Signalling and Signal Boxes along the GER Routes

Over the course of several volumes, Allen Jackson uses an array of photographs to lavishly illustrate the story of signalling in the principal constituents of the LNER – continuing here with the Great Eastern Railway. The LNER is most popularly remembered for the Railway Races to the North in the 1870s and trains like the Flying Scotsman and streamlined record-breaker Mallard. The last link with such glory days is the mechanical signalling and signal boxes, many of which have witnessed the LNER’s finest exploits. This way of life is coming to an end and this book records some of the last of the semaphore scene, which in some cases is no longer with us and the rest is on notice. Although the LNER was the second largest railway company, it had the largest route mileage and area served. From bucolic East Anglian branch lines to the intensity of the Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland coal fields and the chemical industry and shipping of Teeside. In Scotland the picture was much the same, with the LNER active from the Borders to Inverness. Although modernised in the 1960s and 1970s, enough of the mechanical signalling scene remains to give a flavour of the way railways were worked and controlled in the nineteenth century. Further, more recent, modernisation in North Lincolnshire, Humberside and Norfolk have rendered the signalling scene even sparser and this series of books provide a nostalgic and timely look back at the halcyon days of British signalling.