Author: Anthony Dawson

The Knotty was one of the most beloved of Britains pre-grouping companies. Centred on Stoke-on-Trent, at one time it carried two-thirds of the coun...

George and Robert Stephenson are well known names in the canon of railway history. Henry Booth (who designed Rockets boiler) was the worlds first r...

Week after week, the guns of the British expeditionary force battered away at the defences of Sevastopol, eight miles away from Balaklava, the port...

The most striking result produced by the completion of this Railway, is the sudden and marvellous change which has been effected in our ideas of ti...

The Crimean War, the most destructive and deadly war of the nineteenth century, has been the subject of countless books, yet historian Anthony Daws...

The Crimean War, fought by the alliance of Great Britain, France, and the tiny Italian Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia alongside Turkey against Tsaris...

The steam locomotive, the most potent symbol of nineteenth-century civilisation, is perhaps the image that best sums up the Victorian and Edwardian...

The Royal Dragoon Guards, formed in 1992 from the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards and 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, has a proud history datin...

The quarter-century after the Rainhill Trials was an exciting period of growth and experimentation on the railways. The railway locomotive evolved ...

The city of Leeds in West Yorkshire was once one of the busiest railway centres in Britain and had the largest concentration of railway engine buil...

In the quarter of a century between 1830 and 1855, the railway locomotive developed from the small sisters of Rocketto the broad gauge monsters of ...

The Woodhead Route from Manchester to Sheffield has achieved almost mythical status, not only thanks to the Woodhead Tunnels, but also because of t...

Best known as the Titfield Thunderbolt, Lion is one of the most beloved locomotives in railway preservation transformed from humble luggage engine...

The Pennine ridge Englands backbone has provided a dramatic backdrop to the steam locomotive for nearly 180 years. Armies of navvies, c...

Many histories have been written about the conflicts the British army was involved in between the Battle of Waterloo and the First World War. There...

In the age of steam it seemed that every little boy had an ambition to be an engine driver even the notoriously anti-railway Charles Dickens thoug...