HST: The Second Millennium

as described

This book is excellent, if you are a fan of the modern day HST then this book has everthing. Excellent colour pictures of all modern day HST liveries. Interesting facts and up to date data make it a very interesting read.

Great

After the excellent "HST - Silver Jubilee" written by the same author I had high hopes for this book, given the significant changes made to the HST fleet in the intervening years. Seeing as the HST fleets operated by First Great Western, East Coast, Cross Country and East Midlands Trains have had significant makeovers during this period I was looking forward to a detailed description of the upgrades made to each of the fleets. Sadly this information was largely limited to the more superficial details such as seating layouts, seating capacity and paint schemes instead of the more interesting technical aspects of the schemes adopted. I thought that was a great shame seeing as the technical upgrades have ensured that what is almost certainly the best modern train produced in the UK will remain in frontline service for at least another 10 years. For example, I would have liked to see a section devoted to comparing the performance of the MTU-4100 powercars with the original Paxman Valenta engined HSTs as well as a section illustrating the differences between the upgrades adopted by the different operating companies. A major omission from an operating point of view was the failure to mention the innovative use of displaced HSTs between Manchester and St.Pancreas in "Operation Rio" during the West Coast Mainline upgrade. Otherwise I was happy with the book with the quality of the pictures, captions and text up to the high standards found in the earlier book.

An all-colour book of photos of HSTs down the years. As the title suggests, the emphasis is mainly on the the last decade but the earlier years are not neglected. The supporting text is helpful and the picture captions are full and informative.The detailed lists of the histories of both power cars and trailers are very useful.There's lots about the current Great Western fleet and its refurbishment, as one might expect, with it being the biggest of the current fleets. There are also quite a few pictures of Grand Central operations, albeit that this is the smallest of the fleets. As stated above, the focus is on the twenty-first century; however, the author has a good go at detailing the early fleet history, in the 'seventies and 'eighties. What's lacking, in my opinion, then, is coverage of the Cross Country operation in the 'nineties. In these respects, the choices of history and illustrations appear slightly idiosyncratic (- in other words, it's not quite the way I'd have done it!). Overall, though, the book achieves what it sets out to do in illustrating the current HST operations and is a good purchase.

Absolutely fantastic! It has a lot of very detailed information with lists of numbers etc in tables. It also has lots of individual HST operators within the UK and hundreds of great colour pictures that don't exist in most other publications showing HSTs in action around the country in a variety of jobs. Text is displayed in a clear and logical layout. A truely engrossing read for the HST enthusiast!