Review: 'Bulleid: Last Giant of Steam'

I was extremely fortunate to recently acquire a very difficult to find (for a reasonable price, $30Au) book on one of the most controversial figures of British railway history, Oliver Bulleid.



The text, Bulleid:Last Giant of Steam by Sean Day-Lewis is an examination of O.V.S Bulleid's life, of course dealing with his locomotive developments as C.M.E of the Southern and later in Ireland, but also his earliest days on the Great Northern, his experiences in the Great War and later rejoining the Great Northen and continuing his partnership with Sir Nigel Gresley, which only ended with Bulleid's transfer to the SR.

A particularly nice touch of this book is the interesting and very often amusing anecdotes about various events that occurred to Bulleid or even others, which makes the text more interesting overall. Especially, the episodes of interaction between Bulleid and Gresley are a highlight.

For the locomotive enthusiast, however, this book will appeal most due to its examination of engines and rolling stock Bulleid designed or was connected with, and you will almost certainly learn something new about the various designs: for instance, the original appearance of the Bulleid 'Merchant Navy' class was considerably more 'air smoothed' and without smoke deflectors, in fact it looks quite odd considering what we are used to knowing the class to look like. One thing that surely few people would have seen before, however, was the fact that Bulleid experimentally fitted a wooden mock up of airsmoothed style streamlining to 'Schools' class 4-4-0 no.935 Sevenoaks, perhaps drawing inspiration from Gresley's similar A4 style addition to his B-17 4-6-0s. Only the outbreak of war stopped this from developing further, and it is a shame that the idea never got passed the mockup (of which a works photo is thankfully included!).

What is also refreshing is how Bulleid's more radical moves (the pacifics and 'Leader') are given the opportunity to be justified in Mr Bulleid's own words- the reader, while he or she might not agree with the engines themselves, would have to admit that at least they have sound theory behind them- most notably, representing Bulleid's attempt (with 'Leader' and the 'Turf burner' for C.I.E) to go beyond the Stephensonian principles and show steam traction could match the new diesels and most importantly, deserved a future.

I rate this overall, a fantastic text which gives Mr Bulleid a fair hearing with regard to all his experiments and shows what an innovator he was, not only with steam but also in carriage design and electric traction. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Southern railway, experimental steam, locomotive engineers- and the steam enthusiast as a whole.

I cannot, however, give a perfect score- the main issue is that this book is LONG out of print, and finding one for a fair price is next to impossible: 25 pounds is the lowest I have found currently, which might be fair to UK residents, but its over 50$ AU without the $14 postage, ridiculous for most Australian or overseas readers. I was fortunate enough to troll across it by accident on ebay (the seller had not even put the title in the listing heading, I only recognised it by the picture!) but it will not be easy to repeat this success- I suggest trying antiqbook or ukbookworld or similar sites with an impressive collection of old railway books. If I come across any, I will post the links here for your convienience.

Rating: 9.5/10