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* Kerr, Ian J.
''Engines of change: the railroads that made India''.
Westport, CT; London: Praeger, 2006 (Moving Through through history: transportation and society)
Any book by Ian Kerr on railways in India comes highly recommended and ''Engines of change'', his latest, looks set to become the standard primer on the subject, supplanting J N Westwood’s long out of print ''Railways of India''.
The first part traces the history of the Stevenage family in India, from the arrival of John Stevenage in late 1778, a private in the East India Company’s Madras European Regiment, to the family’s exodus, four generations later, in the years after 1947 and in the wake of Indian Independence. The author has researched his ancestors in great detail, helped by the extinction outside India of all other branches of the Stevenage surname which, while unfortunate, has had the happy consequence that any bearer of the surname must be related! However, the sketchiest family tree, the paucity of footnotes and the lack of a bibliography will surely challenge future Stevenage researchers who turn to this book for enlightenment.
The second, and longer, part is the author’s personal story, beginning in Bangalore in 1922 and ending with early retirement circa 1983 in Haywards Heath. Along the way, the author chronicles childhood, schooling and higher education in the Anglo-Indian community around Madras, initial employment in a bank before becoming a Traffic Officer with the Madras & Southern Mahratta Railway, a position he held until his decision to quit India. A fascinating picture emerges of back office work in managing traffic in the days before computers; the author also had a front-row seat in 1948 for Operation Polo by which the supposedly independent state of Hyderabad was forcibly integrated into the Union of India. Once settled in England, he secured a clerical job with British Railways, retrained as an accountant and ended up supervising the investment budget of British Rail. In this section, the absence of a bibliography is barely noticed. (review by Hugh Wilding, FIBIS Trustee) *Wilding, Hugh''Research sources for Indian railways, 1845-1947''. London: Families in British India Society, 2009 (FIBIS fact files; 4) This is the latest in the series of handy guides to sources being produced by the Families in British India Society. Inspired by the discovery that a great grandfather had been an employee of the Indian Railways, the author has over the past fifteen years made himself thoroughly acquainted with all UK sources for researching ancestors connected with the Indian railway system. After an introduction which includes an article by Anthony West, another FIBIS researcher in this field, Wilding provides comprehensive lists of the relevant UK archives covering not only the India Office Records, but also The National Archives, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and the Centre of South Asian Studies. There is also a very full book list, a glossary, and – something which has probably never before been attempted – a complete finding list of railways known to have operated in India between 1853 and 1947.
==Communications==
