Locomotives of the Isle of Wight Railways

By TP Cooper, JCH Faulkner, RJ Maycock and RA Silsbury (hardback, Crecy Publishing, 192pp, £25, ISBN 978 1 91080 987 7).

HERE is a timely and superb reference work that has appeared when the

Isle of Wight Steam Railway has been celebrating its own 50th anniversary, as highlighted in News, pages 20 and 21.

From the early 1860s, the island boasted a railway network of its own, in many ways a microcosm of that on the mainland. It had its beginnings in small mid-Victorian local concerns like the Cowes & Newport Railway and the Isle of Wight Railway, all of which and those that followed in their wake are detailed in depth in chapters of their own. As with their cousins across the Solent, they eventually amalgamated and/ or were absorbed into the Southern Railway at the Grouping of 1923, and three decades later suffered route rationalisation under British Railways.

The IoWSR was born as a magnificent example of the unique character of the Vectis lines that preceded it, and this very comprehensive, enlightening and readable work has been compiled by four of its members.

The volume is superbly illustrated by a wealth of colour and black-and-white pictures, and an appendix contains a complete list of every locomotive to run on the island's railways. For completeness, it also describes forgotten industrial lines such as the West Medina Cement Works narrow gauge system and the short-lived passenger-carrying line at Yafford Mill which ran from 1995 to 2000.