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Tanya Jackson

Författare till British Rail: The Nation's Railway

1 verk 12 medlemmar 1 recension

Om författaren

Tanya Jackson is the Transfer Development Manager of the Historical Model Railway Society and the British Rail Carriage Steward, and has been in the society since 2000. She is a graduate of York University, has worked as a journalist for a number of years and also wrote comedy for BBC radio. She visa mer has had a number of articles published in HMRS Journal and Model Rail, and this will be her first book for The History Press. She lives in Surrey. visa färre

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Tanya Jackson is a specialist in the history of passenger carriages, and this history of British Rail seems to have developed out of a planned book on the passenger's experience of the railway. There's still something of a focus on topics like industrial design, marketing and customer service, as well as a lot of authoritative information about passenger rolling stock, and a few conspicuous gaps when it comes to freight and BR's relations with the coal and steel industries, but overall it's a very lively and well-balanced view of the nationalised railway and the part it played in British life between the 1940s and the 1990s.

Most authors of books on recent railway history are either distracted by nostalgia or have a strong political agenda, but Jackson mostly seems to manage to take a step back and look coolly at how well the political framework in which the railways were operating allowed them to do their job. There is quite a "management perspective", she refers a lot to memoirs of former BR managers and has clearly consulted extensively with Chris Green (head of Network SouthEast and InterCity in the eighties, and later Virgin Rail and other post-privatisation companies). But that doesn't stop her from being quite critical of some aspects of BR management: a lot of BR's poor public image — especially in the sixties and seventies — is directly attributable to demotivated staff, due to authoritarian attitudes and a lack of properly thought out training and career development. And there's also the whole confused mess of sudden policy reversals and internal reorganisations that undermined high-profile activities like the APT project.

The notorious Doctor Beeching, normally the villain of this kind of book, gets something of a reprieve here: Jackson comes to the conclusion that most of the reforms he urged were indeed necessary, including quite a few not carried out for some time later, if at all. She doesn't go into any detail on why it made sense to close the Waverley Line in the 1960s and to rebuild it in the 2010s, though.

Jackson takes the opportunity to tease the doyen of railway historians, George Dow, over his weakness for heraldry, but, despite that I get the feeling that this book is very much in the tradition he established, thoroughly footnoted, scholarly, and not afraid to make aesthetic judgements. But a lot shorter than his magnum opus!
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Flaggad
thorold | Jul 18, 2021 |

Statistik

Verk
1
Medlemmar
12
Popularitet
#813,248
Betyg
½ 3.5
Recensioner
1
ISBN
3