Francis Bennion could
hardly be bettered in his fine evocation of life
in an English village during the period of social
change that followed the coming of the Railway.
The mysterious appearance of golden sovereigns in
the hands of the lamp boy at the new branch line
station, an excursion train to the gruesome spectacle
of a public hanging (and a woman at that) which
divides the village, the vicar's daughter of uncertain
age who falls in love with a youthful shunter, the
local Squire faced with a designing woman who gets
herself locked in his first-class compartment to
London, a ghost (or is it?) that haunts a nearby
signal box, disaster on a Sunday school trip to
the seaside end of the branch line - these are some
of the incidents in this eventful and highly-readable
collection of stories about the coming of the branch
line railway to an English village in the 1860s.
Patterns of life, undisturbed for centuries, altered
overnight with the arrival of gangs of Irish navvies,
closely followed by a type new to the English village
- the Railway Company Official. The author's eye
for the period is so matched by his narrative style
that it is difficult to believe he was not actually
present, knowing the characters and witnessing at
first hand the events he so movingly depicts
