Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

There are no horses working in the shunting and goods yards of British railways now: the last one retired in 1967. That horse was the last of a phenomenon that had lasted over 100 years.  At its height, in 1913, there were 27,826 railway-owned cartage and shunting horses in the UK, a number  Bryan Holden in his  The Long Haul  describes as declining to 9,077 by 1945. This decline had effects that were noticed by even the higher echelons of society.  Riding Magazine , whose readership were not generally troubled by lack of money, noted with concern in its July 1951 edition that the number of railway horses on parade at the 55 th  Annual Show of the London Cart Horse Parade Society at Regent’s Park had dropped from 61 to 14. The decline, as with the agricultural industry, was driven by the replacement of horses with motorised transport. This was not a process that happened immediately: it took 40 years. The Second World War, and the rationing of petrol meant a temporary halt