Product Description: Though trains are one of the safest forms of transport, train accidents always make headline news. Their history is, in many ways, the history of technological development and learning. Early incidents like the felling of William Huskisson MP by Stephenson's Rocket in 1830 led to the reporting systems we know today, while within 50 years safer signalling and braking methods had been made mandatory...read more

Product Description: For British Rail, the 1970s was a time of contrasts, when bad jokes about sandwiches and pork pies often veiled real achievement, like increasing computerisation and the arrival of the high-speed Inter-City 125s. But while television advertisements told of an 'Age of the Train', Monday morning misery remained for many, the commuter experience steadily worsening as rolling stock aged and grew ever more uncomfortable...read more

Product Description: The 1950s saw a realisation that British Railways needed to modernise its equipment and rationalise its network if it was to hold its own in the face of growing competition from road and air transport. The next decade brought line closures, new liveries and the last breath of steam, as Doctor Beeching and his successors strove to break even and build a new business from the old...read more

Product Description: John Betjeman was undoubtedly the most popular Poet Laureate since Tennyson. But beneath the thoroughly modern window on Britain that he opened during his lifetime lay the influence of his nineteenth-century forebears. This book explores his identity through such Victorianism via the verse of that period, but also its architecture, religious faith and – more importantly – religious doubt...read more

Product Description: Born at the start of the twentieth century, John Betjeman later wrote that he always knew he would be a poet. In time, he would indeed become the most popular Poet Laureate since Tennyson, but he was more than that: as a noted broadcaster and journalist, he also did much to help us appreciate the beauty all around us - in the landscape, in architecture, in churches, on the coast and on the railway...read more