Travelling on railtours was an experience that many enthusiasts enjoyed, or on occasions when things did not go to plan, endured, but like most things in life they have changed immeasurably over the years with most modern tours being over long distances and more recently in carriages where leaning out of a window, or even having one open, in order to hear the sounds of motive power in action, is impossible. Some also delighted in arriving at remote locations on freightonly lines and getting on and off the train by jumping to the ground and then struggling to reboard having taken photographs strung out across the track and hanging from every vantage point. In that respect our risk-averse culture and the odd person who would insist on suing the organiser in the event of even a scratch has a lot to answer for. Whilst all the delights of tours did not change in the 1950s and 1960s the railtour market certainly did as we can discover by looking back 70 and then 60 years to 1953 and 1963.
The origin of enthusiasts’ railtours is said to date back to the Railway Correspondence & Travel Society organised trip from King's Cross to Peterborough and return which, hauled by Stirling Single No.1, ran in 1938 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Society. How the railtour market might have developed in the light of that
