The Official Guide To The Great Northern Railway

There is no one living today who has personal experience of the Great Northern Railway (GNR), since it ceased to exist in 1923. However, seated in a favourite armchair with this guide in hand, it is possible to drift back in time and experience Victorian railway travel in the year 1892, the year that this book was originally published by Cassell & Company. Imagine beginning your travels at the magnificent London terminus of King's Cross. The advertisements in this book will inform you that the refreshment-room tariff includes a basin of soup for one shilling, mutton or veal and ham pie for three pence, or a plate of meat for six pence. Port, sherry or claret is available at six pence per glass, whiskey, gin, or rum at four pence per glass, ale or stout at two pence per glass. For younger travellers lemonade soda can be had for two pence a bottle, ginger beer for three pence. Or perhaps you prefer to take your food with you on the train. In this case luncheon baskets, hot or cold, are available at three shillings each. But whistles are blowing and the "Flying Scotsman" is about to depart for Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Highlands. Reaching Edinburgh, we might seek accommodation at John MacPherson's Cockburn Hotel on Waverley Bridge, where a night porter is kept, French, German and Italian are spoken, and a bed and attendance (on the fourth floor) can be had for two shillings and sixpence. This is a temperance hotel so, Mr. MacPherson sternly warns, no spiritous liquors are available. This type of hotel finds great favour with Victorian lady travellers, who have vowed that "lips which touch spirits shall never touch mine". On another journey by the Great Northern, we might travel on the York to Newcastle line and alight at Darlington Bank Top Station. The main line here is a vast thoroughfare for traffic, averaging considerably over one hundred passenger trains daily. The new and handsome station has a letterbox, postal-telegraph office, bookstall, and refreshment rooms, on the island platform. Cabs (that is, horse-drawn hansom cabs, not motor taxis) attend all trains. And so on and on-scores of different but equally delightful journeys, through hundreds of stations, villages and towns big and small, all alluringly described in the guide in over three hundred and sixty pages. Many pages contain delightful engravings depicting high streets with chickens scratching in gutters and horse drawn wagons plodding by, where today the same scene is usually a choked confusion of gridlocked traffic, raucous noise, and mad rush. A further eighty pages are full of beguiling contemporary advertisements that are worth browsing in their own right. Truly, with the Official Guide to the Great Northern Railway in hand, not only is it possible to experience Victorian railway travel at its height, but also to time-travel back to the days before motor cars and yellow lines blighted village and town, before motorways scarred the countryside and their hideous noise drove people nearly insane. A time also when the only things in the sky were songbirds and not screaming jetliners. From your armchair, today, with the Official Guide, you can recapture a time when only a puff of smoke, the hiss of steam and the rattle of carriage wheels marked the passage of a train, only briefly disturbing the quiet townscape or rural idyll. When uniformed hotel porters with their luggage barrows met all trains and no one had to struggle, as today, up and down stairs with their own cumbersome suitcases on wheels. When meals in dining cars were cooked on the train in real ovens and served by waiters in white jackets and black ties, with all the panache of the London Savoy. When drinks were served in glass and china and not disagreeable cardboard. When sleeping cars ensured a sound nights rest on long overnight journeys. Ah-bliss! Discover it all with this wonderful book, and let your imagination know no bounds.