This book is all about trains and my experiences with them together with the years of service in the locomotive area. I am recording as best as I can in this book the memoirs of my time as a fireman on the South African railways and as a scrap metal merchant in Northern Rhodesia now known as Zambia. The idea of writing of my experiences germinated when I was working on contract in the Republic of Mali, North Africa. I was commissioning a hydroelectric power station and, as there was nothin...

This "interesting, insightful book" by the author of Deep South reveals "a side of Britain few visitors see" ( The New York Times Book Review).After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scot...

Remembering the romance of a bygone era, with all the dirt, grime and risks the job entailed! Fast train fireman Ken Issitt worked on the footplate from the late 1940s to 1960, experiencing firing some of the greatest locomotives from the Flying Scotsman to Coltimore and Blink Bonney. The work was hard and conditions were tough but little did Ken know at the time that he was experiencing the last years of steam; he would never have imagined the romantic associations the pe...

This is not your normal quiz book. It contains over 340 questions in 20 different categories based on news items from the 1980's. However not the headline news but ordinary events experienced by ordinary people.The categories may be familiar such as The Arts, Business, Employment, Food and Drink, Politics, Sports and more in the same vein but the questions are not so familiar. General knowledge may not always help; a lack of it is not really a problem. A sense of humour is a great ...

In the 1800s, a shepherd's hut or living van would have been an unremarkable sight in many regions of rural Britain. By the 1970s most lay abandoned as farming methods and industry left them behind. Today the humble shepherd's hut is making a comeback and these quirky collectors' items are fast developing a cult status of their own. Original huts and living vans command high sums and replica huts are being built in high numbers to satisfy demand. However, many who see one, have one or want...

Running a railway is a complex business. However organised it is, there will always be surprises: often hilarious, frequently unexpected, but sometimes serious.Along Different Lines includes such bizarre 'everyday' events as coping with hurricanes, rogue locomotives and runaway wagons; PR successes and otherwise; the Brighton Belle, Flying Scotsman and Mallard; training-course capers; a wino invasion; trackside antics; the Eurost...

On February 22, 2011, journalist Jane Bowron had been living in her hometown of Christchurch, New Zealand, when the city was struck by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake, only five months after a 7.1 earthquake. While the first quake had caused damage but no fatalities, the second became the ultimate horror story: entire suburbs were decimated, houses collapsed, hillsides fell away, and people were killed or trapped in rubble and raging fires. As the historic city lay in ruins, Bowron managed to f...

New horizons beckon around each bend when popular crime writer Deon Meyer and photographer Adriaan Oosthuizen take on the country's most beautiful off-road routes. They share some of the challenges they faced and the interesting characters they met as they went in search of adventure and spectacular scenery. Their favourite routes cover nearly the entire country and are aimed at both experienced and novice riders. The route descriptions read like travel stories, with each one offering some...

In the winter of 1975, Erich Rautenbach’s life took a serious turn for the worse when he was bust for selling weed by gun-toting undercover cops. He’d been selling the dope to raise money to leave South Africa in a bid to escape his army call-up and resist having to shoot people in the name of apartheid. But instead he found himself in the infamous John Vorster Square, at the mercy of drug squad policemen who seemed convinced that he was part of some notorious drug ring. This wild memoir r...

On Sunday, 28 December 1879, the 5.27 mail and passenger train from Burntisland to Dundee went out across the world's longest bridge on a black, fierce night, only to be dashed to pieces in the River Tay as the bridge collapsed during one of the worst storms in Scottish history. The Tay Bridge Disaster remains to this day the worst catastrophic failure of a civil engineering structure in Britain – the land equivalent of the Titanic sinking. In this book, author Ro...

From being chased along a beach by a pack of wolves in Mombasa to being told to get lost by film star Jack Palance, Bernie Howard’s mates loved hearing his stories about his time in the Navy so much that he decided to put them all in a book.Rum, Bum and Baccy is a collection of short stories about Bernie’s life as a sailor in the Royal and Merchant navies in the 1960s and 1970s, beginning with his training at HMS Ganges in Ipswich as a 15-year-old in 1962.“Nobody in my famil...

The nineteenth century was an era of scientific advance like no other in history. And no nation gained more from its forward momentum than Britain and her Empire. Railways were built, bridges constructed, rivers tamed and electricity harnessed, to the great benefit of all But progress was only achieved at high cost. Impatience for achievement too often resulted in catastrophe and disaster. In 1879, the Tay Bridge was the longest in the world and a wonder of its age. But on a stormy night i...