French Narrow Gauge Album by Peter Lemmey & Michael Whitehouse

Narrow Gauge Railways of Europe by Peter Allen and Pat Whitehouse, published in 1959, was a seminal book which introduced many British railway enthusiasts to railways overseas. In the 1950s, holiday expectations began to change and railway enthusiasts began to look further afield, sailing across the Channel to France. In this album we follow these adventures as they began to discover the multitude of different narrow gauge railways once to be found there. In France the narrow gauge was far more extensive than in Britain. Across the Republic as a whole, narrow gauge public railways at one time ran something approaching 12,000 miles (20,000 kilometres) of route. France was once a narrow gauge nation par excellence. This enormous network of narrow gauge railways was developed between 1870 and 1925, to open up what was essentially a country of small towns and rural villages. Motive power on the French narrow gauge ranged from lightweight 0-6-0T tram engines to hefty 0-6-6-0T Mallets, tog.