Discover the ultimate compendium of unique tales, record-breaking feats and engaging train trivia in All Aboard by Julian Holland: a wonderful collection of stories that make compulsive reading for railway enthusiasts everywhere.
Packed with more than 200 anecdotes, facts and intriguing tales, we’ve picked five engine-ious stories from this delightful book that are sure to spark your interest; from the Royal Scot’s 11,000-mile journey in the USA and Canada to Mallard’s unbeaten world speed record of 1938. It’s time to go full steam ahead…
The ultimate Holiday Haunts by train in the early 1900s
From 1906 until the outbreak of the Second World War, the Great Western Railway published Holiday Haunts, an annual guide to holiday resorts served by the railway, which included lists of hotels and boarding establishments. The guide, costing 6d (2½p), was almost 700 pages long and over 200,000 copies were printed each year. To help popularise and give people an opportunity to inspect prospective ‘digs’, special trains were operated in the 1930s at cheap fares on Sundays during the spring.
No more buckets and spades – Britain’s lost seaside branch lines
It is a sad fact that many seaside branch lines were closed in the 1930s and after World War 2. The South of England in particular suffered greatly from the post ‘Beeching Report’ cuts. With passenger closure dates given in brackets, the resorts in Cornwall that lost their rail links were: Perranporth (1963), Fowey (1965), Padstow (1967) and Bude (1966).
The Royal Scot’s 11,000-mile journey in the USA and Canada
Built as No 6152 The Royal Dragoon Guardsman at Derby in 1930, this loco permanently swapped identities with the first engine of this class, No 6100 Royal Scot, in 1933 when it was sent with a train of carriages to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. Fitted with a large headlamp, the engine and train then covered over 11,000 miles of the railroads of Canada and the USA and was visited by over 3 million people. On return to the UK the loco remained on mainline duties on the West Coast Main Line between Euston and Glasgow until being withdrawn by BR as No 46100 in October 1962.
How to fly by Great Western Railway from Cardiff to Plymouth
Even back in the late 1920s the railways saw domestic airlines as a serious threat and in 1929 the ‘Big Four’ – GWR, LMS, LNER and SR – obtained Parliamentary approval to run their own air services. Apart from the Southern Railway’s unsuccessful attempt to take control of Imperial Airways nothing much happened until 1933 when the GWR started an air service for mail and passengers linking Cardiff and Plymouth – an obvious choice as the meandering
This article is written by September Withers, a freelance travel copywriter and marketing copywriter with a love of the British countryside.
Discover the ultimate compendium of unique tales, record-breaking feats and engaging train trivia in All Aboard by Julian Holland: a wonderful collection of stories that make compulsive reading for railway enthusiasts everywhere.