The Story of the Cambrian: A Biography of a Railway

Transcribed from the 1922 Woodall, Minshall, Thomas & Co. Ltd. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
A Biography of a Railway by C. P. GASQUOINE (Editor of the “Border Counties Advertizer.”)
1922:
Printed and Published by Woodall, Minshall, Thomas & Co. Ltd. (Incorporating Hughes & Son).
Principality Press, Wrexham, and Caxton Press, Oswestry.
Credit for the inspiration of this book belongs to my friend, Mr. W. R. Hall, of Aberystwyth, who, in one of his interesting series of “Reminiscences” of half a century of Welsh journalism, contributed to the “Cambrian News,” recently expressed his surprise that no one had hitherto attempted to write the history of the Cambrian Railways. With the termination of that Company’s separate existence, on its amalgamation with the Great Western Railway under the Government’s grouping scheme, “the hour” for such an effort seems to have struck; and Mr. Hall’s pointed indication of Oswestry as the most appropriate place where the work could be undertaken, not only by reason of its close connection with the official headquarters of the Cambrian, but because, in a certain newspaper office there lay the files containing so many old records of the railway’s birth and early struggles for existence, even the selection of “the man” appeared so severely circumscribed that to the present writer it virtually amounted to what, in certain ecclesiastical circles, is termed “a call.”
Responsibility for its acceptance, however, and for the execution of the task, with its manifold imperfections and shortcomings, rests entirely with the author, whose only qualification for assuming the rôle of biographer of the Cambrian is the deep interest he has always taken in a subject worthy of a far abler pen. Not even the attempt would have been possible
had it not been for the valuable assistance readily given by many kind friends directly or indirectly associated with the Cambrian Railways.