page_title: L. T. C. Rolt
section_title: Achievements and honours
hierarchical_section_title: L. T. C. Rolt / Achievements and honours
caption_attribution_description: English: Talyllyn Railway Number 7: Tom Rolt at Tywyn Wharf Cymraeg: Rheilffordd Talyllyn Injan Rhif 7 Tom Rolt yng ngorsaf Tywyn Wharf Deutsch: Talyllyn Railway: Lok Nr. 7 Tom Rolt im Bahnhof Tywyn Wharf
context_page_description: Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt was a prolific English writer and the biographer of major civil engineering figures including Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford. He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain's inland waterways, and as an enthusiast for both vintage cars and heritage railways.
context_section_description: He was Vice-President of the Newcomen Society, which established a Rolt Prize;
  a trustee and member of the  Advisory Council of the Science Museum; member of the York Railway Museum Committee; an honorary MA of Newcastle; an honorary MSc of the University of Bath (1973)  and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was a joint founder of the Association for Industrial Archaeology, which has an annual Rolt lecture. He helped to form the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust.
  A locomotive Tom Rolt on the Talyllyn Railway, the world's first preserved railway, was named in his memory in 1991.
  Rolt observed the changes in society resulting from the industrial-scientific revolution. In the epilogue to his biography of I. K. Brunel he writes two years before C. P. Snow makes similar statements about the split between the arts and sciences:
  
  Men spoke in one breath of the arts and sciences and to the man of intelligence and culture it seemed essential that he should keep himself abreast of developments in both spheres. ... So long as the artist or the man of culture had been able to advance shoulder to shoulder with engineer and scientist and with them see the picture whole, he could share their sense of mastery and confidence and believe wholeheartedly in material progress. But so soon as science and the arts became divorced, so soon as they ceased to speak a common language, confidence vanished and doubts and fears came crowding in.
  He set out these ideas more fully in his book High Horse Riderless, a classic of green philosophy.
  A bridge (no. 164) on the Oxford Canal in Banbury bears his name (in commemoration of his book Narrow Boat), as does a centre at the boat museum at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire. A blue plaque to Mr. Rolt was unveiled in at Tooley's Boatyard, Banbury on 7 August 2010 as part of the centenary celebrations of his birth.
caption: The Tom Rolt locomotive
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