Footplate: The Victorian Engineman's New Zealand - Hardback with dust jacket. 239 page - Author: Troup, Gordon - Publisher: A.H. and A.W. Reed, Wellington - Publication Date: 1978 - ISBN: 0589010964 - Odd marks on the dust jacket and a few inside book, Otherwise fine Footplate - This is the saga of steam and steel in a new country. It begins in 1863, when New Zealand's tiny scattered settlements lay weeks apart in terms of travel time and when, fortunately, the arts of railway making were beginning to bear good fruit. - The young country's irregular surface posed tricky problems for surveyors, en gineers and the men who designed and drove the locomotives. But the boundless confidence and enthusiasm of the vision ary premier Julius Vogel inspired the work; and by the end of Victoria's reign New Zealand's railways were approaching the zenith of their development. - This book tells the story. It is not a formal history but a series of sketches and impressions of the trunks and branch lines, the tracks, the bridges and tunnels, the locomotives and their rolling stock and, above all, of the men of the footplate in that golden age of the grand steam railways. - This book was in its production stages when the author died in October 1977. Gordon Troup, doyen of New Zealand's railway writers, was born in the 19th century and grew up to know and to love his subject. He worked thousands of kilometres on the footplate in his native country and in France. The old drivers and firemen were his lifelong friends. He was no main-trunk snob - he warmed as joyfully to the traction-engines and the little bush-tramway locomotives as he paid homage to the behemoth engines of the main line expresses. - In the book we ride with him in the cab, up and down and across all New Zealand, sharing the tribulations and the triumphs of driver and fireman, straining painfully up grim gradients and around awkward curves with overloaded trains, rollicking down the grades to the flats where straight and level running encourages engine and crew to prove their mettle .... - The illustrations selected by the author run obligato to his text, and will bring pangs of nostalgia to all who, like Mr Troup himself, see the steam-age railways as the symbol of New Zealand's rise to nationhood.