Product Description

Historically, more than a dozen main line termini as well as both surface and underground lines, the railway network of London is without doubt the most complex in the British Isles. From the 1830s onwards, when the first main lines to serve Greater London area were built, a vast network was constructed. In an era when private enterprise dominated the industry, it was inevitable that there would be competing lines but, as London grew both in prosperity and size, so the presence of these routes, that allowed for the growth of suburbs and the shipment of the vast amounts of food consumed by the city's population, became all the more important. Most of the main line railways terminated at the edge of the built-up area at the time they were constructed, leaving access to the very centre of the city to road transport. However, from the 1860s onwards, with the construction of the first part of the future Underground network, railways came to penetrate even the most densely constructed parts of the city. In the 21st century, although some lines and stations have disappeared, most notably termini such as Holborn Viaduct and Broad Street, the vast bulk of the London railway network continues to play a pivotal role in the daily life of the city. Moreover, as pressure on the road network expands, there is continuing investment in the railway infrastructure that serves London through, for example, expansion of the Docklands Light Railway. London Rail Atlas provides the reader with a straightforward and comprehensible study of the railways of Greater London. It shows all lines, both open and closed, stations, changes of station name and station opening and closing dates. It provides a comprehensive and authoritative study of the whole network of lines in the capital covering both ex-BR and London Underground tracks. The geographical relationship between the two is also easily ascertained from the maps.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9417 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-02
• Binding: Hardcover
• 96 pages

Customer Reviews

Not just for railway enthusiasts
There's no denying it, this book fills a rather small niche. I imagine that the vast majority of its buyers will be railway enthusiasts, trainspotters, and model railway builders.

Despite being as none of the above, I love it. On railway journeys, I'm always looking out of the window. Railways take you through the unregarded, unkempt parts of London. You see the backs of things - factories, houses, shops, and parks. You see the strange, isolated triangles of wasteground marginalised by the building of the great brick viaducts that carry the trains through the city and suburbs. And you see other railways. Some of them still carry trains, others are ghosts of sidings and lines abandoned years ago.

The London Railway Atlas in its elegantly created maps shows the routes of all London's railway lines, past and present. Everything is there: goods yards, stations, sidings. Some of these still exist, others stand empty or have been erased from the landscape. Combined with an A to Z, it begins to give you an understanding of why the map of London looks like it does.

An example: I used to rent a flat just north-west of Hammersmith. Looking at the map, my flatmate and I could see the ghost of a railway line curving through the streets to the north. Otherwise regular roads were truncated, but by what? I now discover that this was the path taken by the Hammersmith and Chiswick Branch of the North and South West Junction Railway (1857-1965).

The book is well produced, the maps are elegant. Crowded areas around junctions and termini are given enlarged insets. The second half of the book contains facts and figures about all lines.

This book isn't for everyone, but you don't have to have a shelf full of railway books to appreciate it.

London Railway Atlas.
Joe Brown has gone a long way to addressing two of the usual problems which have been apparent with many previous publications of this kind.

1. The regular need to use such an atlas in conjunction with other reference data in order to get a more comprehensive picture of a particular location.

2. The difficulty in deciphering exactly 'what's going on' in some of the more complex areas.

The incorporation of what was, what is and what will be, along with dates opened, dates closed, helpful explanatory notes and nice touches such as the former names of stations, combined with a cleverly chosen colour scheme, makes using this atlas a real pleasure.

Vastly improved format
As cheeky as it is to write my own 5-star review, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank those of you who purchased the first edition of the London Railway Atlas, and to impress how radically I have overhauled the format for this second edition.

I have painstakingly re-drawn the entire work such that now every single track and platform have been mapped, so it is in many ways a combination of a 'Quail' track diagram with S K Baker's Railway Atlas. I have added much more information in terms of goods yards and railway-served industrial sites from review of old Ordnance Survey maps, and have added several more larger-scale inset maps of more complex areas.

This added detail has necessitated an increase in size of the book to A4, so all in all it does look and feel very different to the first edition and if I say so myself is a far superior product.

If you bought the first edition and enjoyed it, again thank you... I am certain that you will be impressed by this second edition.

Thank you, Joe Brown