Reviews for On the Trail of Washington: A Narrative History of Washington's Boyhood and Manhood, Based O...

The average rating for On the Trail of Washington: A Narrative History of Washington's Boyhood and Manhood, Based O... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-02-09 00:00:00 Daniel Sigetti I picked up this book after losing myself down one too many late-night wiki-holes on train disasters. There was something about these disasters that kept drawing me in, which I hoped a book could perhaps explain for me. Well Rolt’s book, despite being written in 1955, certainly did the job. Aside from being superbly researched (always all the more admirable when the author didn’t have the internet), it’s also insightful on the subject of the fascination we have with disasters of all kinds. “The accident caused by fate alone is rare on the railway,” Rolt writes. “Almost invariably human fallibility is responsible. The cause is found to be trivial - a single mistake on the part of a driver, guard, or signalman - or some fatal lack of cooperation between them. It is in this contrast between trivial error and terrible consequence that the drama of the railway accident lies.” The fact that this human fallibility is often the result of Victorian working conditions often makes the disasters only sadder, as, for example, in the case of one signalman who worked a 24-hour shift in order to have one full day off per week, or another forced to work immediately after the death of his child. The author highlights that public opinion of the time was often highly sympathetic in these cases, and even in other cases without such obvious justification for distraction, Rolt never harshly judges the main protagonists of each disaster, writing: “have we not all been equally careless and forgetful on occasion, but with no such fearful result?” In this vein, the author also uses each accident to narrate the gradual development of increasingly more sophisticated technological attempts to remove the element of human fallibility from railway operations. In any case, it certainly left me glad not to be a Victorian signalman.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-26 00:00:00 Charles Alexander This book was written in the 1950's and is somewhat of a mess. The chapters could do with being shorter and a greater differentiation between each accident would make things clearer. Having said that, I thought this book was extremely interesting, as it takes you on a journey through the accidents in the early days of the railway, allowing you to see all the various rules and regs that have been implemented as a direct reaction to each incident. I am more than grateful that if I'm having to commute on a train, at least I'm doing it with the benefit of over 170 years of safety improvements! Some of the accidents mentioned were horrifyingly predictable - whoever thought that wooden carriages and gas lighting would be a good combination?! Especially in the days where there weren't through corridors in the carriages, and the doors to each compartment were locked. And coated in a flammable lacquer!