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The basic principle of the railway is one of great antiquity and wooden railways were used in many European mines from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. But the most far-reaching developments, as Dr. Lewis shows in this classic and hard-to-find reissued book, originally published in 1970, took place in British coalfields.
List of contents
1.The Early Railway Scene 2. The Leitnagel Hund 3. The Hungarian Hund 4. Channel- and Flanged-Rail Railways 5. Guide-Wheel Railways 6. Flanged-Wheel Railways in Eastern Europe 7. English Railways before 1660 8. The Newcastle Waggonway: Its Spread on Tyneside and Elsewhere 9. The Newcastle Waggonway: Wayleaves and Engineering 10. The Newcastle Waggonway: Track 11. The Newcastle Waggonway: Waggons 12. The Newcastle Waggonway: Operating and Maintenance 13. The Shropshire Railway: I 14. The Shropshire Railway: II 15. Canal Railways and the Coming of the Iron Rail 16. Miscellaneous Railways 17. British Railways Underground 18. English Railways on the Continent. Appendix: Comparative Efficiency of Continental Railway Vehicles.
About the author
M. J. T. Lewis spent nine years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where, after graduating in classics and acquiring a PhD, he was awarded a three-year fellowship. He spent it on research for this book, a pioneering study which is still regarded as the standard work in its field. From 1968 he worked in the Adult Education Department of the University of Hull, teaching industrial archaeology and the history of technology to evening classes and residential courses. He initiated an annual fieldwork course based at the Snowdonia National Park study centre, which ran for fifty years before falling victim to Covid. In 1976-78 he served as president, and thereafter a vice-president, of the Railway & Canal Historical Society, and from 1998 to 2018 he sat on the Early Railways Conference committee. A fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, he has published many books and papers on such diverse topics as early railways, the Welsh slate industry, and Greek and Roman engineering. He retired from teaching, though not from writing, in 2001.
