At the time of writing, over 200 underground railways are in service or under construction and here are the technical challenges they faced and the colourful personalities involved in their stories. In January 1863, London's Metropolitan Railway, running from Paddington to Farringdon, became the world's first underground railway. Budapest and Glasgow followed London in 1896 and in 1900 Paris added its Métro. Another 10 cities joined the underground club by 1939, many only a few kilometres in length with some tracks above ground. Since 2001, 79 underground railways have entered service, mostly in Asia with Chinese cities leading the way, in particular Beijing and Shanghai with its 420 miles of track, with both approaching four billion passengers a year. The deepest station is in St Petersburg at 86 metres or 282ft below ground built in the 1950s. From Auckland and Berlin's U-Bahn, Buenos Aires, the Chicago 'L', Crossrail, the Madrid Metro, we travel to Mexico City, Moscow, the New York subway, Pyong Yang, Stockholm, and Vienna, absorbing stories and trivia from innovative engineers and corrupt politicians, earthquakes and morning rush hours to great successes and terrible tragedies. With tales of secret networks and nuclear shelters, Art Nouveau and woolly mammoths, we delve deep underground. 144pp, well illus. with photos and line art.

'A Quiz Book for the Cultured Trainspotter' the book will test your knowledge of this country's rail system and enlighten you on the most colourful aspects of its long history. Covers entrepreneurs and engineers beginning with the first question. The carved head of which British steam pioneer is on the roof of the Gare du Nord Station, Paris? Was George Stephenson the father of Robert, or was Robert the father of George? Who on 5th July 1841 took his first step in the leisure travel business by chartering a train to take 500 temperance supporters from Leicester to Loughborough? What is Brunel's billiard table? There are picture questions and archive photos of the Flying Scotsman right up to which Great British Bake Off judge once served on the BR Board? Meet trunk murderers, trainspotters, haters of railways, railway writers, Ministers for Transport good and bad, railway cats and dogs and even a railway penguin, crime and criminals, celebrities, staff, stations and tunnels, bridges and junctions, famous trains and locos, carriages and sleepers, classes and tickets, refreshment, erotica and accidents. When was smoking banned on trains? What regular lineside event did Dickens describe as 'a shave in the air'? And what is a steam banana? 230pp, photos and thankfully, answers.

With a passion for engineering history, John Hannavy has written extensively on railways, steam-powered machines, the history of photography and the Industrial Revolution of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Power without control is unusable power, and long after the invention of the steam engine, finding ways of applying that power to tasks where consistency was of paramount importance was the Holy Grail which many steam engineers sought to find. It was the centrifugal governor which brought precision to the application of steam power, and its story can be traced back to 17th century Holland and Christiaan Huygens' development of both the pendulum clock and system controls for windmills. Governors are still at the heart of sophisticated machinery today, albeit electronic rather than mechanical. As machine speed increased, the governor had to evolve to keep pace with the demands for greater precision. Over 100 British patents were applied for in the 19th century alone for 'improvements' in governor design, many of which could be fitted or retro-fitted to engines from every large manufacturer. This is the first book to deal with the subject, telling the story of the evolution of the original 'spinning-ball' governor from its first appearance to the point where it became a small device entirely enclosed in a housing to keep it clean, and thus hidden from view. Over 200 photographs, engravings, plans and diagrams, one of which is a series of colour photographs of one of the few large mill engines to survive, Wigan's 2500hp Trencher Field Mill Engine and some of the more than 60,000 spindles in operation, all belt-driven from the massive steam engine. Chapters include James Watt Harnessing Steam, Selected Patents 1698-1913, British Governor Makers and Suppliers and Places to See Governors at Work including Showman's Road Locomotive No.3555 the Busy Bee, pumping stations, Twyford Waterworks, the Robey Trust's New Perseverance Ironworks in Tavistock or the shiny red balls of the Armstrong Engines which provided hydraulic power at Ellesmere Port, now the National Waterways Museum. Packed with colour, 160 large pages, 21.6 x 28cm.
Click YouTube icon to see this book come to life on video.