Life in a Railway Factory
Transportation History Industrial History Railway History Working-Class Memoir British Social History Technology & Society Engineering Biography
Alfred Williams’s Life in a Railway Factory is the forgotten classic every steam-age enthusiast hopes to stumble upon in the wild. First published in 1915 and re-issued here by The History Press in a generously illustrated 1992 paperback, the book drops you onto the foundry floor of the Great Western Railway’s Swindon works at the height of Victorian and Edwardian industrial might. Williams—poet, scholar and self-taught “hammerman”—writes with the eye of a documentarian and the soul of a poet, turning rivets, boilers and 80-ton locomotives into living characters. The result is a 320-page memoir that reads like a fast-moving novel, yet every scene is true, drawn from the twelve-hour shifts, soot-blackened wages and pride that powered the biggest railway empire on earth.
What makes this copy especially appealing is its clean, unmarked interior and the wealth of period photographs and line drawings that rarely survive in later reprints. At 250 mm tall and a sturdy 826 g, it has the heft of a reference textbook but the narrative pull of a bedtime story. Condition notes mention only light cover scuffing and the speckled page edges common to 30-year-old paper—no underlining, no book-plate, no smoke smells, so the original typesetting and illustrations remain crisp and collectible.
For modellers, historians, or anyone tracing British family roots in the railways, this single volume is a primary-source goldmine: wages tables, shop-hierarchy slang, safety disasters and pay-day rituals are all recorded by a man who actually swung the hammer. Young-adult readers looking for a real-life counterpart to Billy Elliot or Brassed Off will find Williams’s journey from manual labourer to published author an inspiring, syllabus-friendly true story. Demand for first-hand accounts of industrial Britain keeps the title on academic reading lists and railway-society wish-lists alike, so finding an affordable, illustrated, still-tight copy is a genuine win for the transport-history shelf.
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