The Liverpool & Manchester Railway – an operating history

General railway histories may interest may an EIM reader despite seldom containing much technical detail about the locomotives and stock used, especially those of the early lines, and this new book on the first major passenger line in the UK follows the trend. Those looking for engineering details of the ‘Rocket’ and her successors will find what they need in excellent volumes published elsewhere.

However your editor, who admits to an interest in the earliest lines surpassed only by his passion for narrow gauge and miniature railways, did discover that this book is much more than a typical chronological railway history. Instead it delves into the day-to-day minutiae of the Liverpool and Manchester

Railway – how the line was operated.

When one thinks about this, everything about railway life that students of this form of transport would become familiar with, from ticket types and classes of carriages to rates for carrying goods and other livestock, creating timetables, signalling, policing... all had to be created by the pioneers who operated this first railway.

The author has clearly undertaken extensive research to present what is both an interesting and informative portrait of what life was actually like on the L&M, and certainly this reviewer learnt much that he was unaware of.

The book is divided into four sections, Passenger Business, Carrying the Goods, Time Working & Timetables and Rules & Regulations.

Each includes several chapters presenting a very full picture, and written in such a way that is informative while never becoming dry.

The detail is impressive, down to prices of various classes of ticket between individual stations, the workings an early trainspotter might have witnessed on an average day and their scheduled times, and even a sobering list of fatalities, mostly it seems caused by passengers not realising that jumping out of or in front of a moving train was likely to lead to serious injury...

Imagery is restricted to a colour plate section in the centre (few photographers were around in the early 19th century!) but the period images are well reproduced if a little small, and the selection includes diagrams of track switches and two pages of flag signals demonstrated by a modern re-enactor in period ‘Railway Constable’ garb.

The book also scores on its collection of extensive notes and its bibliography, which while described as ‘select’ includes a good number of entries including a dozen sources that are highlighted for their technical content.

Published by Pen & Sword

Web: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk Price £25.00

ISBN: 978-1-4738991-2-4