Author(s): Fred Affleck

Local Books | Australian History | Three Amazing Local Authors

Rails in the West is a fascinating and easy to read narrative story, filled with the men (and a few women) who built it, operated and managed it, the passengers who travelled on it, and the politicians who initiated it, guided, and sometimes interfered in it. Beginning in 1873, the story covers the Railway’s thirteen decades (until its sale in 2000) while it was the essential circulation system sustaining and energising the colony’s and the State’s economy.
The characters in this story of the ‘Western Australian Government Railways’ include many of the State’s best-known historical figures, including Sir John Forrest, C.Y.O’Connor, Sir Charles Court and many others, and chief executives including Jim Pascoe and Ian McCullough.
The WAGR provided the ‘sinews’, the ‘muscle’ and the ‘nervous system’ enabling the State’s growth, beginning as a remote and impoverished colony, through multiple gold rushes, tragedies and scandals, and widely dispersed agricultural, mining and urban development.
This book is an essential record, including more than a century of the many stories which helped to shape the State of Western Australia, its cities and towns, farms, mines and factories. And it will also be a very readable rail-buff’s treasure.