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Stenlake Publishing - A Pictorial Guide to Alpine Railways


A Pictorial Guide to Alpine Railways



Author : Mervyn Jones
ISBN : 9780853616900
Cover : paperback
Price : £16.95

This book is the first ‘Pictorial Guide’ to be produced by the author. It follows on the successes of the ‘Essential Guide’ series on French (2006), Swiss (2007) and Austrian (2008) railways. This book is radically different from the previous publications in a number of ways.

In researching about alpine railways the author, in addition to information about the railways, has chosen to include interesting facts about the places through which the trains pass. For instance: Where is the loudest church bell the world? Where did the meringue originate? Where is the largest glacier in Europe? Which is the largest inland lake in Europe? Which has the first town in the world to install electric street lighting? Where did Sherlock Holmes meet his end? Where in Europe are brown bears still living in the wild? The answer to these questions and many more can be found here.

There is a greater concentration on the pictorial representation of the railways with an emphasis on the picturesque nature of the alpine railway scene. All the photographs are new and have featured in any of the author’s previous publications. The focus on presenting photographs has led to a change in the book’s format from a portrait to a landscape layout. This has allowed most of the pictures to occupy a full-size page. The previous guides were heavy on detailed information about rolling stock, operating dates, tariffs and so on. Most of this does not feature in this book in order to give more room for the photographs and to avoid replication.

The Pictorial Guide to Alpine Railways identifies 164 locations of railway interest in alpine areas of seven European countries, of which 155 are railway routes and nine railway museums. A total of 142 of these railways are covered in detail, of which 20 are in France, 29 in Italy, 6 in Slovenia, 1 in Croatia, 24 in Austria, 19 in Germany and 33 in Switzerland.

A5 format, 208 pages, 143 illustrations.

A Pictorial Guide to Alpine Railways
£16.95