Books

Every one of these books was made by someone who was there for the job, not just there for the photograph.

Peter Collins had a position within British Railways that gave him access the rest of us never got. Toton depot in the early seventies — on Christmas Day, which tells you something about how the railway ran then. Stratford Works, behind the scenes. The Deltics at King’s Cross, all twenty-two Napier-powered 55s, thrumming away under Cubitt’s train shed. Three volumes: Western, London Midland, Eastern. The Western one alone comes out of a personal archive of more than 1,500 images, most of them unseen for over fifty years.

Ronnie Gee spent most of his working life between Manchester and Stockport, and worked the boxes at London Road, Longsight and Stockport — so his pictures come from the box interior as well as the lineside. He lived near Mauldeth Road, and took himself off to the Styal Line for the running-in turns off Crewe works: Duchess and Princess class engines, and the BR Standard 9Fs out on test.

Chris Thornburn conducted Leeds trams through the summers of 1955, 1956 and 1957 — the middle three years of an abandonment that finished on 7 November 1959. First-hand accounts by the crews who actually worked the trams barely exist. There are four we know of.