Download or read book The Quintinshill Conspiracy written by Adrian Searle and published by Wharncliffe. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was the railway's Titanic. A horrific crash involving five trains in which 230 died and 246 were injured, it remains the worst disaster in the long history of Britain's rail network.??The location was the isolated signal box at Quintinshill, on the Anglo-Scottish border near Gretna; the date, 22 May 1915. Amongst the dead and injured were women and children but most of the casualties were Scottish soldiers on their way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign. Territorials setting off for war on a distant battlefield were to die, not in battle, but on home soil – victims, it was said, of serious incompetence and a shoddy regard for procedure in the signal box, resulting in two signalmen being sent to prison. Startling new evidence reveals that the failures which led to the disaster were far more complex and wide-reaching than signalling negligence. Using previously undisclosed documents, the authors have been able to access official records from the time and have uncovered a?highly shocking and controversial truth behind what actually happened at Quintinshill and the extraordinary attempts to hide the truth.??As featured in Dumfries & Galloway Life magazine, January 2014.

Download or read book Final Journey written by Nicolas Wheatley and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new history reveals the previously untold story of why and how trains have been used to transport the dead, enabling their burial in a place of significance to the bereaved. Profusely illustrated with many images, some never previously published, Nicolas Wheatley's work details how the mainline railways carried out this important yet often hidden work from the Victorian age to the 1980s, as well as how ceremonial funeral transport continues on heritage railways today. From royalty, aristocrats and other VIPs (including Sir Winston Churchill and the Unknown Warrior) to victims of accidents and ordinary people, Final Journey explores the way in which these people travelled for the last time by train before being laid to rest.

Download or read book Carlisle in the Great War written by David M Carter and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-09-05 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the experience of war impacted on the town, from the initial enthusiasm for sorting out the German kaiser in time for Christmas 1914, to the gradual realization of the enormity of human sacrifice the families of Carlisle were committed to as the war stretched out over the next four years. A record of the growing disillusion of the people, their tragedies and hardships and a determination to see it through. Already an important railway junction, with local industrial and commercial interests reflecting its historical position on the border with Scotland, Carlisle became a key settlement in the Great War. The Carlisle story includes the arrival of Belgian Refugees; the care of wounded men passing through the city on hospital trains; recruiting the Lonsdale Battalion; dealing with the aftermath of the Gretna rail disaster; caring for the wounded brought to the local hospitals after major battles; the effect of the Gretna Munitions factory on the city and state ownership of public houses and breweries. Beneath these new activities normal life continued with children going to school, local government dealing with a growing population and daily work and commerce

Download or read book Footsteps in Summer written by Russell George and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When early retirement beckons, Russell George decides to set off on a gruelling 950 mile solo charity walk along the length of Britain from John O’Groats to Land’s End, which is about 930 miles further than he’s ever walked before. During his journey, he has to cope with an extended heat wave, loneliness, troublesome blisters, a roadside tumble and a succession of missing signposts and overgrown footpaths. He encounters a variety of incidents, including rescuing a set of keys from a departing train and finding his accommodation double-booked, but manages to maintain a sense of humour throughout. He even finds time to meet his namesake and to sample a few local beers, especially the ones with really obscure names. But there’s a darker theme. Despite much of the journey passing through countryside, the rural idyll is disturbed as Russell gradually discovers that his entire route is dotted with the scenes of tragic historical events, including air and rail crashes, maritime and industrial tragedies, battles and wartime destruction, and natural catastrophes. This is an amusing and enlightening tale of an arduous, but rewarding, journey through rural Britain during a glorious long, hot summer, depicting a slower pace of life, dramatic landscapes, an abundance of nature, and acts of kindness from complete strangers. All of the author royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to Cancer Research UK.

Download or read book Churchill s Last Wartime Secret written by Adrian Searle and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Its been a State secret for more than seventy years. The official line in the UK has always been that it never happened but this new work challenges the assertion that no German force set foot on British soil during the Second World War (the Channel Islands excepted), on active military service. Churchills Last Wartime Secret reveals the remarkable story of a mid-war seaborne enemy raid on an Isle of Wight radar station. It describes the purpose and scope of the attack, the composition of the raiding German force and how it was immediately, and understandably, hushed-up by Winston Churchills wartime administration, in order to safeguard public morale. Circumventing the almost complete lack of official British archival documentation, the author relies on compelling and previously undisclosed firsthand evidence from Germany to underpin the books narrative and claims; thus distinguishing it from other tales of rumored seaborne enemy assaults on British soil during the 1939-45 conflict. After examining the outcome and repercussions of this astonishing incident, what emerges is an event of major symbolic significance in the annals of wartime history. Its been a State secret for more than seventy years. The official line in the UK has always been that it never happened but this new work challenges the assertion that no German force set foot on British soil during the Second World War (the Channel Islands excepted), on active military service.

Download or read book The New Coastal History written by David Worthington and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a pathway for the New Coastal History. Our littorals are all too often the setting for climate change and the political, refugee and migration crises that blight our age. Yet historians have continued, in large part, to ignore the space between the sea and the land. Through a range of conceptual and thematic chapters, this book remedies that. Scotland, a country where one is never more than fifty miles from saltwater, provides a platform as regards the majority of chapters, in accounting for and supporting the clusters of scholarship that have begun to gather around the coast. The book presents a new approach that is distinct from both terrestrial and maritime history, and which helps bring environmental history to the shore. Its cross-disciplinary perspectives will be of appeal to scholars and students in those fields, as well as in the environmental humanities, coastal archaeology, human geography and anthropology.

Download or read book A Century of Man Made Disasters written by Nigel Blundell and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-10-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pictorial history of the major man-made calamities that shocked the world throughout the twentieth century. It was a period during which the power and scale of industrialization changed the planet—an unforeseen consequence being the creation of more human-created catastrophes than ever before experienced. The events recorded here include the needless carnage of history’s worst air disaster when two jumbo jets collided on the island of Tenerife. We recall the horrors of Aberfan, the Welsh village in which schoolchildren were buried alive. The story of the explosion aboard the Challenger space shuttle reveals how warnings that were ignored led to the deaths of seven astronauts. And we report on the failings that caused the nuclear nightmare at Chernobyl, a poisonous blot on the face of the globe. These and the other tragedies in this book were all man-made and, it seems, just waiting to happen. A further link between these horrific events is that they were all caused by either folly or greed—or both. But despite the tales of monstrous misfortune, many also produced heart-lifting stories of heroism, selflessness, sacrifice, and human resilience.

Download or read book Scottish Steam written by Keith Langston and published by Wharncliffe. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scotland is renowned worldwide for its engineering prowess, which of course included locomotive building. This lavishly illustrated and detailed publication celebrates standard gauge steam locomotive building North of the Border. Focussing not only on the achievements of the major companies, North British Locomotive Co Ltd, Neilson & Co Ltd, Neilson Reid & Co Ltd, William Bearmore Ltd, Sharp Stewart & Co Ltd,and Andrew Barclay, Sons & Co Ltd it also highlights the contribution made by several of the smaller, but nevertheless significant locomotive builders. Details of the output of the several railway company locomotive building works are also included. All of the Scottish built locomotive classes which came into British Railway's ownership are featured ,and a large majority of the carefully selected images are published for the first time. Scottish Steam celebrates the significant contribution made by Scottish railway engineering workshops to steam locomotive development.

Download or read book The Infamous Sophie Dawes written by Adrian Searle and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She was the daughter of an alcoholic Isle of Wight smuggler. Much of her childhood was spent in the island’s workhouse. Yet Sophie Dawes threw off the shackles of her downbeat formative years to become one of the most talked-about personalities in post-revolutionary France. It was the ultimate rags to riches story which would see her become the mistress of the fabulously wealthy French aristocrat Louis Henri de Bourbon, destined to be the last Prince of Condé. Her total subjugation of the ageing prince, her obsessive desire for a position among the highest echelon of French royalist society following the Bourbon restoration, and her designs upon a hefty chunk of Louis Henri’s vast fortune would lead to scandal, sensation and then infamy. The Infamous Sophie Dawes takes an in-depth look at her island background before tracing her extraordinary rise from obscurity to becoming a baroness who ruled the prince’s château at Chantilly as its unofficial queen and intrigued with the King of the French to get what she wanted. But how far did she go? The book examines the mysterious death of Louis Henri in 1830 and uses newly discovered evidence in a bid to determine the part Sophie may have played in his demise.

Download or read book Britain written by Andrew Whittaker and published by Thorogood Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British culture is strewn with names that strike a chord the world over such as Shakespeare, Churchill, Dickens, Pinter, Lennon and McCartney. This book examines the people, history and movements that have shaped Britain as it now is, providing key information in easily digested chunks.

Download or read book Catastrophe written by Stephen J. Spignesi and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than half of the disasters chronicled are natural. These floods, storms, droughts, blizzards, famines and epidemics are fierce reminders that humankind is no match for the devastating force and fury of nature. From the Great Influenza Epidemic of WWI that took nearly 40 million lives to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, there are numerous accounts of catastrophes that could not be averted, and whose destructive power was beyond imagining.

Download or read book A Void written by Georges Perec and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 2005 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss."--Time magazine A Void is a metaphysical whodunit, a story chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which afford Perec occasion to display his virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl's penchant for word games, especially for "lipograms," compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl's verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances . . .

Download or read book Invisible Sun written by Charles Stross and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The alternate timelines of Charles Stross' Empire Games trilogy have never been so entangled than in Invisible Sun—the techno-thriller follow up to Dark State—as stakes escalate in a conflict that could spell extermination for humanity across all known timelines. An inter-timeline coup d'état gone awry. A renegade British monarch on the run through the streets of Berlin. And robotic alien invaders from a distant timeline flood through a wormhole, wreaking havoc in the USA. Can disgraced worldwalker Rita and her intertemporal extraordaire agent of a mother neutralize the livewire contention before it's too late? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Red for Danger written by L. T. C. Rolt and published by History Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic work that must be included in the library of any railway enthusiast

Download or read book The Metropolitan Vickers Type 2 Co Bo Diesel Electric Locomotives written by Anthony P. Sayer and published by Pen and Sword Transport. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough history of the Metropolitan-Vickers locomotive, also known as “Class 28,” featuring 160 color and black & white photos. This book provides an in-depth history of the Metropolitan-Vickers diesel-electric Type 2 locomotives, more frequently known collectively as the “Co-Bo’s” due to their unusual wheel arrangement. Twenty locomotives were constructed during the late-1950s for use on the London Midland Region of British Railways. The fleet was fraught with difficulties from the start, most notably due to problems with their Crossley engines, this necessitating the need for extensive rehabilitation work during the early-1960s. Matters barely improved and the option to completely re-engine the locomotives with English Electric units was debated at length, but a downturn in traffic levels ultimately resulted in their demise by the end of 1968 prior to any further major rebuilding work being carried out. Significant quantities of new archive and personal sighting information, supported by over 180 photographs and diagrams, have been brought together to allow dramatic new insights into this enigmatic class of locomotives, including the whole debate surrounding potential re-engining, their works histories, the extended periods in storage, together with in-depth reviews of the various detail differences and liveries.

Download or read book Britain s Railway Disasters written by Michael Foley and published by Wharncliffe. This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passengers on the early railways took their lives in their hands every time they got on board a train. It was so dangerous that they could buy an insurance policy with their ticket. There seemed to be an acceptance that the level danger was tolerable in return for the speed of travel that was now available to them.British Railway Disasters looks at the most serious railway accidents from the origins of the development of the train up to the present day. Seriousness is judged on the number of those who died. Information gleaned from various newspaper reports is compared with official reports on the accidents.The book will appeal to all those with a fascination for rail transport as well as those with a love of history.Michael Foley examines the social context of how injuries and deaths on the railways were seen in the early days, as well as how claims in the courts became more common, leading to a series of medical investigations as to how travelling and crashing at high speed affected the human body

Download or read book The Ill Fated Battalion The Story of the 7th Leith Royal Scots at Quintinshill and Gallipoli 1915 written by Peter Sain Ley Berry and published by . This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early morning of Saturday 22 May 1915 one thousand and twenty-eight officers and men of the 7th (Leith) Royal Scots set out for Gallipoli. Yet before they could leave Scotland the first of two trains taking them to Liverpool collided head-on with another train at Quintinshill, near Gretna and almost immediately a Glasgow-bound express ran into the wreck. The wooden carriages then caught fire. Only 468 soldiers disembarked at Gallipoli a month later and by the time the Gallipoli expedition was abandoned only 119 men remained. Drawn from contemporary accounts 'The Ill-Fated Battalion' traces the story of these soldiers, describing their twin tragedies of Gretna and Gallipoli and the inquiries, inquests and criminal trials that followed the railway disaster.