A regional history of the Railways of Great Britain. The Lake counties . Volume 14 . David Joy

A REGIONAL HISTORY OF THE RAILWAYS OF GREAT BRITAIN

Volume 14 The Lake Counties

David Joy

Here is the long-awaited last-but-one volume in this important series, dealing with a relatively compact but highly varied region of great interest.

Dominated by England's highest mountains and most dramatic scenery, the region possessed in its heyday a railway network of

immense fascination and variety. Two rival Anglo-Scottish trunk routes had perhaps their most spectacular stretches here. The London & North Western climbed up from sea level near Lancaster by way of Grayrigg and the Lune gorge to Shap, while the Midland had in its legendary Settle & Carlisle line a tour de force of Victorian railway engineering.The two companies met their Scottish neighbours at Car-Lisle in a unique joint station which generated both a kaleidoscope of colour and an atmosphere of mutual distrust.

Beyond the mountains was a quite different network of lines,locally promoted but once phenomenally prosperous, providing for a few halcyon years the arteries for the development of an iron and steel industry of world import-ance. Their many remarkable achievements reached a pinnacle in boom town Barrow, where the Furness Railway assumed the role of benevolent dictator and turned a hamlet into an

"English Chicago' with the then largest docks in Britain.

The decline of Cumbrian iron-making brought greater exploitation to the area's tourist potential with the expansion of Lakeland branch line and steamer services and the growth of resorts as diverse as Grange, Keswick and Seascale. Conservationists rebuffed attempts to penetrate what they regarded as the sacrosanct heart of the region, and today the Lake District has largely turned its back on the railway through wholesale closures and the building of massive modern highways.

This volume vividly recounts the railway history of the Lake Counties, set against the social, economic and geographical background.