Nigel Gresley, Locomotive Engineer by F.A.S. Brown (Paperback, 1975)

Nigel Gresley, Locomotive Engineer by F.A.S. Brown (Paperback, 1975).

Nigel Gresley was by common consent one of the outstanding locomotive engineers of the world. He came to a railway which in Sturrock, Stirling and Ivatt boasted a locomotive tradition second to none. While conserving the best of that tradition he soon set the stamp of his own genius on the products of Doncaster. The author grew up alongside the Great Northern main line and watched the development of Gresley locomotives which reached its final expression in such masterpieces as the streamlined Pacifics. He has delved deeply for his material and there is much that was published for the first time in the original hardback edition. Students of what might have been will particularly like the references to, and diagrams of, Gresley locomotives that never got beyond the drawing board, among them his first proposed Pacific and the 4-8-2 that the 1939 war killed. Carriage and wagon development, for which Gresley will equally be remembered, is adequately treated. Add anecdote and personalia and the result is perhaps the most comprehensive biography of a chief mechanical engineer, as expressed by his life's work, yet to appear.