THE two authors spent a great deal of their teenage spare time in the period 1962-1971 recording the soon to vanish steam operations on British Railways. Then in 2013, the pair launched a plan to digitise the huge number of monochrome negatives they had captured back then.
Don’s health was already causing concern, however, as he was receiving ongoing treatment for blood cancer. Sadly Don passed away in April 2020, and the planned book to publish their superb railway images was left unfinished. So Alan subsequently made it his task to complete what they had both begun so many years before, and pay tribute to his friend’s photographic skills.
This large format, selfpublished book has been limited to a print run of 500 copies. Sometimes the words ‘self-published’ can mean ‘low quality’, but not in this case. It is a very substantial 442-page volume that allows the excellent images to be reproduced on quality art paper at a size that does justice to the images they produced on medium format Rolleiflex, Mamiya, and 35mm Leica M3 equipment.
The 400 photographs contain a wealth of detail portraying the twilight of varied steam activity around the United Kingdom from Weymouth to Aberdeen. These terrific pictures are provided with detailed informative captions and the text gives an account of their numerous expeditions to record the steam railway scenes before they vanished.