Steam World

My father was a driver at Old Oak Common. My two uncles also worked for the Great Western Railway. It was fairly inevitable that I became interested in railways from an early age. We lived near the railway at Greenford, Middlesex and, like many enthu

I'm not sure if I should apologise for the above photograph. I am sure some readers will dislike it. There's no train, no track, a dumped car and some derelict buildings. They are, however, railway buildings – or, at least, they once were. I'm always

It is difficult to over-state the perceived Iimportance of Windsor in the Victorian era. Alreadya long-established Royal residence, it was the adoption of Windsor as ‘home’ by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert which really boosted the town's importanc

It was Prince Albert's purchase of Balmoral Castle that reinvigorated efforts to build a railway along the banks of the River Dee in Aberdeenshire. The Deeside Railway had been authorised on July 16 1846. It would link Aboyne to Ferryhill anda juncti

I was interested in David Cunliffe's letter about his spotting days in Newcastle (SW 440) because, although I lived in Leeds and did most of my spotting there, I made numerous visits to Newcastle Central in the 1950s and early 1960s when staying with

I grew up to the sound of the former LSWR main line from London Waterloo to Bournemouth and the west. We had a bench and two green gas meters to sit on at our local spotting place at Haines Bridge, to the London side of Weybridge station, with the LS

I became a Test Inspector at Darlington in 1937 and was one of the crew of the LNER Dynamometer Car, No. 23591, which was based there. Thus, I took part in some special brake tests on Sunday July 3 1938. A new type of ‘quick service application’ brak

The southern end of the West Coast Main Line was in a state of transition in 1963. Steam was in decline but electrification wasn't yet complete so English Electric Type 4s had taken over almost all of the long distance trains (D1 or D2 in the Working