Transport: general interest

Mainly covering the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, this collection of images offers a fascinating survey of one of the iconic locomotives of twentieth-century Britain: the Class 40.

Few countries went through the level of interest and development of pleasure piers like the United Kingdom.

The Royal Mail has, for over 500 years, provided a crucial service in keeping people connected by land, sea and air.

Disaster at sea has been a part of maritime life for as long as man has sailed the seas.

British Rail's Modernisation Plan was published in December 1954.

Kelvin Central Buses came together as a result of a merger between Kelvin Scottish and Central Scottish, both companies created by the Scottish Bus Group in 1985 as it prepared for deregulation in 1989.

In the mid-1950s there were rumours that the Northern line was to be upgraded from manual operation to an automated line.

Scottish Motor Traction, or SMT, was originally founded in Edinburgh in 1905.

Maps have long held a fascination for travellers and would-be travellers alike.

John Law moved to South East London in 1970 and joined British Rail four years later.

The A1, Britain's longest numbered road, is a ribbon of tarmac that stretches for 396 miles and threads its way into the heart of two great capital cities.

This book celebrates the British railway station hotel.

Harley Crossley was a professional artist for over forty years.

The main role of the tug is to assist vessels in the river or within the dock system by moving them by pushing or towing.

The 1954 film On the Waterfront brought to life the New York docks of the 1950s, when it was often said that a ship, usually a freighter, arrived or departed every 24 minutes, around the clock.

This book tells the story of the famous James ML military motorcycle which had originally been developed as a utility machine for the working man and was then modified for the military during the Second World War.

Great disasters always attract conspiracy theories and this is just as true of disasters at sea as it is of those on land or in the air.

The very first motor bus services in East Anglia were operated by the Great Eastern Railway Company, and although these started in Suffolk, services were soon provided within Norfolk as well.

For a hundred years excursion paddle steamers gave all the social classes the opportunity to enjoy a cruise on the briny from ports, resorts and piers around the UK.

This book traces the design, development and production history of the iconic classic Saab 900 model, manufactured from 1978 to 1993, looking at every variant from the basic single carburettor Saab 900 GL to the blisteringly fast turbocharged Saab 900 turbo 16S.

This is the first book to cover the little-known car production of the famous Birmingham Small Arms company (BSA).

Porthmadog was once host to a wide variety of industries.

There have been millions of shipwrecks, but just a few have been remembered.

Comfort is not a measureable quality, mainly because it means different things to different people.

When Daniel Defoe, the author of A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, visited Shropshire in the early 1720s, on his journey from Shrewsbury to Lichfield he travelled along what he called 'The Great Ancient Road'.

The first bus service in Manchester was a horse bus that started running in 1824.

The daring flights of the early balloonists that were the first steps on mankind's upward journey to the Moon and beyond have been strangely neglected, and their names have been largely forgotten.

In the decades leading up to the 1970s, passenger air transport was the preserve of the well-to-do who flew on airliners driven by propellers.

Many people will be familiar with the traditional signal box, controlling a level crossing or at a local station.

St Mawes Sailing Club was founded in 1920 and has functioned without interruption from that date, with the exception of the war years.

John Cooper takes the reader on a fascinating journey along the towpath of the Grand Union Canal, which meanders through what is arguably one of the most picturesque stretches of inland waterway in the county.

The 1970s were a decade of great change for Britain's military air arms.

Today, most British Rail diesel locomotive types are represented in preservation, though some classes are much more prolific than others (in particular the more recently withdrawn).

Thousands of commuters south of the Thames use the railway daily, but how many know the fascinating history of the Southern Railway, created in 1923 from four smaller companies?

The Bristol Tramways Company started operating buses in 1906 to feed traffic into their tram services from beyond Bristol's city boundaries.

What are the wrong kinds of leaves on the track?

The iconic Hawker-Siddeley Harrier was designed to fight the Cold War from the fields of West Germany but won its battle spurs in the Falklands, Belize and Afghanistan.

Steamship Travel in the Interwar Years: Tourist Third Cabin offers a window into a bygone era in which modern steamships like the Queen Mary, the Normandie, and the Olympic transported new breeds of tourists between Europe and North America, and dazzled them with their technological marvels and palatial interiors.

From nationalisation in 1948, British Railways built huge numbers of EMUs for suburban and short/medium-distance main line express duties, initially of pre-nationalisation design.

The Jet Age began in Britain in May 1941 when the Gloster E.

The seventy-four Class 52 diesel-hydraulics were built between 1961 and 1964 for British Railways' Western Region as high-powered locomotives to haul inter-city services.

With the coming of the naval arms race with Germany, in 1903 the Admiralty decided to establish a naval base and dockyard at Rosyth, taking advantage of deep tidal water there.

The Blue Star Line was founded by brothers William and Edmund Vestey in 1911 to ship meat in refrigerated vessels from Australia, New Zealand and South America to the UK.

CELEBRATING FIFE'S RAILWAYS.

Liverpool has many railway 'firsts' in the world: an inter-city service, an electrified overhead railway, a large-scale marshalling yard, a deep-level suburban tunnel and one under a tidal estuary.

Strathclyde Buses can trace its roots back to the tram services provided by Glasgow Corporation, which started running buses in 1924 as a more cost-effective way of reaching the new, large council housing schemes on the outskirts of the city.

This classic guide to motoring still has the power to capture the imagination of motorists everywhere.

While the first public passenger-carrying railway operated between Liverpool and Manchester from 1830, it was the construction of the Grand Junction and London & Birmingham that created the first long-distance, inter-city route from 1838.

The Red Book, the twice-yearly newsletter, now the Journal of the West Highland Steamer Club, regularly contained a collection of ship photographs of both everyday and special events in the lives of the MacBrayne vessels which plied the waters of the west coast of Scotland, from charters of vessels like the pioneering 1920s turbine steamer King George V and delivery voyages through the Caledonian Canal to regular ferry voyages.

The Chester & Holyhead Railway was incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1844, and the promoters were thereby empowered to build an 85-mile line along the North Wales coast, the engineer for the line being Robert Stephenson.