James Boyd, along with Lewis Cozens and Charles Lee, blazed a trail in Welsh
narrow gauge history that has since led many others to follow. For this we owe
him a great debt.

My main criticism of Boyd's work is that he did not distinguish in his writing
between provable facts and intelligent guesswork. His Corris chapter in Narrow
Gauge Railways in Mid Wales can be extremely frustrating to those coming after
as distinguishing his guesses and assumptions from provable facts requires
tracing the source for his every statement, and he was not strong at quoting his
sources.

An example is his comment on the four wheel carriages "..ultimately there were
eight vehicles in all.." From this error (there were in fact ten) he assumes
there can only have been four conversions and that there must have been three
Metropolitan new-build bogie carriages, whereas in fact the evidence suggests
there were five conversions and two Metropolitans. (He also has the 1888-built
Falcon bogie carriage as being built in 1890). Had he stated that these were
assumptions based on the evidence available to him, that would have been fair
enough; stating them as bald fact makes it much harder for those following up
the interest generated by his work to establish what the truth of the matter
was.

Another statement that has caused errors in works on the Corris ever since is
that "..on 1 October 1887 the Imperial undertaking was absorbed by Bristol
Tramways and Carriage Co.Ltd". The only trouble is - no it wasn't ! The Bristol
involvement, which was not an "absorption" of the one company by the other, more
a sharing of management and premises, did not take place until 1892.

Richard

--- In corris-discuss@..., "Walter Bareham" <Milwaukee@...> wrote:
>
> I agree completely with the previous mail regarding Boyd and his
> influence on the narrow gauge. Back in the 50's and 60's while we were
> chasing the decline of standard gauge steam Boyd was walking all the
> narrow gauge railways, running, derelict or abandoned years before, it
> was all noted and eventually presented to us in his books.
> I still remember the excitement caused by his first book 'Narrow Gauge
> Rails to Portmadoc' which rapidly fell to pieces in the pannier bag of
> my motor cycle. Merioneth roads were very bumpy in those days.
> Considering the amount of information he presented, his errors were
> few and he didn't have the vast facilities of computers at the start.
>
> Walter Bareham
>