Gushing and totally uncritical account of the modernisation of the West Coast Main Line between London, Manchester and Liverpool in the early 1960s. Commissioned by British Railways to celebrate one of their biggest ever engineering projects, and written by one of the best-known railway journalists of the day.

Besides having a very impressive repertoire of journalistic cliché at his disposal, Nock was of course the man behind the long-running "Practice and Performance" column in Railway Magazine, only really happy when he had a stopwatch and clipboard in his hand. Nevertheless, he does a pretty conscientious job here of recording the impressive statistics of a project that involved rebuilding and resignalling several hundred miles of heavily-used railway without shutting it down (including the total reconstruction of three of Britain's busiest stations), introducing a completely new technology, and retraining hundreds of employees to use new equipment. No doubt in obedience to instructions from his clients, there is not a single reference to what any of this cost, or what had to be done politically to get it approved, nor is there any mention of trade unions or industrial relations...

Technically, I felt it was a bit light on the details: Nock throws in lots of numbers and buzzwords, but he never goes very deep. The purpose of the book is to show us what a good job the BR engineers have done, not to explain how you build a railway.

Not one of the great railway books, by any means, but it's still an interesting period piece, particularly when we read it fifty years on and reflect that it's all had to be done again since Nock's time, and that there are now fairly serious plans for a completely new high-speed line duplicating the WCML. ( )