Reviews

摘要

The Great Northern and London & North Western Railways jointly obtained an Act of Parliament in 1874 to build a line from Market Harborough to Newark. It opened throughout on December 15,1879. A branch from Marefield Junction to Leicester (Belgrave Road) was later built by the GNR alone and came into use on October 2,1882, providing a service between Leicester and Grantham via Melton Mowbray North. This album is only the second to cover the line in its entirety and tells the story by way of pictures, captions and maps in the now time-honoured Middleton Press style. There are also facsimiles of four timetables - from 1880, 1910, 1925 and 1952 - which provide a fascinating insight into changing traffic patterns. Each station is dealt with in turn, working northwards from Harborough, and anyone unfamiliar with the area will soon realise what quiet rural affairs they were. In fact, some of the villages it passed through are little bigger today, which helps explain why the passenger service was withdrawn as early as 1953 -a decade before the Beeching report was published.