Railways Now and Then; A World History

New York: Crown Publishers, Inc, 1975. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Hardcover. Good/Fair. Format is approximately 9 inches by 12 inches. 215, [1] pages. Illustrations. Maps. List of Plates. Index DJ has wear, tears, soiling, chips and some tape repairs. DJ price inked over. Oswald Stevens Nock (21 January 1905 - 29 September 1994), nicknamed Ossie, was a British railway signal engineer and senior manager at the Westinghouse company; he was well known for his prodigious output of publications on railway subjects, including over 100 books, as well as a large number of more technical works on locomotive performance. He authored articles on railway signaling and locomotive performance for The Engineer researched during World War II, and from 1958 to 1980 he succeeded Cecil J. Allen as the author of the "British locomotive practice and performance" series published in The Railway Magazine. In 1969 Nock became president of the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers (IRSE). O. S. Nock, one of the best known experts on locomotives and trains and a railway engineer all his working life, first surveys, in this world history, the early development of rails and traction, and the first attempts to bring the two together. He explains how railway in North American came to be so different from those in Britain: how strategic considerations influenced early work on the continent of Europe; and how the construction of immensely long transcontinental lines formed an integral part of national development in 19th-century empires. With an engineer's knowledge of the technicalities involved, Mr. Nock conveys a graphic appreciation of the stupendous feats involving in the building of bridges and viaducts, in carving tracks through mountains and in taking the railroad underground; of many families of unforgettable locomotives; and of the ever urgent quest for speed.