
Tartars, Astronomical elements of, i, 723;
Ulug-beg, and tables of, i, 722.
Tartarus, Atlas and Japetus in, ii, 806;
Iliad, of, ii, 820.
Tartary, Future gulf of, ii, 341.
Task, Cyclic, i, 300.
Tasmania, Continent from India to, ii, 231;
Darwin on tribe in, ii, 206;
Extinct tribes of, ii, 346;
Geological survey of, ii, 9;
Half-animal tribes of, ii, 205;
Race of men in, ii, 765.
Taste, Animals without, i, 665;
Sense of, ii, 113;
 Seven in perception of, ii, 658.
Tat, Egyptian God of wisdom, ii, 558;
Emblem of stability, ii, 588;
Hermes called, ii, 398;
Tau or, ii, 621.
Tatios, referred to, i, 306, 307.
Tatoo, Tat, in, ii, 621.
Tau, Apophis bound on, ii, 621;
Astronomical cross, ii, 572;
Christianity borrowed, i, 24;
Circle, and, i, 34, 634, 658;
Cross of, ii, 572, 577, 578;
Cube unfolded is, i, 342;
Egg and, i, 390;
Egyptian cross or, i, 721, ii, 34, 39, 587, 614;
Form of, i, 35, 436;
Gnostics revealed, ii, 605;
Greek gamma and figure seven, ii, 625;
Initiated adept bound to, ii, 589;
Israelites’ doorposts, marked on, ii, 588;
Mystery, a, ii, 622;
Perfect, ii, 588;
Snake encircling, i, 275, ii, 225;
Son of Gaia, called, ii, 625.
Tauri sacrificed human beings to Artemis, i, 425.
Taurus, Asterisk a, of, i, 720;
Atlantis, vertical to island of, ii, 426;
Constellation of, i, 721, ii, 581;
Eye of, i, 726, 727, 830;
Issachar, in sphere of, i, 714;
Sun in, ii, 732, 802.
Taurus Draconem gemuit et Taurum Draco, ii, 142.
Taut, or Thoth, serpent symbol of, ii, 30.
Taygeta, daughter of Atlas, ii, 811.
Taylor, Thomas, quoted, i, 458, 489, ii, 633.
Tchan-gy, Chinese demi-Gods, ii, 382.
Tchengis-Khan destroyed Djooljool, ii, 353.
Tcheou, Sun, ii, 388.
Tchertchen in Tibet, i, 16, 17.
Tchertchen-Darya, river, i, 16.
Tchong, a Dhyân Chohan, ii, 293.
Tchoon-Tsieoo, Falling stars, the, on the, ii, 511.
Tchy-Yeoo, beguilements of, ii, 293.
Teachings, Archaic, i, 458, ii, 1, 105, 408, 726;
Belief in old, ii, 460;
Esoteric, i, 22, 308, 658, 683, 702, 735, ii, 469, 639;
Gnostics, of the, ii, 654;
Isis Unveiled, withheld in, ii, 521;
Kabalah, of, ii, 708;
Occult, i, 27, 703, 718, ii, 5, 70, 91, 241, 640;
Paracelsus, of, ii, 693;
Pre-Christian, i, 23;
Protest, imparted under, i, 212;
Pythagorean and Platonic, i, 677;
Regents of planets, of, i, 424;
Secret, i, 273;
Secret doctrine, of, i, 21, 713, ii, 169, 188;
Vedic, ii, 641.
Teak found at Mugheir, ii, 237.
Teapi, or Easter island, ii, 351.
Tears, Eyes, of their, i, 631;
Niobe, of, ii, 815.
Tectum, a roof, ii, 614.
Tefnoot in Devachan, ii, 390.
Teiresias, Abodes of, ii, 398.
Telang, K. T., quoted, i, 104, 114, 115, 127, 583, 625.
Telchines, born at Rhodes, ii, 408, 409.
Telepathic impacts, ii, 165.
Telephone, i, 611.
Telescope, Limits of, i, 519, 647;
Nebulæ, and, i, 654;
Stars in range of, ii, 748;
Worlds and firmaments seen by, i, 663.
Telesphorus, Heptagon called, ii, 637.
Telita, queen of moon, ii, 143.
Tell, William, ii, 804.
Tel-loh, Statues at, ii, 236, 730, 732.
Tellurian spirit, Serpent as a, ii, 218.
Tellurium, i, 601.
Temperature, Earth, of, ii, 9, 163;
Existence and, i, 666;
Ideals result of, i, 348;
Sun, of, i, 525;
Universe, of, i, 166, 601;
Venus, of, ii, 747.
Templar degree in masonry, i, 513.
Temple, Bishop, ii, 28, 681, 682;
Crypt, ii, 589;
Delphic, ii, 613;
Dendera, of, ii, 391;
Earth, a mystic, i, 231;
 Egyptian, planisphere in an, ii, 385;
God, of, i, 410, 628, 632, ii, 488;
Golden candlestick of, ii, 615;
Hiranya-garbha, of, ii, 492;
Holy of Holies in, i, 284;
Initiates, i, 5;
Kabirim, of, ii, 376;
Kosmos, of, i, 512;
Libraries, ii, 557;
Lord, of, ii, 482;
Naram-Sin, built by, ii, 730;
Nebo at Borsippa, of, ii, 477;
Northern India, in, ii, 451;
Pachacamac, of, ii, 331;
Philæ, of, ii, 589;
Planetary, of Babylon, ii, 477;
Sâmba, built by, ii, 337;
Satan, doorkeeper of, ii, 243;
Science, of, i, 641;
Sigalions in every, ii, 414;
Solar God, of, ii, 481;
Solomon, of, i, 140, 334, 421, 424, ii, 483, 487, 573, 840;
Sun, seven vases in, of, ii, 638;
Teaching, ii, 164;
Universe, of, i, 233, ii, 688;
Veil of, i, 465;
West end of, ii, 481.
Temple de Jerusalem, quoted, i, 712.
Temple-Brâhmans, Vedas kept by, i, 292;
Vishnu Purâna, passed into hands of, i, 456.
Temples, Ancient archives of, i, 325;
Ancient college, i, 192;
Construction of, i, 336;
Dragon, sacred to, ii, 397;
 East, sacred imagery in, of, i, 387;
Egypt, of, i, 12, 150, ii, 449, 590;
Gentiles, of, ii, 561;
Glyphs of primitive, ii, 610;
Grecian, i, 230, ii, 480;
Hierophants of, and sacred books, i, 19;
Hiram built, ii, 570;
Human body, for, ii, 23, 284;
Initiation, of, ii, 396;
Kabiri, of, ii, 377;
Kadeshim of Jewish, ii, 485;
Made with hands, i, 349;
Mysteries of inner, ii, 239;
Priest-architects of Indian, i, 230;
Pueblos, impenetrable, of, ii, 191;
Records of, ii, 457;
Rock-cut, of India, i, 151, ii, 231, 353;
Stellar, ii, 368;
Sun, sacred to, ii, 396;
Teachings of, inner, i, 363;
Volcanic localities, in, ii, 380.
Temporo-sphenoidal convolutions, ii, 682.
Tempter, Genesis, of, i, 275;
God of Semite, i, 411;
Intellectual, of man, ii, 438;
Man, of, ii, 369;
Satan our, and redeemer, ii, 540;
Woman, of man, ii, 405.
Temura, anagrammatical method of Kabalah, i, 107, 117.
Ten, Arûpa universe, are, i, 61;
Creator, perfect number of, i, 125;
Decad or sign of, i, 356;
Dual numeral, ii, 584;
Lettered God, ii, 638;
 Lights in their totality made, i, 467;
Limbs of heavenly man, i, 235;
Number, ii, 244;
Points of Pythagorean triangle, i, 675;
Sacred, i, 428;
Svastika means, thousand truths, ii, 619;
Universe, numbers of, i, 386, 460;
Words or, Sephiroth, i, 466;
Zodiac, signs of, ii, 528.
Tenbrel, Chugnyi not, i, 50, 70.
Teneriffe, ii, 425, 768, 806, 835.
Tenets, Esoteric, i, 286, ii, 469;
Mysterious, ii, 316;
Occult sciences, of, i, 695;
Pharisees, of, ii, 64;
Philosophical, ii, 618;
Religious mysteries, of, ii, 131;
Satanians, of, ii, 407;
Secret doctrine, of, ii, 476.
Tennyson, ii, 185.
Tenshoko Doijin, first of Gods of earth, i, 261.
Tent of Egyptians, ii, 636.
Teos of Greeks, ii, 636.
Teraphim, Divination by, ii, 476;
Jewish oracles, or the, i, 424.
Teratological phenomena, ii, 198.
Termini, of Hermes-Mercury, cruciform, ii, 571, 572.
Terminus, a symbol of shelter, ii, 614.
Termites, or white ants, i, 739.
Ternaries, Animals only, ii, 608.
Ternary, Five composed of binary and, i, 412;
Nine triple, ii, 614;
Odd numbers, first of, ii, 607;
Pythagoreans, of, ii, 608;
Tetragram, at beginning of, ii, 136;
Third life, symbol of, i, 412;
Triangle included in a, i, 675.
Terra, Giants sons of Cœlus and, ii, 813.
Terra-cotta discs or fusaïoles, ii, 106.
Terrene, Ancestors, i, 203;
Chain, i, 179;
Element, ii, 375;
Plane, i, 190;
Products, creation called, ii, 252.
Terrestrial, Adam, ii, 478;
Animal human being, i, 697;
Beings evolution of, i, 475;
Branches of tree reach, plane, i, 437;
Bull emblem of, life, ii, 98;
Casket, physical, i, 207;
Cause of, phenomena, i, 661;
Centres of, forces, i, 226;
Chain, i, 179, 187, 228, ii, 745, 801;
Conflagration, ii, 510;
Continents, i, 452;
Cosmic, man, ii, 113;
Creators, ii, 172;
Deluge, ii, 148;
Diti, forms of, ii, 649;
Divine natures, and, ii, 440;
Dust of, origin, i, 707;
Earths, three, ii, 652;
Elements, i, 650, ii, 639;
Even numbers are, ii, 607;
Evolution, i, 679;
Fire, i, 508, ii, 548;
Floods, ii, 147, 368;
Forces, i, 136, 519;
Globe, the, atmosphere of the, ii, 650;
Globes of, chain, i, 186, ii, 563;
Heavenly to, man, i, 672;
Hebdomad, i, 483;
Humanity, i, 132, 295, 303;
Hydrogen on our, plane, ii, 111;
Illusion, a mere, i, 411;
Infernal deities, and, ii, 636;
Initiates, form of, ii, 241;
Jambu-dvîpa, ii, 340;
Kabiri were, ii, 380;
Life, i, 245, ii, 160, 257, 530;
Life-cycle, ii, 657;
Light, i, 520, 653;
Love, ii, 612;
Lunar and, chain, i, 202;
Magnetism, ii, 573;
Messengers, ii, 324;
Monads, i, 626;
Mortals, i, 663, ii, 641;
Mysteries, ii, 494;
Nature, i, 464, ii, 77, 774;
Nitrogen, i, 683;
Occult side of, nature, ii, 629;
Organisms, i, 665;
Origin of, life, ii, 572;
Period of fourth round, ii, 722;
Personality, false, ii, 252;
Phases of, life, i, 716;
Phenomena, i, 170;
Physical nature, ii, 630;
Physiological union, ii, 492;
 Plane, i, 147, 168, 370, 559, 605, 734, ii, 60, 96, 561;
Poles, ii, 379, 449;
Powers of, nature, ii, 637;
Production, man the crown of, ii, 508;
Races, ii, 137;
Regions, Varshas and Dvîpas regarded as, ii, 334;
Round, i, 183, ii, 344;
Seed or sperm, i, 304;
Self, ii, 280;
Senses, i, 176;
Septenary, law in, life, ii, 659;
Sphere, our, i, 679, ii, 67, 596;
Spirits, i, 254, ii, 25, 26, 120;
Sublime and, ii, 89;
Substance terrestrial and sidereal, i, 654;
Taurus symbol of, generation, i, 721;
Tetragrammaton, significance of, ii, 663;
Tetraktys, ii, 639;
Thot-Hermes, incarnation of, i, 738;
Vitality cosmic and, i, 226;
Wisdom, ii, 676;
Workshops, i, 686.
Terror, Demon of, ii, 421;
Thou shalt be a, ii, 518.
Tertiaries, Development in newest, ii, 726.
Tertiary period, The age of, ii, 714;
Ancestor of ape in, i, 213, 718, 720;
Australia of, ii, 7;
Civilization during, ii, 717;
Climate of, ii, 755, 780;
Croll on, ii, 9, 724, 726, 734;
Date of, ii, 714, 794;
Disturbances in, ii, 328;
Duration of, ii, 166, 733;
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