Railways in Cumbria
Compiled by David Spaven (hardback, Totem Publishing, 80pp, £13.50, ISBN 978-1-913893-20-0). Cheques payable to: Transport Treasury Publishing, 16 Highworth Close, High Wycombe HP13 7PJ. THINK of Cumbria and images of lakes and mountains (from Scafell Pike at 3208ft downwards) will spring to mind, as will the Settle-Carlisle route and West Coast Main Line, writes Geoff Courtney.
There is, though, much more to the county from the railway perspective than just those two lines and interestingly, most of the Cumbrian network avoided being felled by Dr Beeching’s axe.
Early doors we find ourselves with this new book at Carlisle station (with a Citadel suffix pre-1948), and images of Princess Coronation and A3 Pacifics, and even a ‘Brit’ on a S&C three-coach stopping train late in its life.
Then it is a pictorial journey to the Waverley route via such locations as Alston in 1956 – complete with a Triumph TR2 sports car, the Eden Valley lines, this time adorned by a Wolseley saloon, Windermere with Royal Scot No. 46143 The South Staffordshire Regiment in residence, Carnforth and another ‘Brit,’
No. 70003 beside the huge coaling tower sadly devoid of its John Bunyan nameplates, and onward to Barrow and Workington.
The oldest of the 81 photographs dates back to 1939 and the most recent to 1970, but the majority is from the 1950s and 1960s, and thus from the last decades of steam to the early days of diesel traction.
Compiler David Spaven, an Edinburgh resident and for 20 years a campaigner for the reopening of the Borders Railway, says in his introduction that, even in today’s rationalised railway world, Cumbria offered a microcosm of what the iron road does, adding: “The variety was all the greater in the heyday of the railway, shaped by a distinctive geography and major economic forces in the form of mass tourism and concentrated industrial development.”
This book’s subtitle is ’A snapshot from the Fifties and Sixties,’ and those snapshots make interesting viewing of, as the compiler says, a great variety.