Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. No notes or highlighting. Some tanning and dustmarks due to age. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> By John Thomas (author of The West Highland Railway) The clan chiefs were at war again. But the year was 1845 and they had found something new to wrangle about-railways. Glen Falloch the deep mountain pass running from the top of Loch Lomond northwards to Crianlarich was the key to the West High- lands. Glen Falloch was Breadalbane country and the Duke of Montrose was the titular head of a railway that had been promoted to climb up the glen on its way to open up the West Highlands. When Montrose’s engineers appeared in the glen the Breadalbane men swooped on them and put them to flight. ‘We hear it was a well- fought battle’ report the Perthshire Advertiser ‘gallantly sus tained by the engineers against fearful odds where the assailants were ready to go to any extremity after the Highland fashion to please the laird.’ When the Montrose men returned to the glen armed with an interdict Breadalbane’s men eschewed violence but managed to place themselves peacefully in the line of sight of the theodolites. Forty-nine years passed before the railway came to Glen Falloch. True enough by 1880 two lines had reached the west coast the Callander & Oban at Oban and the Dingwall & Skye at Kyle of Lochalsh. But these were branch lines straggling out from the parent Caledonian and Highland companies. There was no north and south trunk line. The great tract of wild and beautiful country between the two cross-country lines remained remote and inaccessible to the ordinary traveller. The impetus for building the West Highland Railway came from Fort William and the country round it. Lochaber. The people of Lochaber felt that they were cut off from the outside world and that only a railway would end their isolation and solve the problems that went with it. The sensible thing would have been to have taken the line from Fort William down the coast through Onich Ballachulish and Appin to link up with the existing Callander & Oban line at Connel Ferry. But the people of Lochaber had sponsored the line and through Lochaber it had to go.