Updated and enlarged edition of the Scenes from the Past 11A in the series, this is a truly nostalgic collection of archive images and the original 1991 text reproduced in facsimile, now a rather dated looking design, but a valuable historical record. 'It all began in the 1980s with a handful of railway pictures which I hoped would be accepted by Becknell Books to emerge as 'The Railways of Nottingham' but they ceased publishing shortly after they received my offering so it came to nothing. Thankfully the project was rekindled and the well written and carefully researched manuscript and good quality images reproduced on the right kind of bright white glossy paper plus illustrations showing the entire railway scene.? With humour and anecdotes, the history covers approximately 140 years. In 1850, the then Midland Station was to be found on a route from Derby to Lincoln to which was connected a branch line running through the northern suburbs of Basford and Bulwell proceeding up the valley of the River Leen and ultimately reaching Mansfield. A few miles to the east of the city at Netherfield a connection went off in a south-easterly direction crossing the River Trent near Radcliffe and joining what is now the East Coast Mainline from Kings Cross to Edinburgh at Grantham. The GNR spread its tentacles beyond the coalfield to reach the breweries of Burton-on-Trent and out as far as the rich pastureland east of Stafford from which district it secured a valuable traffic in milk for London. Much land was available at Colwick, east of Nottingham, and there a facility blossomed to become a main shed in LNER days housing well over 200 engines. On 1st July 1878 a line from Bottesford West Junction on the Grantham Line to Newark was opened. There remain in Nottingham two railway built clock towers, and a journey through the pages of this book take young and old alike to the most relevant places in and around the city and we are rewarded with hours of nostalgic pleasure looking at the engines and coaches, civil engineering works of cuttings and concrete drainage channels, colliery closures, the booking office, and in the colour section of eight pages a smartly turned out LMS Jubilee 46560 Blake Director No. 62667 Somme, Britannia No. 7001 to John of Gaunt, or a Stanier 2-6-4T No. 2550 waiting patiently among this gallery of hundreds of superb archive images, tickets reproduced and beautifully drawn maps. Large sized softback.

Photographs from the Bluebell Museum Archive from the 1950s and 1960s are collected in this special picture book with extended captions and a special thanks to a gentleman named Chris Turner who first contacted the author about the collection which without his intervention would have ended up in a skip! Around the end of 2007, they opened one of the storage crates to find shoeboxes full of negatives, neatly stored with date and location written on the outside containing over 6,000 negatives, pictures nearly all of trains or locomotives. The photographer was John Smith who worked for British Railways at Croydon in the Divisional Office who had taken many signalling exams and worked for much of his time in the Special Trains area. This was the reason he knew about the interesting workings he photographed, not only superb pictures of the Southern Region era but also many other unusual pictures, never before published. See a Pullman Brake Car no. 80 with fresh paint passing Kentish Town West in September 1955, filming for The Railway Children TV series February 1957, milk trains, new electric locomotives, a Tyneside parcels car, track testing trials, ramblers? excursions, the Merlin which was used in a TV train crash sequence but suffered relatively little damage, a C-Class 060 no. 31297 emerging from the gloom at Holborn and entering a bomb-damaged area September 1956, weed-killing trains which were fascinating if an irregular sight on country routes, a level crossing and a visit to Lewisham one Sunday to photograph the Golden Arrow, 2pm Victoria to Folkestone Harbour. Battle of Britain Class Pacific no.34085 (501 Squadron) is in charge. 5-Bel Pullman Unit no.3051 is an unusual sight leaving Blackfriars in April 1961 with extra passengers in the cab. And there were exhibitions such as Eastbourne in June 1951 and the Modern Railway Exhibition opened 1st July 1957 with a surprising visitor to Southern Metals, the prototype Deltic in company with diesel no. D8000 from Willesden Junction to Battersea for display. Glossy white heavyweight paper has been used to showcase these restored archive photographs to their best possible quality. An album to bring the joy back into nostalgia, finding new photographs of the UK railway seen in the 1950s can be difficult and this is a totally new source. 28 x 22cm, 64 pages, illus.

Sub-titled 'The Changing Face of Aerial Warfare 1940 to the Present Day' defence expert Anthony Tucker-Jones charts the remarkable evolution of aerial warfare and asks can air power alone win a war? That has been a question since the Second World War. Air attacks failed miserably in Vietnam; Operation Linebacker had little effect, while bombing Hanoi just increased hatred for America, yet airstrikes in both Iraq and Libya helped bring about regime changes. No-fly zones may have worked in the Balkans, but they might as well not have been there for Saddam Hussein's Iraq. From the Luftwaffe's massed attack on Britain to NATO's interventions in Libya, the piston engine has been replaced by the jet, and in some cases the pilot has been completely replaced by the microchip and remote control. Carpet bombing is now a global positioning system, and laser pinpointed strikes use precision-guided munitions. Whereas a bomber's greatest enemies were once fighters and flak, these threats have morphed into smart missiles from half a world away. Chapters include Eagle Day, Striking Pearl Harbor, Slaughterer at Kharkov, Typhoons over Normandy, Target Toulon, Death Over the Reich, MiG Alley, Day of the Helicopter, Nam Mud Movers, Niagara, Storm in the Desert and Bombing Tripoli and Rise of the Drone. 220 page softback, 28 pages of illustrations. A History Press publication.

The Firefly replica at Didcot, the immense chimney of the former Kew Pumping Station, Daniel Gooch's Iron Duke replica in its new home at the National Railway Museum, York, the paddle steamer Kingswear Castle on the River Dart, Anthony Burton has travelled from the Highlands of Scotland to the southwest of England in pursuit of his passion for the steam engine in all its different forms. He has travelled on narrow gauge railways in Wales and enjoyed the splendour of mainline journeys behind some of the grandest locomotives ever built. He has shovelled coal into the boiler of an old Clyde Puffer and luxuriated in the elegance of a Windermere steam launch. He has marvelled at the magnificence of the great Victorian pumping engines and their elaborately decorated engine houses and spends time every year helping to oil and polish an old mill engine to get it ready to receive visitors. He has revelled in the fun of the steam fair and shared a ride in a replica of Richard Trevithick's extraordinary steam carriage with a direct descendent of the great engineer. His lively narrative covers these experiences of the places he visits which he puts within its historical context. It is also a tribute to the anonymous volunteers whose hard work keeps the great steam tradition alive. 150 big glossy pages, colour photos and maps.
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'First of all, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the numerous photographers who had the foresight to record the steam age in Sussex and have permitted me to borrow their cherished and irreplaceable images for publication in this album.' Today Sussex is best known to railway aficionados as the home of the Bluebell Line, Britain's first preserved standard gauge passenger-carrying railway, but at one time the sound of steam could be heard across the country. Many mainline routes had been electrified in the 1930s, but only the passenger services were affected, and well into the BR era, steam traction continued unchallenged on a variety of tasks, ranging from Bulleid Pacifics on long distance and inter-regional expresses, to diminutive LBSCR 'Terriers' pottering around on menial shunting duties. Some distinctive designs such as the elegant Billinton K Class 'Moguls', were closely associated with Sussex and gave the county a special identity. We take a nostalgic journey on the Hellingly Hospital Railway, Hastings to Ashford, Eastbourne to Tunbridge Wells, the East Coast Line, Three Bridges, and visitors to Brighton like the Caledonian Railway 'single' or a GNR no. 1247, the Brighton Line to Hayward Heath, Pulborough to Midhurst, West Grinstead and East Grinstead, Chichester and Shoreham-by-Sea. With reproductions of original tickets, timetables, archive photographs beautifully restored and reproduced, and dozens of colour images on these bright white glossy pages. Large sized, 112pp.

In the years leading up to the outbreak of war in September 1939 there had been a considerable decline in the number of tramway operators in the British Isles, but there still remained some 50 operators of varying sizes. There were four in Scotland - Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, or five if the freight-only line at Cruden Bay is included; four in Wales - Cardiff, Llandudno and Colwyn Bay, Great Orme and Swansea & Mumbles - as well as six on the island of Ireland. Plus a number in England, from Bristol in the Southwest to Newcastle and Sunderland in the Northeast, and from Blackburn and Bury in Lancashire to London and Southampton in the South. Even with the pre-war abandonments, most significant towns and cities in England, with the exception of places like Nottingham and Derby, still possess some tramcar routes. Many of these systems like Bradford, London and Manchester had been converting their routes to either bus or trolleybus operation during the 1930s, and so many of the surviving systems were a fraction of the size they had been at their peak. The largest to survive World War Two that was serving Glasgow was a fleet of trams in excess of 1,000. The largest element were the Standard cars built between 1898 and 1924, such as number 48 seen on page 5. During the 30s Blackpool had a significant number of new single and double-deck trams. A system to be heavily influenced by a pro-tram manager was Sunderland, where Charles Albert Hopkins was in charge for two decades. One of the smallest undertakings to survive the war was Darwen, which latterly had a serviceable fleet of some five cars including two modern, centre-entrance streamliners built by English Electric in 1936. On closure both were regauged to 3ft 6" and sold, where they saw limited service until 1954 in Wales. The story of the decline of the tram car over these years is one filled with missed opportunities as new tram cars and route extensions were needlessly scraped or abandoned well before their economic life dictated. From the major to the smaller operators such as Giant's Causeway, the period was to witness an almost unrelenting retreat of the tram. The author records the story of those systems that were doomed from the moment peace was declared in 1945, through those that sought initially to invest but still succumbed, to the handful that managed to survive. A nostalgic 64 page fully illustrated softback.

The Life of Captain Aidan Liddell VC, MC who won the fourth Air VC in the summer of 1915. Scholar, scientist, naturalist, astronomer, musician, aviator, photographer and diarist, Aidan Liddell embraced the challenges of a new century with enthusiasm. And thankfully his words live on. Daybell draws extensively on Captain Liddell's own letters and diaries, compelling and moving words supported by other contemporary documents to provide a vivid picture of the squalor and danger of war, the backbreaking hardship of trench life, and the challenges of pioneer air fighting. It is also a story of growing up in a devout and prosperous family, of a Jesuit education at Stonyhurst College, and of Edwardian Oxford before the Great War. It is about a very closeknit and patriotic family dealing with the adversity of war. Aidan Liddell was a decent, brave and intensely likeable young man and his story deserves to be told for the sake of countless others like him who fought bravely for King and Empire with a fervour that is difficult to imagine today. He served with the 3rd Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and Royal Flying Corps. 'Talk of dirt and unshaveness. It's now one month and twelve days since I had a bath and have been in the trenches now for 24 days with one solitary attempt to wash about ten days ago.' (November 1914). One month later: 'It's a war with no glamour or glory... modern weapons are too deadly, and the whole art of war, and all tactics is laid down in our books, and the German dittoes, has been quite altered...' 'I thought at first a shell had hit us and knocked the tail off, a piece getting me in the process.' - 3rd August 1915. Riveting, ghastly, this gentleman was awarded the VC, the highest military award for the British Empire and seemingly cheated almost certain death. He lived on to be proclaimed a hero lying on a stretcher, cigarette in hand, smiling and waving for the camera yet despite rallying bravely, he died of his wounds a month after the action. A Pen & Sword publication, originally 2005 and here in facsimile reprint of the original. 300 pages, well illustrated.

Pot luck on the colour we send you of bright yellow, green, blue or red Porsche-style racing cars. Rev them up by pushing the friction wheels hard several times, then place them on the ground and let them go! In this way they are friction-powered turbo toys, diecast cars of 2½" long, beautifully styled racing cars with seats and wheels and grille in black, racing coupé styling, and they really go quite fast. You should have seen the owner of Rysons (the manufacturer and importer) playing with our Annie at a recent trade show like two little kids on the floor! Suit ages 3+, CE safety approved, no colour choice. Sold singly.

This series has proved so popular that we have chosen skill level 3 (Challenging) for people aged eight to adult to construct a Meccano compatible Hurricane Fighter complete with twirling propeller and retractable wheels on the landing gear. The propeller and wingtips are silver, the bodywork authentic green and the stickers in RAF colours for the wingtips, fuselage and tailfin, and all the tools, parts and assembly instructions needed are included in this large box set. Made from sturdy metal plate, learn basic engineering concepts while having fun, keeping your hands nimble and using your problem solving skills.

The front cover shows Six Ways Aston in July 1949, one of hundreds of junctions you will encounter in this book where alterations have transformed the scene beyond recognition. The photograph is taken from the open front balcony of tramcar 343 in Lozells Road and the back cover shows Steelhouse Lane taken from the middle of the crossroads at Bull Street and Snow Hill. William Arthur Camwell, born 1906 in Handsworth, known as 'Cam', joined the Light Railway Transport League in 1938, later to become the Light Rail Transport Association. Apart from his interest in trams and trains, he also took an interest in motor buses, trolly buses, aircraft and canals and also served the railway cause through his membership of the Stephenson Locomotive Society. His greatest memorial is his photography of transport subjects. After securing a Rolleiflex camera in 1934 he was able to record the transport scene in a manner which few have equalled in atmosphere, clarity and scenic interest. Here we can enjoy the earliest Birmingham photographs with views of the Harborne Branch Railway, long forgotten stations, the tramway network in a vast map, contemporary advertising, termini such as Perry Barr, old public houses, services used during football matches, the Dudley Terminus, the closure of depots and tramway fleets, superb details of wooden buildings long since gone, coach trains by number and trains right through to 1973 like the Western Champion from Walsall to Birmingham New Street. 112pp, over 200 quality archive photographs in a Birmingham Transport Historical Group publication.