Coffee Table Book of: Steam (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Steam is a large-format coffee table book about the steam railway in black and white, printed edge to edge, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two.

It begins with the engine whole: a big locomotive seen head-on, a heavy freight engine broadside on its small driving wheels, a tank engine alone on a grass-edged siding, and the cowcatcher and brass bell of a North American front end.

Then the boiler and the fire: the round smokebox door, the smokebox open on its blastpipe and tubes, safety valves blowing off a tall column of steam, and inside an empty cab the backhead with its gauges and valve wheels, the regulator, the screw reverser, and the firehole door open on a fire blazing white-hot.

Then out along the line: an engine and tender racing over water troughs laid between the rails, spray thrown wide, a plume laid back along a train crossing farmland, a many-arched stone viaduct, a banking engine pushing at the rear of a goods train, two engines at the head of one train on a mountain grade, an engine bursting from a tunnel mouth, and a coastal line on a sea wall above breaking waves.

Then the weather and the dark: drifts banked along a moorland line, a snowplough on a buffer beam, hoar frost on the sleepers at dawn, icicles along a running board, rain streaming off a cab roof, the glow of a firebox lighting the exhaust from below, a night train as a line of lit windows, and a signal lamp glowing through its spectacle glass.

Then the shed, the yard and the line itself: a roundhouse around its turntable, a coaling tower straddling the tracks, a water crane dripping from its leather hose, an ash pit glowing between the rails, a timber trestle over a gorge, a signal box and the lever frame inside it, a set of points, and a rail seated in its chair.

Short notes run through the book. They are about the railway rather than about the pictures: what the cloud that looks like steam really is, what a plume laid flat along the carriages says about a train’s speed, what the angle of a semaphore arm means, and why the chimneys of big British engines were short.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.