local railroads

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local railroads

1kdweber
Nov 2, 2016, 4:51 pm

I'm from the San Francisco Bay Area. It's always fun to pick up books on local railways. I just picked up three books on different defunct Bay Area railroads:

Hetch Hetchy and its Dam Railroad (Theodore Wurm) about the railway used to build the Hetch Hetchy water system
The Crookedest Railroad in the World (also Wurm) - a History of the Mt. Tamalpais & Muir Woods Railroad of California
The State Belt (Kaufman) - San Francisco's Waterfront Railroad

All great reads with numerous historical photos.

2RobertDay
Abr 30, 2023, 6:44 pm

I've recently started a re-read of one of my favourite books, an obscure work on European minor railways entitled The End of the Line by a (now) obscure British novelist, Bryan Morgan. He wrote a number of novels in the late 1940s/early 1950s which are now pretty much forgotten. He wrote this book in 1955, describing his journeys around Western Europe, looking at obscure minor railways, many of which most likely closed before the book got into print (especially in France).

However, a lot of what he saw in Germany and Austria did survive rather longer, and certainly the first time I read it, a lot of what he wrote chimed with me. Moreover, I'd been able to access Eastern Europe and saw the sort of railways he wrote about, before they got privatised or gentrified out of recognition. So I'd long had the idea of writing a sort of partial sequel, bringing some of the book up to date and highlighting Morgan's work for a new generation. But I've had difficulty interesting a publisher - even those who knew of the original - and so I've decided to write the book anyway and, if necessary, publish it myself.

Just to make it clear, Morgan wasn't writing a technical treatise; he was more likely to talk about the décor of the stations, the behaviour of the passengers, the decrepitude of the rolling stock and the shape of the conductor's moustache than he was to give nuts and bolts details of the engines or describe the minutiae of the timetable. Perhaps I may give a quote:

"For Égreville, now a terminus, was formerly a junction. The Chemins de Fer Departmentaux worked from it back to Souppes and Château-Landon, over a line so recently abandoned that the timetables showing the Paris connections still hang yellowing in the station-houses; whilst the old Chemins de Fer d'Intérêt Local de l'Yonne went on from an embrancement now marked by a derelict signal just east of the station. This line today is used for a few hundred yards as a siding, but beyond that its rails vanish under grass. And by 'grass' I do not mean a six-inch growth such as covers the active Montereau route, but a jungle of yard-high pasture from which the tracks hardly reappear until Sens, twenty-five miles away.

But they are there; and the thrifty French rarely leave steel to rust quite purposeless; and in fact this buried line is still used for carrying - beetroot. This is not the beet you eat, of course, but that bloodless root which they turn into sugar and which has to be gathered in tens of thousands of tons over a wide area and shipped to a refinery during some two months of the year. This is a job for a railway; and so it is not surprising that all over the langue d'oïl, from Flanders to the Loire, you stumble across such lignes betteravières. Some carry passengers on the side, but most sleep their deep sleep under long grass for ten months out of twelve. They lie down, but they are not dead."