Transport

In these recollections of a vintage motorist, the author describes, with some humour, a collection of motoring memories.

A tribute to the Royal Air Force 1918-1993.

Amelia Earhart died mysteriously before she was forty, disappearing in the South Pacific on an around-the-world flight attempt in 1937. She was the best-known female aviator in the world, and set the record for the first trans-Atlantic solo flight by a woman, a flight that launched her on a double career as a fighter for women's rights and a tireless crusader for commercial air travel. And as her dream has persisted through the decades, so has her story, and her spirit.

When Monisha Rajesh announced plans to circumnavigate the globe in 80 train journeys, she was met with wide-eyed disbelief. Packing up her rucksack - and her fiancé, Jem - Monisha embarks on an unforgettable adventure that will take her from London's St Pancras station to the vast expanses of Russia and Mongolia, North Korea, Canada, Kazakhstan, and beyond.

Christian Wolmar describes the vision and determination of the pioneers who developed railways that would one day span continents, as well as the labour of the navvies who built this global network.

The internationally celebrated artist and wildlife conservationist has a third passion - steam trains. In this book he tells of the trials and tribulations of steam locomotive preservation.

More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings.

This book celebrates the immense drama and beauty of the car. As the age of the car as we know it comes to an end, Bryan Appleyard's brilliantly insightful book tells the story of the rise and fall of the incredible machine that made the modern world what it is today.

Jonathan Glancey traces the development of Concorde from the moment Captain Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947 through to the last commercial flight of the supersonic airliner in 2003. He uses not only existing material and archives, but also interviews with those who lived with the supersonic project from its inception.

There are 100,000 freighters on the seas. Between them they carry nearly everything we eat, wear and work with. In this unique investigation, we join the crew of a container ship to chart the murky waters of international shipping to reveal the hidden industry upon which our world turns and our future depends.

Britain gave railways to the world, yet our own network is plagued with unreliable and overcrowded trains - not to mention sky-high ticket prices. Matthew Engel explores the history of Britain's railways by talking to everyone from politicians to platform staff.

The rise of the steam train allowed goods and people to circulate around Britain as never before, stimulating the growth of towns and industry. From the early days of steam to electrification, this book examines the social and economical importance of the railway and how it helped to form the Britain of today.

In examining the history of the 737, a highly-regarded plane that Boeing's new management degraded with cost-focused mandates, Flying Blind explores how Boeing skimped on testing in the race to match a competing plane from Airbus, outsourced software work to poorly paid graduates in India and convinced the US Federal Aviation Authority to put the MAX into service without requiring pilots to undergo simulator training.

The life stories of George Stephenson and his son, Robert, run parallel with the history of steam engines and the development of the railways. The drama of the railway age is brought to life by the author.

From the Eurostar in London, Paul Theroux sets out on a journey to the East, travelling overland through Eastern Europe, India and Asia. Infused with the changes that have shaped the exterior landscape and enriched with developments to his own perceptions and psychology, his account is an absorbing follow-up to The Great Railway Bazaar. (12513).

A history of the Great Western Railway which would appeal to enthusiasts of steam railway.

Life and times on the railways of yesteryear.

This amusing insight into Cunard’s legendary liners begins more than fifty years ago when the author joined the original Queen Mary as an entertainments officer. Over a Cunard high tea in the Queens Room, Paul recounts the stories of these iconic ships. His frank and funny account mixes Cunard history with personal anecdote and vividly reveals how passenger and crew life have changed over the years across the Cunard liners.

Hear the enthralling story of the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy's largest ever warship.

65,000 tons. 280 metres long. A flight deck the size of sixty tennis courts. A giant piece of Sovereign British territory that's home to up to fifty Aircraft. HMS Queen Elizabeth in the biggest ship in the Royal Navy's history and one of the most ambitious and exacting engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK.

But it's her ship's company of 700, alongside an air group of 900 air and ground crew that are Big Lizzie's beating heart. And How to Build an Aircraft Carrier tells their story.

From before the first steel of her hull was cut, Chris Terrill has enjoyed unprecedented access to the Queen Elizabeth and the men and women who have brought her to life. From Jerry Kyd, the ship's inspirational captain, to Cdr Nathan Gray, the first pilot to land Britain's new stealth jet fighter on her deck, Terrill has won the trust and confidence of the ship's people.

How to Build an Aircraft Carrier tells the story of Britain at her best: innovative, confident, outward-looking and world-beating.

After eight years of struggle by engineers the world's first passenger line, the Liverpool - Manchester Railway, was opened. Watching the ceremony William Huskisson was killed when he accidentally stepped out in front of Stephenson's Rocket. As the opening descended into gruesome farce, this accident proved how breathtaking but dangerous trains could be.

In 1895, George Whitehouse arrived at the east African post of Mombasa to perform an engineering miracle: the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi-Lake Victoria Railway – a 600-mile route that was largely unmapped and barely explored. This book explores the building of this great railway but above all, it is the story of the white intruders whose combination of avarice, honour and tenacious courage made them a breed apart.

In 1943 Emma Smith joined the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company under their wartime scheme of employing women to replace the boaters. She set out with two friends on a big adventure, freed from a middle-class background, learning how to handle a pair of 72 foot-long canal boats.

Tales of life along the Settle-Carlisle railway line.

Sequel to: 'Steam Up!' (4796). The author reveals the fun ordinary railwaymen had in their work when steam was king.

In this audiobook donated to Calibre by the author, he tells of the adventures and experiences of himself and his family who owned four narrowboats, but live 300 miles away from where they were moored.

One morning in September, Mark Mason boards the number 1A bus at Land's End. Forty-six buses and eleven days later he disembarks at John O'Groats. Along the way he samples staples of the British diet, and uncovers countless fascinating facts about his native land.

The author describes his progression from trainspotter to shedmaster via an apprenticeship at Horwich. It covers the period from the early 1900s focusing on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and into the LMS era.

No-one had ever sailed an English narrowboat in the US before, but Terry and Monica Darlington and their whippet, Jim, take us on a dangerous, surprising and always entertaining journey. A thousand miles of the little-known South-East Seaboard unfold at six miles an hour- the golden marshes of the Carolinas, the incomparable cities of Charleston and Savannah, and the lost arcadias of Georgia and Florida.

When their famous canal boat was destroyed by fire, Terry and Monica Darlington soon bought a new one and headed north in the Phyllis May 2 - to Liverpool, Lancaster, the Pennines and Wigan Pier. Terry recorded the journey, and alongside it the story of his life, his marriage and his dog Jim.

Paul Theroux depicts a train journey down the length of North and South America, from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina’s most southerly tip. He describes the people he encountered – the tedious Mr Thornberry in Limón and reading to the legendary blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires.

Here we travel on the slow train to another era when travel meant more than hurrying from one place to the next, the journey meaning nothing but time lost in crowded carriages, condemned by broken timetables. Tap into a love of railways, a love of history, and a love of nostalgia.

From the most luxurious and historic - aboard the Orient Express, to the most futuristic - the driverless trains of London's Docklands Light Railway, here is a unique travel companion celebrating the treasures of our railway heritage from one of Britain's most knowledgeable railway writers.

A shared love of canals and narrowboats has been inseparable from the marriage of Timothy West and Prunella Scales. In 2014, Tim and Pru took to the canals of Britain with a television crew to record their best-loved trips along the beautiful waterways. Little did anyone guess that their seemingly light-hearted travelogue, would become something entirely more powerful. Timothy tells how Prunella's struggle with dementia has both changed, and yet failed to change, their lives together.

For 175 years the British have lived with the railway, and for a long while it was a love affair - the grandeur of the Victorian heyday, the glorious age of steam, the romance of Brief Encounter. Then the love affair turned sour - strikes, bad food, delays, disasters... Parallel Lines tells the story of these two railways: the real railway and the railway of our dreams. Travelling all over Britain, Ian Marchant examines the history of the British railway and meets those who still hold the railways close to their hearts - the model railway enthusiasts, the train-spotters and bashers (a hybrid of train-spotting where the individual - usually male - has to travel behind a certain locomotive in order to catalogue it), the steam enthusiasts. He swaps stories with commuters at the far reaches of London suburbia, he travels to deserted railway museums, and smokes cigarettes on remote, windswept stations in the furthest corners of Scotland, turning his characteristic eye for character, humour and surprise to one of the great shared experiences of the British nation.

The story of life on the footplate, and the competition for speed in the railways' age of steam.

The poorly educated son of a yeoman farmer, George Hudson, invested his inheritance in the developing railway industry. By 1848 he was a millionaire, controlling a third of Britain's railway network. Unfortunately his fall was as spectacular as his rise.

A railway book like no other, which covers the natural history of railways, a reminder of what traffic used to be like on peak summer Saturdays, an evocation of watching trains and many other topics.