Everyone knows that Britain invented the steam locomotive. Yet while Britain was gripped by the great period of railway building of the 1830s and ‘40s in which many of our inter-city routes began to take shape, there were those who believed that the future lay beyond steam haulage.

In 1837 Scotsman Robert Davidson built a model electric locomotive, and followed it up with a fourwheeled machine, Galavani, that was powered by zinc-acid batteries. It was the world’s first electric locomotive. The first English patent for the use of rails as conductors of electric current was granted in 1840. But it took until 1882 until Britain’s first public electric railway was opened, in Brighton – the Volks Electric Railway.

Expert Robin Jones traces the history of electric traction in Britain, from these pioneering early days, through nostalgic underground trains and the “Brighton Belle”, right up to Eurostar and the Pendolino in the twenty-first century, when a large proportion of the national rail network is electrified.

In more than 60 images and with a sharp and incisive text, Electric Trains is the ideal brief guide, in Halsgrove’s collectable pocket-size format.

A graduate of the University of Central England, Robin Jones, founding editor of Heritage Railway magazine, was a news editor and chief investigative reporter at the Birmingham Evening Mail, and over the years has produced several books and special publications, along with historical features for numerous other newspapers and periodicals. He has been interested in railways from a very early age, when his elder brother Stewart took him trainspotting at Widney Manor station in Solihull at the age of four, at the end of the British Railways steam age.

Imprint: PiXZ Books. ISBN 978 1 906887 81 0, hardnack, 110x155mm, 64 pages. Published September 2010.