8vo. 46 + (2)pp. Stitched as issued. Very light staining at top lh corner of first few leaves. Ottley No. 1524. Not in Skempton. This rare report proposes a 30-mile railway from Sanquhar with its rich coalfield through Nithsdale to Dumfries and is one of the earliest schemes seriously to consider passenger traffic. As Peter Cross-Rudkin writes in the Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers the report “is notable on several counts. It shows that he was familiar with practice on the Sirhowy Railway in South Wales, where passengers had been carried for four years, and although the Sanquhar line was projected to carry coal, he was one of the first to make provision in his estimates for newly generated classes of traffic. He also envisaged the line as forming part of a through route from Carlisle to Glasgow, very much along the course taken more than thirty years later”. Buchanan was better known as a millwright and was the author of an excellent and influential work, “An essay on the teeth of wheels” of 1808.
GBP 650.00
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