Seaside Specials: Rail Excursions to Blackpool & Fylde Coast

Seaside Specials: Rail Excursions to Blackpool and the Fylde Coast by Barry McLoughlin and Paul Nettleton.

Railway excursions were the lifeblood of Blackpool’s holiday trade for almost 150 years. This new book provides an atmospheric reminder of such excursions from the industrial hinterlands of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Scotland that brought millions of day-trippers to Blackpool and its satellite resorts.

Featuring many previously unpublished photographs, this highly illustrated tribute to Blackpool’s Seaside Specials, produced by Blackpool and Fylde Rail Users’ Association, chronicles the pleasures and pitfalls of this once-intensive excursion traffic.

These trains helped transform the lives of millions of working-class Britons – and the fortunes of emerging holiday resorts such as Blackpool. Before the arrival of the passenger-carrying railway in 1825, travel had been the preserve of the rich: the travel plans of the ‘lower orders’ were restricted by the limitations imposed by horse-power, whether on the roads or the country’s canal network. The railway excursion changed all that, opening up the possibilities of travel to ordinary people, at reasonable cost.

In the book, Seaside Specials, the steam era is covered by Malcolm Richardson’s collection of pictures by the late Frank Dean, the doyen of Fylde railway photography – some at rarely photographed locations – and the ‘preservation’ era of railtours by one of his latter-day successors, BAFRUA Chairman Paul Nettleton. The book is edited and co-written by former Gazette and Post journalist Barry McLoughlin.

All proceeds from the 120-page book will go towards funding BAFRUA’s mission of maintaining and extending the Fylde’s railway system, to recapture, at least in part, the glory days of the ‘Seaside Specials’.