Am not sure which is the appropriate forum for posting this: mods, please move as needed.
Have just been reading a newly-published book by Bill Bryson, an author with whom I have long had a love-hate relationship (with the hate element gradually coming to predominate over the love one). This work, The Road to Little Dribbling, tells of further travels in Great Britain by Bryson a kind of sequel twenty years later, to his Notes From a Small Island. Various mentions in the book, of rail-related matters on the whole, the author regards rail passenger services as a good thing. He gives several pages to an attempted outline of the Beeching cuts, expressing regrets at the more extreme manifestations of same.
I have often found, over a variety of factual matters, that Brysons research tends to be sloppy, and that he quite often publishes supposed facts, which are inaccurate: he can be suspected of valuing getting a laugh, or coming out with startling stuff in quest of attention, more highly than telling the truth. A few of his statements in the Beeching passage will get the wrong kind of attention from even moderately knowledgeable railway enthusiasts. In an aside about the plethora of pre-Grouping companies, he states that the Isle of Wights 55 miles of track were operated by eight separate companies. Certainly not all at once (which is what I think one would infer from that statement) not any way, in which one might try to make sense of those words.
Further on, re the Beeching Report: Beeching commissioned a study which showed that the situation was even worse than thought. Some lines were doing hardly any business at all. The Invergarry and Fort Augustus line in Scotland was found to be carrying an average of just six passengers a day. The little Llangynog-to-Mochnant line in Wales had average daily earnings of less than £1. What?? This stuff was way pre-Beeching. The Fort Augustus branch was closed to passenger traffic by the LNER in 1933, and to freight in 1947. And his garbled attempt to, presumably, identify the Llynclys Jun. / Blodwell Jun. -- Llangynog line: this route lost its passenger service in 1951 (freight as far as Llanrhaiadr Mochnant continued longer). Bryson would seem to have found random, arresting data somewhere, which he throws into the book without checking its relevance to the intended thread of his discourse.
Id feel inclined to write to Mr. B. c/o his publisher, gently raising these points. However, it seems that as from this new book, he has started with a gimmick of harping on about how he is getting old, and starting to fail in body and mind (he was born in 1951, for heavens sake not even sixty-five yet). One would expect that from now on, hell be liable to brush off any attempts to remonstrate with him about published inaccuracies, with the catch-all of his beginning to become old and gaga.
At one point in his recounted travels in this book, he calls in at Sheringham and encounters the North Norfolk Railway: cue for a bout of humour at the expense of British hobbyists in general, and railway enthusiasts in particular superficially affectionate, but with what I feel to be some slightly nasty barbs. And the book overall, I found mediocre at best. Mr. Bryson is in a fair way toward losing, in the person of myself, a reader for any further material which he may produce.
Have just been reading a newly-published book by Bill Bryson, an author with whom I have long had a love-hate relationship (with the hate element gradually coming to predominate over the love one). This work, The Road to Little Dribbling, tells of further travels in Great Britain by Bryson a kind of sequel twenty years later, to his Notes From a Small Island. Various mentions in the book, of rail-related matters on the whole, the author regards rail passenger services as a good thing. He gives several pages to an attempted outline of the Beeching cuts, expressing regrets at the more extreme manifestations of same.
I have often found, over a variety of factual matters, that Brysons research tends to be sloppy, and that he quite often publishes supposed facts, which are inaccurate: he can be suspected of valuing getting a laugh, or coming out with startling stuff in quest of attention, more highly than telling the truth. A few of his statements in the Beeching passage will get the wrong kind of attention from even moderately knowledgeable railway enthusiasts. In an aside about the plethora of pre-Grouping companies, he states that the Isle of Wights 55 miles of track were operated by eight separate companies. Certainly not all at once (which is what I think one would infer from that statement) not any way, in which one might try to make sense of those words.
Further on, re the Beeching Report: Beeching commissioned a study which showed that the situation was even worse than thought. Some lines were doing hardly any business at all. The Invergarry and Fort Augustus line in Scotland was found to be carrying an average of just six passengers a day. The little Llangynog-to-Mochnant line in Wales had average daily earnings of less than £1. What?? This stuff was way pre-Beeching. The Fort Augustus branch was closed to passenger traffic by the LNER in 1933, and to freight in 1947. And his garbled attempt to, presumably, identify the Llynclys Jun. / Blodwell Jun. -- Llangynog line: this route lost its passenger service in 1951 (freight as far as Llanrhaiadr Mochnant continued longer). Bryson would seem to have found random, arresting data somewhere, which he throws into the book without checking its relevance to the intended thread of his discourse.
Id feel inclined to write to Mr. B. c/o his publisher, gently raising these points. However, it seems that as from this new book, he has started with a gimmick of harping on about how he is getting old, and starting to fail in body and mind (he was born in 1951, for heavens sake not even sixty-five yet). One would expect that from now on, hell be liable to brush off any attempts to remonstrate with him about published inaccuracies, with the catch-all of his beginning to become old and gaga.
At one point in his recounted travels in this book, he calls in at Sheringham and encounters the North Norfolk Railway: cue for a bout of humour at the expense of British hobbyists in general, and railway enthusiasts in particular superficially affectionate, but with what I feel to be some slightly nasty barbs. And the book overall, I found mediocre at best. Mr. Bryson is in a fair way toward losing, in the person of myself, a reader for any further material which he may produce.
