Dropping the Fire: The Decline and Fall of the Steam Locomotive (IR899)

Product No.: IR899
Title: Dropping the Fire: The Decline and Fall of the Steam Locomotive 
Author(s): Atkins, Philip
Illustrator(s): N/A
Publisher: Irwell Press
ISBN: 1871608899
Condition: New
Binding: Laminated Pictorial Boards
Dust Jacket: None
Edition: 1st Edition
Publication Year: 1999

Features: 106 Pages with Black/White Photos.

This is not another sadly nostalgic memorial to the summer of 1968 but a work that covers the final designs and manufacture of the ultimate steam locomotive classes and series in all countries and how and when each nation ended the use of such head-end power. Photographic coverage of this wide brief is lavish and reproduction, on art paper, excellent.

Each chapter and the appendices at the end contain a large quantity of statistical data, much of it in tabular form. The importance of costs and global energy considerations feature more than sterile arguments about superior technologies; the rugged US design philosophy becoming the dominating one worldwide, by the end . There is much food for thought in this book and plenty of references to sources mean that interested readers can follow up various implications with their own further researches.