The sheer proliferation of trains and stations listed is fascinating, but it is hard to trace any particular journey, because of the way that main-line services are entangled with those on branch lines. I often dip into it, but am not like the man in the Victorian joke who stayed up all night reading Bradshaw ‘because he wanted to see how it ended’. The Guardian predicted this would prove a waste of time, ‘like painting Union Jacks on chamber pots’, but the resulting volume was a bestseller. This is why, in 1968, the railway publishing firm of David & Charles published Bradshaw’s April 1910 Railway Guide, a reprint of the Bradshaw (i.e. Our Iron Roads chronicles a protean, rapidly expanding network that reached its peak density in 1910. Mackenzie (1986), that sometime during the 1930s, the actor George Arliss booked himself into the Left Luggage Office at Charing Cross as a parcel, in order to escape marauding autograph hunters. It is reported in a similarly entertaining work, The Railway Station: A Social History, by Jeffrey Richards and John M. When the train stopped at Van Wert, Ohio, he was discovered by a railway guard who was passing through the baggage wagon, whereupon the stowaway was nearly shot for being a train robber, and taken to prison. Williams also relates how an ‘old and wellknown citizen of Chicago, of eccentric and jocular disposition’, sought to confound the demarcation between passenger traffic and goods, by sending himself to Philadelphia in a wooden box. So we have the story of a woman in New Zealand who stood on the tracks and flagged down a train in order to find out whether any passenger could give her change for a £1 note. Even though Williams’s main concentration is on Britain, he often goes abroad for comic material.
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