a new history of railways around Wellington

Earlier in the year in response to a question we said that the reason we hadn't produced a sequel to Wellington Transport Memories is that although invariably inferior to ours, someone produces a new book about Wellington every year.  And this is the first such book for this year.

As the title indicates, the subject of Wellington's Railways: Colonial Steam to Matangi is the greater Wellington railway system and the trains that have run over it since the early days of the 1870s when a line was progressively laid between Wellington and the Hutt Valley and then over "The Hill' to the Wairarapa.  This is, of course, a significant subject and books have been written about it before, particularly the late Doug Hoy's Rails out of the Capital (1970) of which this is a kind of updated edition.  For good measure, a bit (not a lot) is included about the city's trams/cable car, the rail ferries, the Rail-Air Service, and the railway museums in the region, although rather oddly, not the Railways Road Services buses. 

Compiler David Parsons seems to have decided to concentrate on the 20th century and as most of the 19th century photos available have now been published, this is understandable (several of the the 20th century photos in this have been used before, too).  There is a solid presentation of colour photos, including items of ephemera, although most are 1980s onwards. The action photos of trains in all conditions taken by Alan Wickens, a Petone signalman, are superb, however, Parsons' own photos are rather pedestrian.  The same can be said about the book's internal design (the only font used is Arial for text and captions plus a bit of Verdana for display).  Some thought and effort has gone into the cover design, though.

The 200 pages in A4 format makes it a solid volume and it is a pity it is bound in a softcover with flaps, instead of a hardcover, which given the Chinese printing shouldn't have cost much more.  It is available for $56 in our shop.