BOOK
REVIEW OF THE MONTH
West Coast Main Lines - 1957-1963
John Palmer
Pen & Sword Books, 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire S70 2AS. Tel: 01226 734222. Web: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk Email: enquiries@pen-and-sword.co.uk Description: Hardback, 254mm × 178mm 184pp. ISBN: 9781526 791825 Price £.35.
For better or worse, the West Coast Main Line changed more in the short space of six years from the late 1950s than the previous hundred. The speed of modernisation Was more than observers could possibly take in, and was not helped by the sparsity of official information and the non-existence of social media that came half a century later.
Now, a quality factual analysis written by someone with a keen interest in locomotive numbers as well as history is something quite novel, and extremely readable.
Thanks to his trawl through the archives, it's now possible to better understand the rapid rundown of the steam total from 17,000 to under 9,000, and the changing passenger and freight traffic patterns as new competition arrived With the
