Our very successful pocket book giving details of London walks to see the sites of disused railway structures is now available in a new edition with maps. Updated to the first half of 2021, the book provides ideas for walks now we are all getting out more. Maps of each route have now been added to accompany the descriptions and photos.

A comprehensive look at the LMS/BR Class 7 4-6-0 rebuilt locomotives, including the rebuilt Jubilees, the rebuilt Patriots and the rebuilt Royal Scots. The book includes hundreds of photographs and feedback from the original crews that operated the engines. Topics covered include: origins of the rebuilt Class 7s in the 1940s and the design of the 2A boiler; differences between the classes; liveries, names and finally, name plates; detailed allocation tables. There are chapters on the rebuilt Class 7s to the rescue - the severe winter of 1962/3; the decline of the Class 7s and withdrawal in the 1960s and finally, the preservation of the Class 7 rebuilds.

Tim Parks s books on Italy have been hailed as "so vivid, so packed with delectable details, they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains from Verona to Milan, Rome to Palermo, and right down to the heel of Italy.

Parks begins as any traveler might: "A train is a train is a train, isn t it?" But soon he turns his novelist s eye to the details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward brutal architecture amid grand monuments; and an undying love of a good argument and the perfect cappuccino.

Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how their development reflects Italians sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all, Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of modern Italy. As Parks writes, "To see the country by train is to consider the crux of the essential Italian dilemma: Is Italy part of the modern world, or not?""

This is the story of a quarter-century struggle to rebuild from scrap condition a unique locomotive, it being an essential part of the British engineering heritage.It covers the unusual and efficient Caprotti valve gear in depth and solves the mystery of why the locomotive did not work properly in service. It was never improved until it was restored and its secrets revealed with a surprising conclusion.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the newly formed country of Czechoslovakia built an ambitious national rail network out of what remained of the obsolete Habsburg system. While conceived as a means of knitting together a young and ethnically diverse nation-state, these railways were by their very nature a transnational phenomenon, and as such they simultaneously articulated and embodied a distinctive Czechoslovak cosmopolitanism. Drawing on evidence ranging from government documents to newsreels to train timetables, Iron Landscapes gives a nuanced account of how planners and authorities balanced these two imperatives, bringing the cultural history of infrastructure into dialogue with the spatial history of Central Europe.