Visionary Pragmatist: Sir Vincent Raven

When the Railway Magazine of January 2000 published the results of its Millennium Poll, Sir Vincent Raven gained a 42nd place, along with Thomas Newcomen and Arthur Peppercorn. He, like them, usually merits little more than a brief mention in railway history books, yet in many ways he was much more than a typical man of his time. His sole employer was the North Eastern railway. He rose from being an engineering apprentice at Darlington in 1878 to heading the company's locomotive and engineering department from 1910. The locomotives he designed were often visionary and ahead of their time and gave the NER a reputation for forward thinking locomotive development. This is the first biography of this engineer, illustrated with contemporary archive photographs, portraits and ephemera, creating a cohesive biographical narrative of Raven't steam and electric locomotive building activity in the context of his life and times.