Pre-grouping railway companies frequently had misleading and over-ambitious names, but the Manchester & Milford was in a class by itself. Promoted as a way to give the Lancashire cotton industry access to a rival deep-water port to Liverpool, the 40-mile section of line that was actually built was in a remote and thinly-populated part of mid-Wales, with no obvious sources of traffic. At its southern end it was 50 miles from Milford Haven; at its northern end 150 miles from Manchester (as the crow flies, it is about 200 miles from Manchester to Milford Haven). Thanks to the machinations of a rival company, a vital link across the Welsh mountains that would have given it some sort of access to civilisation was never built. The M&M did get saddled with a short and entirely useless detached section of line at Llandidloes, at the far end of this missing link, where it had to pay the Cambrian Railway a hefty charge for shared use of a station its trains could not reach. Or at least it would have done, had there ever been any money in the kitty: the M&M spent almost all its fifty years of independent existence in receivership. In fact, it probably owed its survival as an independent concern to its debts: it was so enmeshed with the Court of Chancery that no-one would have had any profit out of either taking it over or shutting it down until the mighty Great Western stepped in, apparently for strategic reasons, in 1911.

This book (originally published in 1979, reissued in a revised edition in 2007) almost lives up to the usual high standard of Oakwood Press histories. Holden's text is readable and informative, if not especially lively, with about half the book being devoted to history and the rest to a detailed description of the line and its equipment. There are plenty of period photographs and a reasonable number of maps and plans. The historical maps could have been a bit clearer: there's no consistent convention for distinguishing between lines proposed and those actually built, so it's sometimes a little difficult to follow. But that's a minor niggle. More serious is the absence of a proper bibliography and references to sources, a failing that isn't really something readers should be prepared to put up with in a book of this degree of specialisation. Holden clearly did a lot of research in primary sources to produce the book: there seems to be no good reason for not telling us where he found his information. ( )