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
