WATCHES, BOOKS, PRODUCTS AND MODELS
KARL LUDVIGSEN, Evro Publishing, £150, ISBN 978 1 910505 25 0
Special-edition longer Chrono section
It’s impossible to look at contemporary photos of the lean, bespectacled Reid Railton, with his thinning hair and diffident expression, and not think of those backroom boffins depicted in classic British black-and-white movies such as The Dam Busters. Railton was so very much the archetype of the genius engineer for whom the conventions of everyday life had little meaning – his daughter Sally Railton Joslin recalls him turning up to her wedding in 1958 with slits cut into the toes of his formal shoes ‘to relieve the pressure’. When she queried this, he said that noone would be looking at his shoes, but did concede to covering the openings with insulation tape…
Trouble is, you could scarcely pack Railton’s life and achievements into a single film (and which explains why this book comprises two substantial volumes and a slipcase). Most of us are familiar with the famous shot of the Napier-Railton recordbreaker, all four wheels in mid-air as it hits a bump on the Brooklands banking; and many will have heard of those big straight-eight Railton cars of the late 1930s. Fewer, perhaps, will know that he was extensively involved with high-speed boats – not just Malcolm Campbell’s series and John Cobb’s (top), but also the engines used in Fairmile motor launches during World War Two – or that he was a consultant to Hudson in the USA, and likely influenced the design of its ‘stepdown’ cars of the late 1940s. And then there was Railton’s own sports car marque, the Arab; his early work with Parry Thomas on the massive Leyland Eight, and much, much more.
But the pursuit of speed and efficiency meant that record-breakers dominated his life. From being made chief engineer at Thomson & Taylor, through designing cars for Campbell (below), John Cobb and Goldie Gardner – and the speed record boats, of course – it’s an amazing story, brilliantly compiled in unparalleled depth by historian Ludvigsen with the support and archival help of Railton’s daughter Sally. There are hundreds of superb images, beautifully reproduced, and together the two volumes run to almost 1300 large-format pages. If these words are starting to sound a little breathless – well, that’s the effect this amazing work will have on you, too.