History Of The Gwr

To paraphrase the old army adage, there were three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way and the Great Western Way.

Right from its start in the 1830s the Great Western quickly established its own distinctive and idiosyncratic way of life. Not least with the bold decision to adopt a track gauge of 7' 0%" when every other railway at the time was happy to standardise at 4'8%". Soon the Great Western became an institution with its own particular approach to running a
railway, likened by some to a sovereign state strung out along hundreds of miles of track, governed and closely controlled from Head Office at Paddington.

But, as this history of the Great Western will show, the railway with its excellently designed and engineered locomotives is just our starting point. The GWR had extensive shipping interests, ran buses and lorries and even had its own air service. It ran docks,
restaurants and hotels and in the restaurant cars you could read the Great Western magazine, drink Great Western whisky and eat Great Western biscuits with your cheese. With this total embrace and a consciously different approach from other lines it's no surprise that passengers and employees thought the GWR superior to what they regarded as the other lesser railway companies,

In some ways perhaps it was but there's certainly no doubt the GWR has had a long held appeal. and not just for dedicated railway enthusiasts. In this book as well as addressing historical details and technical facts we'll try to discover just what it was, locomotives with burnished copper and brass fittings, bucolie branch lines or the delightful journey to the West Country's seaside resorts that added an almost magical quality to the name Great Western Railway and saw it so often referred to as "God's Wonderful Railway".