This is a profusely illustrated account of the period from 1938 to 1953,
containing over 90,000 words with 200 mostly unpublished illustrations, ranging
from Thurso to Hayling Island, and from Dingle to Wisbech provides a stunning
exploration of the fifteen years that shaped the future of Britain's railways.
By using contemporary records, and exploring developments on British Railways,
in Ulster and in Ireland, Robert Hendry has drawn parallels that shed new light
on what really happened. We meet Robin Riddles, the last steam locomotive
engineer, Col Eric Gore Browne, an outspoken railway chairman, Frank Pope, who
closed more than half the system he ran in a few months, Bill Allen, a union
man turned employer, and George Howden, who was in turn a civil engineer, a
mechanical engineer, a manager, and railway board chairman. With the wealth of
authoritative data that appears in this book, Robert Hendry questions the long
accepted allegation that railway managers, who had done a superb job in time of
war, lost touch with reality.

He suggests this argument was a product
of old company loyalties, political expediency, and a failure to study the
facts, and that the Railway Executive, the men who ran BR from 1948 to 1953,
were not the fools that some writers claim, but responsible men who had been
put in an impossible position, and almost succeeded in doing the
impossible.