Railways Through the Vale of the White Horse

Book excerpt: This commemorative history of the railways of the beautiful Oxfordshire district 'Vale of the White Horse', running twenty-seven miles from Steventon to Wootton Bassett, covers the route from the opening in 1840 until 1965, when British Rail withdrew all the local passenger services between Didcot and Swindon and all the intermediate stations were closed. With personal insight and images from railway historian Adrian Vaughan, the book covers the Great Western Railway's development of the route, as part of Brunel's 'Bristol Railway' and shows the original correspondence between Brunel and his staff. Fully illustrated with hundreds of historical photographs and detailed track diagrams, Railways Through the Vale of the White Horse is an ideal resource for anyone with an interest in this scenic railway route and a nostalgia for the early days of railways in Britain. Includes: the building and progression of all the stations from Steventon to Wootton Bassett; station staff, passenger statistics and goods income reports; the signal boxes, introduced in 1874, through to their abolition between 1965 and 1968. Fully illustrated with 200 black & white images and 37 diagrams of the track layouts.