Travelling on the Victorian Railway: Travel in the Early Days of Steam [Paperback]

‘The most striking result produced by the completion of this Railway, is the sudden and marvellous change which has been effected in our ideas of time and space. What was quick is now slow; what was distant is now near.’ So wrote Henry Booth of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. The early railways changed all aspects of life: what people ate (and how they cooked), what they wore and how they communicated. But what was it like to travel on the railways in the 1830s and 1840s? This book hopes to explore the experiences of these pioneer railway travellers, from the first railway stations and railway carriages to the hazards of the journey itself.Anthony Dawson has a lifetime’s interest in railways; he is a graduate both of the University of Bradford (B.Sc hons, archaeology) and the University of Leeds (M.Res, history). Anthony is a member of staff at the Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester, where he puts his enthusiasm for early railways into practice as a Railway Volunteer on the replica ‘Planet’ locomotive.