Echoes of Steam and Vintage Voltage

This is a vivid, contemporary account of the sights and sounds of the last two years of commercial steam on British Railways from the detailed diaries of a journalist, photographer and sound recordist in north-west England in that final theatre of steam operations. His descriptive text and atmospheric photographs are evocative of a lost era and the wider transport scene of that period. The author begins his story as a boy on the GWR and Southern. In his work as a newspaper reporter and feature writer he moved north to LMS country. He liked to hear Stanier and Britannia whistles echoing in the fells and the sounds of clanking siderods and squealing flanges in the goods yard and shed yard. He 'communed with the locomotives' to capture their more intimate sounds and he sought to record the whole repertoire of the sounds of steam freight and passenger operations, vestiges of a passing age. He also liked to capture the ghostly drone of vintage electric trains and tramcars, then in their last years.