THE time is the middle 1890s, when the British railway system was approaching the zenith of its power and importance. For the professional railwayman what were the sources of regular information? The monthly Railway Engineer and the weeklies Engineer and Engineering served well on the technical side. Investors and speculators had the Railway Times and Herapath’s Weekly, both somewhat fossilised in appearance and content. Middle management had the long established Railway News to rely on. For ordinary railwaymen there was the weekly Railway Herald.
By contrast the growing yet ill-defined body of amateur railway enthusiasts was poorly provided for. Railway Herald, founded 1887, did supply some paragraphs of general interest and in 1896 came Moore’s Monthly Magazine (later to find fame and authority as The Locomotive Magazine). Yet neither offered more than thin gruel, usually 12 or 16 pages of editorial, and they could be sucked dry by the reader in 20 minutes.
Frank Cornwall, the proprietor of the Railway Herald, was well aware of the shortcomings of his paper, and noted the intense public interest in the so-called ‘Railway Race To The North’ of August 1895, during which large crowds gathered at strategic points, the daily results being published in the national newspapers. He decided the time was ripe for a more substantial monthly magazine. But first he needed an editor with journalistic flair and a good working knowledge of railways to develop his ideas.
His choice fell upon a young Londoner, George Augustus Nokes, then working in the family business as a land agent, surveyor and auctioneer. Nokes, who always wrote under the pseudonym of G A Sekon, was a keen rail enthusiast from boyhood and for some time had been submitting articles and news paragraphs to the Herald. Sekon, as we shall now call him, was already an established author with the first definitive history of the Great Western Broad Gauge (1895, two printings) to his name as well as shorter accounts of the South Eastern Railway and the London & South Western Railway (1895 and 1896 respectively).
Over the period of some months Cornwall and Sekon crystallised the theme of a really substantial monthly with long articles by reputable authors, containing solid narrative rather than snippets, mechanically typeset, printed on good quality paper, generously illustrated by the new half-tone process, and at an affordable cover price.
Such an enterprise would require).
