Fabryki lokomotyw - Wielka Brytania: książki (1/3)

From the early 1800s and for nearly 170 years, steam locomotives were built in Great Britain and Ireland, by a variety of firms, large and small.
James Lowe spent many years accumulating a considerable archive of material on the History of the locomotive building industry, from its early beginnings at the dawn of railways, until the end of steam locomotive construction in the 1960s.

"British Steam Locomotive Builders" was first published in 1975 and has not been in print for some years. This useful and well researched book is a must for any serious railway historian or locomotive enthusiast, 704 pages with reference to 350 builders, 541 illustrations and 47 diagrams.

The material in this book has been carefully selected to cover all the leading former steam locomotive manufacturers in the British Isles.

In recent years the importance of the personal element in locomotive design and operation has increasingly come to be seen as very important. No author any longer attempts to compile articles which state that: Mr X built a class of 6' 4-4-0s... because, in some cases, Wainwright comes immediately to mind, he had little part in their design. Even the great Stanier relied on a team of engineers and draughtsman who transformed his outline ideas into detailed designs.

This book which was originally conceived as a series of articles for Back Track is intended to be brief but tight profiles of some of Britain's loco engineers, some very well known, some not, examining their work in relation to the points made earlier. Some reassessments, that of Gresley for example will be controversial.

This book was originally envisaged as a purely photographic overview of those British main-line diesel and electric locomotives which managed to find further useful employment across Europe after completion of their careers in the United Kingdom.
However, such was the quantity of information collected regarding these exported locomotives and their operational deployment over the past twenty years that the scope of the book was expanded to incorporate both the factual and the pictorial into a detailed history of these locomotives.
The geographical use of the locomotives is surprisingly extensive including France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Kosovo, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia in the twenty years since 1998.

A significant amount of exclusive factual information and over 200 previously unpublished photographs combine to provide a comprehensive insight into the British locomotives now finding a second life overseas, including coverage of Class 37, 56 and 58 locomotives on high-speed line construction work in France, Class 37 mishaps in Spain, Class 86s on their day of arrival in Bulgaria, and various types of a.c. electric locomotives in their new "natural habitats" across Eastern Europe.

The history of commercial railway locomotive manufacture in the Leeds is a fascinating story, covering a period of nearly two centuries, which commenced during the Napoleonic period and only came to an end in 1995.
The two companies that most epitomised the formative years and period of consolidation of this this part of Britains industrial history were E.B. Wilson & Co (1846-59) and Manning Wardle & Co (1858-1927).

The former manufacturer was well known for the Jenny Lind locomotives and their derivative designs used on several British main lines during the mid-nineteenth century. They proved to have a profound influence upon the work of other manufacturers for main line needs.
The latter company was a builder of contractors and industrial locomotives, used worldwide, whose mainstream designs were likewise highly influential upon the work of neighbouring manufacturers, constituting a sphere of locomotive production that lasted from before the Crimean War until after the end of the Second World War.

In this new work, Mark Smithers draws upon a variety of sources, both documentary and illustrative, to arrive at an up-to date appraisal of the achievements of these companies during their respective periods of production, and their legacy to the greater sphere of British railway locomotive development.

The world-famous Beyer, Peacock works of Gorton, Manchester, is remembered principally for its remarkable Beyer-Garratt articulated locomotives, which ran in forty-eight countries. The firm would also turn out steam lorries and steam tram engines.
Among the company's iconic domestic designs were the 4-4-0T condensing engines for the pre-electrified Metropolitan Railway in London, the narrow-gauge 2-4-0 tank engine that is synonymous with the Isle of Man and the stylish and powerful diesel-hydraulic Hymeks for British Railways' Western Region.

Beyer, Peacock exported many of its 8,000 steam, diesel and electric locomotives all over the world and this book illustrates a variety of these throughout the company's 112-year existence, beginning in 1854.