Steam and Speed
CANON LLOYD belongs to a very particular generation of railway enthusiasts. He is among those who enjoyed, as young children, the last few years of the independent railway in this country. Flyers which now adorn the York Museum thundered over the main lines. Everywhere was colour. To travel was to find variety, rivalry, and some of the happier results of competition. The financial condition of some of the companies would not have been apparent, and would have mattered nothing if it had. Railway life was exuberant, attractive, individual. Brass fittings dazzled the eye, and steam at speed was even more thrilling than it is now, since the aeroplane was in its childhood and the pre-1914 fast car -was the prerogative of the very rich.
Nurtured in such times, Canon Lloyd has lived to see first the quelling effects of a vast war, then great amalgamations which snuffed out the more extravagant railway eccentricities, then another -vast war, followed by nationalisation. How easy, after his opening chapter on "The Pleasure of Watching, Trains," to have become merely nostalgic. It is a great virtue in his appreciation of the steam railway that it has not become so. Changes are followed with interest and sympathy. The author's adult pleasure is, in fact, as great as that of his childhood, and is reinforced by wide experience. He has graduated from the superficialities of railway life to an appraisal of the spirit which informs it. His later chapters include an account of an accident in which he once found himself, where the lives of the passengers were saved by the vigilance and skill of the driver ; and there is a succinct account of the railways in war. They had a record fit to compare with that of any other public service, and not one instance is known of an employee leaving an essential post or a train under fire. The FascinaKon of Railways ends with a hopeful forecast, hopeful at least in the sense that the author anticipates that the steam locomotive, which is the true focus of his interest, will still, despite its successful rivals, be very much at work even in 1960.
The love of railways defeats glib analysis, but it is fairly wide- spread. Canon Lloyd says that if he writes three articles, one on a religious, one on an historical and one on a railway subject, he will have three or four times as much correspondence arising from the third subject as from the other two. Although the audience is predominantly masculine, it is not entirely so. And one matter offends the feminine eye even more than that of the small boy engaged in hero-worship and number-noting : British Railways may produce fine machinery, but they do not keep it clean.
OLIVER WARNER.
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