Just over 180 years ago a group of men representing business interests in Bristol and London held a meeting to form a company to build a railway between the two cities.

Among the items on the agenda on August 19, 1833, was the selection of a name for the enterprise and rather than the prosaic Bristol and London Railroad, they plumped for the altogether more evocative Great Western Railway.

That the name Great Western is still borne by trains running on the same tracks today perhaps offers an early hint of the flair for publicity that the company would exhibit in its heyday, one of the aspects of the GWR story that author Colin Maggs looks at in A History of the Great Western Railway (Amberley, £20).

While the story has been exhaustively documented, Maggs's book takes a look at aspects of its operations that are perhaps less well-known, including its pioneering of new technologies, such as the diesel railcars that were a familiar sight in Oxfordshire from the mid-1930s, and its role in the development of bus and air services.

Engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel looms large in the early stages of the story as the engineer of that initial route between London and Bristol and extensions taking the GWR’s broad gauge rails to Oxford, Birmingham, Wales and the West Country. Other personalities who guided the GWR until nationalisation in 1948 are also featured, including the locomotive engineer George Jackson Churchward, whose tenure from 1901 to 1921 saw a series of standard designs developed that gave sterling service to the GWR and then British Railways almost until the end of steam.

Among anecdotes which add colour to the book is the tale of how crows’ taste for the yellow grease used in the axle boxes of GWR goods wagons in the 19th century once brought a train to grief in the Vale of White Horse.

A train of empty wagons that had been sitting in sidings at Didcot for several days was despatched to Swindon.

As the train reached Challow, the signalman stopped it, after seeing sparks coming from a series of hot axleboxes.

An inspection revealed that the axlebox lids had been lifted on some of the wagons, and the grease was gone. That the crows of Didcot were the culprits was given away by footprints they had left behind in the remnants of the grease.