The Eastern Regional Library Show 4th June 2008

Library staff members Lesley Conway and Pia Butcher run a radio show each Wednesday 12:05pm-12:45pm on Eastern FM 98.1 called The Eastern Regional Library Show. Tune in next Wednesday for a great show.

On Wednesday's show

Love on a branch line by John Hadfield is one of my all time favourite 'feel good' reads. An eccentric English Lord lives in his own private train, one of his beautiful daughters is the engine driver, and the other two daughters spend their time attempting to seduce a hapless civil servant who has come to find out why an obscure government department is still operating an office in the ancestral hall, 17 years after the end of World War II. The writing is funny and nostalgic, much in the way of H.E.Bates and his Darling Buds of May series.

This has inspired my theme for this week...trains. After re-reading Love on a branch line two weeks ago, I coincidently came across a wonderful history of British railways, Tickets please! a nostalgic journey through railway station life by Paul Atterbury. Paul "lives and breathes yesterday's railways", and even lives in a converted railway carriage. This is not his first book, he has also written Along country lines, which ERL has copies. The book is full of magnificent illustrations, photos old and new, posters, post cards and brochures. The text is set up in many small segments of information ranging from City Stations and Country Stations to Crashes, Station Gardens and Comic Postcards.

If this has inspired you, then read Patsy Adam Smith's recollections of growing up beside the railways in country Victoria between the wars, Hear the train blow : an Australian childhood. Patsy has a breezy, humourous style of storytelling which captures the smell of the bush and the eccentricity and good nature of the people who lived there.

Finally, Steven Carroll's The art of the engine driver, a novel set in the outer suburbs of Melbourne during the 1950's, gently and sympathetically describes a family in crisis, a time of rapidly changing social values, and the ambitions of an engine driver to become one of the elite drivers, a member of 'The Circle'.

Music today was from High heel sneakers, a double CD of Jose Feliciano's music.

---- Lesley