Rail Operations Viewed from South Devon

I rarely review books, but make an exception for a most unusual volume: Rail Operations

Viewed from South Devon by Garth Pedlar. This is a delight: hardback, 425 pages, 75 chapters, 28 maps, but not a single picture - instead a beautifully written text of almost 350,000 words and a very eclectic work that will appeal to a wide audience.

The chapters vary from a few hundred to almost 20,000 words, and cover a wide variety of subjects - both historical (back to the 19th century) and what might have been, up to the present.

Some of the recent history (by which I mean in our lifetimes, for Garth and I were both born in 1946) is portrayed through his family connection with the railway, while the Epilogue is a fascinating story of travel in 1961.

This latter not only brought home to me how far one could travel in a day around a rural area, pre-Beeching and despite relatively limited timetables, but how much has changed socially.

Today, few families would be happy with 15-year-olds roving on their own, yet that loss is to all today’s 15-year-olds, deprived of their independence just when they need to learn how to use it. The idea for Rail Operations Viewed from

South Devon stemmed from a day trip from Totnes to Carlisle in 1999 utilising the SettleCarlisle Line one-way, with all the pitfalls of a missed connection but at least getting home the same day.

Writing continued until it was almost completed in 2010, after which it was updated to cover incidents such as the Dawlish Sea Wall storms of 2014.

The appendices cover 62 pages and are a masterful collation of statistics which reveal details not previously published.

There is much that those interested in railways will learn - indeed, much that today’s railway managers can learn. Yet it is never dry and academic.

There are many timetables going back to the 19th century, plus numerous maps, fascinating for their history and detail.

We also have scathing analyses of broken promises regarding timetable opportunities, such as the lack of ability to reach Heathrow on a Sunday morning from the South West.

A few years back I was privileged to be asked to write the Foreword to this book, and also a tribute (on his retirement in 2012) to one of the industry’s most able managers - Julian Crow, who did so much for the West Country branch lines.

More details of the book, including cost, are contained in the advertisement which appears on page 83 of this issue of RAIL.