Any UK rail fans?

Hi,are there any other U.K. based rail fans in this group!

I'm not based in the UK, but I'm from UK and I still take a keen interest in UK railways, via railway magazines and the internet. Last time I lived in UK for about a year (in 1995) I volunteered at the Dean Forest Railway.

I see from your profile that you're in Lancashire. I have childhood railway memories from visiting my grandparents in Newton-le-Willows in the late 1950s and early '60s, and indeed that may be where my love of steam springs, along with an uncle who was at the Vulcan Works and who used to take me to climb all over the half-completed locos. Steam from Euston in my earliest memories (that was the old Euston Station), and plenty of steam in the northwest right up to the end of steam in 1968.

A lot of my railway books are UK-related. I notice that nobody else on LTR shares them. Perhaps when you've entered a few more of yours there'll be some matches?

They have a great second hand book section on railways in the ingrow carriage museum on the Worth valley line,including some early stuff.They also have railway and modelling mag's going back to the 20's in a back room,you can buy these as well as it supports the museum.
I will be going again soon and will post any new book additions.

There aren't many of us about, are there?

I'm UK based, son of a railwayman but not in the industry myself, but now increasingly becoming invovled in following European railways as the British ones get, frankly, too boring and corporate. It'll be a while before many of my railway books get LT'd, though, as my tastes are pretty eclectic...

I think the problem is the paucity of railfans on LT. Rail books can be more difficult to catalog because many are published either privately or by small houses. More true in the U.S. than in the U.K.

Although not a resident of the UK, I do have a few books in my libary of which I am the only owner in LT:

"This is York: Major railway centre" by Michael Harris (1983)
Jane's World Railways 2001-2002
Yorkshire Railways by A. Haigh (1979)
Our railways; their origin, development, incident, and romance by John Pendleton (1894)
Railways for Pleasure by Kenneth Westcott Jones (1982), also covers Ireland
Guide to Light Railways, Canals, Steamers and Industrial Preservation (1981)
Britain's Railways: an industrial history by Harold Pollins (1971)

Not difficult to catalogue as such (speaking here as a defrocked librarian - something I forgot to put on my profile!), but certainly on LT itself, given that it runs off ISBNs and other bibliographic data. So, for example,the booklets produced by the UK's Austrian Railway Group will need manual entry when I get round to them, precisely because they've never been sent up to the UK copyright libraries and don't have ISBNs allocated.

Sometimes, it pays off to try using other library sites for adding books. This is where you type in the title and hope that your book comes up. For me, I found that Michigan (where I used to live) books, regardless of their provenance, were typically held by the University of Michigan, not unsurprisingly, when neither Amazon nor LOC had them (and there was not ISBN, of the ISBN was bogus). Similarly, French books at Universite de Montreal (and now SUDOC). The advantage is you don't have type in publisher, dates, etc. Unlike Amazon, these sites require that you put a comma between title and author, as their keyword searches don't function very well otherwise.

But still pamphlet like books are frequently hard to do, there are lots of them around in transportation, and libraries (on LT) don't always honor them

# 7, #8

I have found in the short time I've been here, that for my purpose, just typing in the title and author on the "manual entry" works just as fast. Then into the box for the movers. Take care of the details later when I add the ones already moved.

Was a fan of UK rail until refused a ticket to Stratford o A. Agent said there was no train back to Cheltenham that day. He did give directions to the bus station. I still don't know why we could not take the train up and come back by bus,

Became a fan later when I needed to go to London. Arrived at the station late by cab from school. Wife and family were flying in so I knew I wouldn't make it to the airport on time. "Not to worry," he said. "There is a local going the other way with a change at Oxford that should do," It left 30 min later and I arrived in London just 20 minutes after the diect run.

Now my grand-son picks up a couple of train books for me when in England. Have no idea where he buys them.

#9: Welcome to LT. Be careful with manual entry, as people will try to "combine" your books. When you have time, try to get the ISBN # in, if available.

Note, on some of the very newest books, the ISBN-13 is the same as the product code. But, of course, many railway books are not sold in places where they are needed.

Just a note on ISBN's. These are assigned by private publishers' groups, and not by government agencies which handle copyright. In the U.K. (& Ireland), it is Nielsen Bookdata; in the U.S. - RR Bowker; in Australia Thorpe-Bowker; in France - AFNIL.

I've loaded a few that have one ISBN # on the jacket and one or more inside that has to be entered for search. Cue cat is no good for those.

Are you saying someone will try to change "combine" my entries? In my library? With what? Why?

Was a fan of UK rail until refused a ticket to Stratford o A. Agent said there was no train back to Cheltenham that day. He did give directions to the bus station. I still don't know why we could not take the train up and come back by bus,

Sounds like an example of the curious British custom of making single tickets more expensive than returns. The booking clerk was probably just trying to discourage you from paying far more than you needed to for the journey. Also, the railway connection between Cheltenham and Stratford is somewhat inconvenient these days - it's about three times as far as it is by road, and you have to change stations in Birmingham...

Of course, there's two ways of reading the thread title (as there rightly should be!) - "Are there any fans of UK railways on LT?" or "Are there any railfans in the UK on LT?".

I certainly fall into the latter category, but I have less in common with the former since the majority of British railways stopped being railways and started being part of Corporate UK plc, and since I began looking further afield and finding railways I recognised as The Real Thing - loco-hauled passenger trains, branch lines, wagonload freight, staffed stations, new investment in new kit, not just cosmetic refurbishment and corporate image.

#12
Combining is an effort where people who find books whose title differ only by type of capitalization, punctuation, and obvious spelling errors "combine" them. So, if three peole enter the same book manually into their own catalog, but there are minor differences ( a colon in one, not in another entry, or 2nd word of title is capitalized in one and not in the other), then if someone combines the three works as being the same under a 'given' author, then when you go to your catalog you will see that three "people" own it, despite the inconsistency of manual entry. Now, combining is much easier if all the ISBN's are the same. This helps the "social" aspect of LT, many people like to know who shares their interests. Combining does not change your own book record.

>9 flabuckeye:, >13 thorold: - it certainly used to be the case in British Rail days that some returns were cheaper than singles. I often had this conversation: "Single to ***, please". "You don't want a single, mate, you want a return." "No, I want a single" "No, mate, you want a return, 'cos it's cheaper".

These days, though, I don't know if it's still true. Amongst the plethora of new ticket types I've found railways that won't sell a return but will only sell two singles, one out and one back, (First Great Western were going through a phase of this about a year ago). On my most recent trip to UK I discovered the delights of return tickets which cost just one pound more than the single.

I also discovered a ticket machine that wanted to sell me a GBP58 ticket, but when I went to the ticket window I was able to buy the same ticket for GBP26, and a ticket clerk at another station who wanted to sell me two singles (again, no return!) for GBP140 while on the internet, within ten minutes of my enquiry at the ticket window, I was able to buy a return for GBP59 (single price of GBP58 plus a quid for the return).