On Tour for Steam is a book for the steam railway enthusiast. Howard Routledge devotes seven chapters to each of the railway regions that existed in 1968, when, as he writes in his brief Introduction, “steam was banished” (north-west England was in the London Midland Region). Each chapter consists of black-and-white photos of locomotives – two per page – with brief details of location, design and class. Routledge recalls his days as a teenager in Carlisle buying an all-line rover ticket giving “unlimited travel for a week”, going to spot engines and visit loco works in a “glorified shed bash”. Some of the photos are bleak, showing a “depressing station scene” and “neglect”: One shows lumps of coal scattered around an engine doomed for breaking up. Several of the photos are Routledge’s own. His love for steam is obvious, many pictures evoking excitement or sadness. As he says: “We are fortunate … that our photographic recollections have survived to leave us with a host of memories of a time that is nothing more than a distant past”.
The book shows the need for a companion volume on the fascinating history of steam locomotion, arguably dating from 15 September 1830 when Stephenson’s Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened (and William Huskisson MP was killed when struck by the Rocket near Newton-le-Willows). The economic and social impacts of the Railway Age were huge. The canal owners and turnpike trusts saw their profits and share prices collapse. Villages and towns expanded enormously, goods and people moved with ease … and more cheaply. Many of those social upheavals also have their photographic records, but regrettably are not the focus of Routledge’s book.
The Railway Age saw bitter rivalries between the scores of companies that were set up, driving competition and monopolisation, showing capitalism at its rawest. How to capture that in a photograph?
A more rounded book could have given more historical detail to accompany the photos. The nationalisation of the railways on 1 January 1948 under the Labour Government’s Transport Act is barely mentioned; nor is the specific regional impact of Beeching’s closures from 1963. In the north-west, passenger services were withdrawn from 605 miles of track (out of 2000 miles) and 300 out of 600 stations were closed.
The abandoned site of Gorton Locomotive Works in Manchester was put up for sale in May 1963. It had employed 1400 people – a sad farewell to Routledge’s “shed bashes”! But have we properly recorded, in book, film or audiotape, the impact on the lives of working people, te lives of working people, their families and their communities?
George McLean