In the mail...

.....the two volumes of John Thomas's "The North British Railway". The North British was kind of an interesting operation - an insurgent company, dedicated to breaking the monopoly the Caledonian enjoyed on service to Scotland.

I first became familiar with it when I started doing some reading on the Tay Bridge disaster. The bridge over the Firth of Tay was at its completion in 1878 the longest in the world. It lasted for about a year in service, collapsing under a passenger train on the night of December 28th, 1879, and carrying all 75 people aboard to their deaths. The very British voice of "The Steam Index" describes it as "mean and impoverished," a condition that almost certainly contributed to the fatal corners that the contractors cut in its construction. The Tay Bridge collapse was one of the great folkloric disasters of the long Nineteenth Century (1815-1914), producing some of the same cultural effect as the sinking of the Titanic, the explosion of the Space Shuttle, or 9/11 - it was one of those events that appear as a kind of general rebuke to the achievements of the age.

Interestingly, Thomas chose the disaster as the dividing point between the two volumes; the endpaper of the first volume is adorned with a diagram of the coaches and locomotive on the Edinburgh-Dundee express, the train that fell into the Tay encased in the girders of the bridge. The North British had its share of engineering achievements - its bridge over the Firth of Forth is perhaps the greatest of all Scottish engineering landmarks, and its buildings in Edinburgh are splendid piles of Victorian gothic.