This seventh volume in the series of regional books examining the
industrial railways of England, Wales and Scotland looks at railways of
the former Ridings of Yorkshire, a region that once boasted widespread
coal mining activities, which strongly influenced the county's fortunes
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The numerous steel
manufacturing complexes, chiefly centred around the Sheffield and
Rotherham area, and the one-time highly polluting coal and chemicals
by-products plants are looked at, including the well-known Orgreave
complex during the 1980s, a time when many coal mines and their
supporting industries and railways were rapidly dwindling in number, a
fact sadly driven home when examining the contents of this book. Other
industries in the county, once heavily reliant on railways, either
internal narrow gauge or standard gauge, included an extensive peat bog
railway system east of Doncaster, water treatment plants around Leeds
and Bradford, gas and electricity plants serving some of the county's
towns and cities, numerous scrapyards supporting steel manufacturing,
stone quarries in the rich limestone region to the north of the county,
and brick and block manufacturers in the Vale of York, all contributing
to the rich industrial railway heritage of Yorkshire. With informative
captions and an array of striking and many previously unpublished
historical colour and monochrome photographs, author Gordon Edgar
delivers a fascinating overview of the industrial locomotives and
railways of Yorkshire, essentially covering the last six decades and
striving to convey the attraction of the many former industrial railways
of this vast and topographically varied county.
