Abstract
MR. J. W. WILLIAMSON will be known to many men of science as the former secretary of the British Scientific Instrument Research Association. He has a facile pen and also hobbies, one of which is the study of railways and their working. The opening chapter in the book under notice touches on conditions of transport in Great Britain during the sixteenth century, the development of roads in later years and eventually of the ‘rail way’, from which the modern railway arose early in the nineteenth century. Succeeding chapters discuss individual aspects of railway transport, such as the track, the locomotive, building and repairing rolling stock, signalling, operating traffic, traffic control, and so on, with a concluding chapter on electric traction. The book is well illustrated with plates and explanatory diagrams. To the mechanically minded boy, and also to those of his elders who still regard the railway as something more than a necessary means of transport, it will be of absorbing interest.
Railways To-day
J. W.
Williamson
By. (The Pageant of Progress Series.) Pp. 160 + 23 plates. (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1938.) 3s. 6d. net.
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Railways To-day. Nature 142, 1100 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/1421100b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1421100b0