The Signalman's Daughter
Published on 31. March 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
270 pages
978-1-9164010-4-4 (ISBN)
Description
The Signalman's Daughter
Whining its way into steam's Indian summer comes The Difference Engine, a gas turbine locomotive flashily showing the future of rail transport in 1956. But it's the past this gleaming white machine stirs up; tearing lives asunder as it thunders through sleepy middle England, its heat haze distorting what appeared to be reality.
Not least for Laura Green, the signalman's daughter, who has proudly followed in her beloved father's footsteps. And just as The Difference Engine proves not to be the paragon of progress it promises, so David Green, the archetypal quiet family man, is revealed to have hidden faults of his own.
Rewind to one glorious May day in pre-war England. Two inebriated teenagers engineer an encounter with Rosie, the village beauty, which ultimately ends in tragedy. All that remains is one small tangible item loaded with such dark emotion it causes decades of resentment.
DCI Vignoles muses that this case's complexities have a metaphor in the intricacy of wires, levers, pulleys and rods, which when activated by the signalman's daughter all conspire with one result...
...a signal warning red for danger!
Whining its way into steam's Indian summer comes The Difference Engine, a gas turbine locomotive flashily showing the future of rail transport in 1956. But it's the past this gleaming white machine stirs up; tearing lives asunder as it thunders through sleepy middle England, its heat haze distorting what appeared to be reality.
Not least for Laura Green, the signalman's daughter, who has proudly followed in her beloved father's footsteps. And just as The Difference Engine proves not to be the paragon of progress it promises, so David Green, the archetypal quiet family man, is revealed to have hidden faults of his own.
Rewind to one glorious May day in pre-war England. Two inebriated teenagers engineer an encounter with Rosie, the village beauty, which ultimately ends in tragedy. All that remains is one small tangible item loaded with such dark emotion it causes decades of resentment.
DCI Vignoles muses that this case's complexities have a metaphor in the intricacy of wires, levers, pulleys and rods, which when activated by the signalman's daughter all conspire with one result...
...a signal warning red for danger!
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-9164010-4-4 (9781916401044)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Stephen Done
August 3rd 1968, and it was my eighth birthday. Whilst dressed in my new Batman cape, with best friend Sean in a bright yellow Robin cape, dark, thunder clouds gathered behind our house on the outskirts of Scarborough as I declared 'I wanted to become the driver of a steam engine.'
Only to be told that the last steam engines were departing the next day...
Perhaps that is why I took up writing about steam trains instead.
I never knew the Great Central Railway whilst operational but spent teenage years in Brackley and watched the great viaduct being demolished, so I have tried to breathe life back into the large sections of the line that are now silent and overgrown by taking readers back to time when steam still ruled the rails and am a member of the Friends of the Great Central Railway.
A museum curator by profession and official historian and curator of the Liverpool Football Club Museum at Anfield since 1997 and recently been freelancing with the BBC as a storytelling consultant in their Academy.
I also like painting (as seen on recent covers of Inspector Vignoles), bird watching, gardening and walking plus railway modelling...and a good real ale!
August 3rd 1968, and it was my eighth birthday. Whilst dressed in my new Batman cape, with best friend Sean in a bright yellow Robin cape, dark, thunder clouds gathered behind our house on the outskirts of Scarborough as I declared 'I wanted to become the driver of a steam engine.'
Only to be told that the last steam engines were departing the next day...
Perhaps that is why I took up writing about steam trains instead.
I never knew the Great Central Railway whilst operational but spent teenage years in Brackley and watched the great viaduct being demolished, so I have tried to breathe life back into the large sections of the line that are now silent and overgrown by taking readers back to time when steam still ruled the rails and am a member of the Friends of the Great Central Railway.
A museum curator by profession and official historian and curator of the Liverpool Football Club Museum at Anfield since 1997 and recently been freelancing with the BBC as a storytelling consultant in their Academy.
I also like painting (as seen on recent covers of Inspector Vignoles), bird watching, gardening and walking plus railway modelling...and a good real ale!