Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. Some dust marking to the page block but page faces are clear and excellent. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The vast literature of railways mainly preoccupied with Parliamentary and inter-company struggles with locomotive matters and with the minutiae of day-to-day operation has to a large extent neglected the men who built directed and managed the railways. Only a handful of the great engineers have received the attention they deserve while the majority of the men who promoted our railways whose perseverance secured the Acts of Parliament and whose money paid the contractors bought the rolling-stock and provided the working capital are still shadowy figures whose very names are known only to the few. Mention of the Great Western Railway inevitably brings to mind the name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel the undoubted genius who planned and built a railway embodying enough unorthodox features to ensure the disapproval opposition and even ridicule of his profession and many of the shareholders. Yet he had been dead almost a century before a biography worthy of the subject appeared. But of Brunel’s associates we still know all too little. The memoirs and diary of Sir Daniel Gooch who knew and worked with many of them are now one of the very few sources from which we can obtain an authentic picture of their activities.