Review: The Festiniog Railway: Volume I, 1800–1889

RAILWAYS AND GEOGRAPHY. By A. C. O'Dell. (Hutchinson, 1956. 198 pp. Maps. I2S. 6d.) This book is "an endeavour, in the space available, to portray, with reference to numerous and varied examples, the geographical factors which have influenced in different places, at different times, the construction and the operation of railways." The author attacks this formidable task by first considering its separate elements: the track; the railway men; the land and the rail; fog and flood; and motive power. A long section follows entitled "The Railway Reticule". (May we be spared that word in future! What is wrong with "network"?) This is descriptive and worldwide, with special reference to physical and climatic features. Three more general, indeed sketchy, chapters conclude the book, on services, the urban pattern, and rivals to the railway. Professor O'Dell is evidently gripped by a consuming interest in railways of all sizes, ages, and climes, and the variety of example he draws on to illustrate his points shows a broad view; he sounds as much at home in Australia as at Aberdeen, though a smaller degree of concern with continental Europe is perceptible. It is the more to be regretted therefore that there are many small inaccuracies of fact, and a book appearing under the imprint of a "university library" should be more careful to avoid spelling mistakes in proper names ifit is to be commended to beginners. For example: the Lickey banker ofthe Midland Railway has not been the only British locomotive with ten coupled wheels (p. 36); upper quadrant signals were adopted not because of danger arising from snow clogging on lower-quadrant arms, but for their superior visibility (p. 61); the railway to whose name special atrention is called on p. 137is the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac; the London railway map (p. 167) is nearly twenty years out ofdate. Lake Pontchartrain, the Nullarbor plain, Chevet (near Wakefield), Kennington (London), and Yalloum (Victoria) are wrongly spelt, But all the same, much ground is covered, with zest, and the experienced student will learn something from it. When he has finished the book, he will most likely ask: "What, then, is the special contribution ofgeography to railway studies?How useful a tool is it?'.' Evidently, physical and climatic conditions impose special requirements on railway builders and operators, nearly always disadvantageous. (The favourable ones might have been mentioned in passing, like the gradient "with the load" from the coalfield ofSouth Wales down to the coast.) But there it seems to end, unless "geography" is to be taken as embracing something approaching every physical occurrence on, or just above or below, the surface of the earth. Short of that, Mr O'Dell's book itself demonstrates that the tool is rather blunt. It is difficult to find anything at all specificallygeographical in the chapter on railway men; but without the chapter the book would clearly be incomplete. Geographical factors might be supposed to show themselves operating in special force on the choice ofgauge ofrailway track; yet the table on p. 17 silently demonstrates that some other factors must have been more potently at work to produce the peculiar choices made in some countries. The geographical element has always been present, ofcourse, in railway location and working; but this study shows it to have been far less important than the influence ofeconomics and of personality that has forced railways across virtually impassable mountains and over waterless plains-to override physical geography, in a sense, in pursuit of other objectives. And that is the really interesting part ofit all. R. M. R.