Steam World

Regular readers will know that I buy original railway slides – colour transparencies – on eBay. There are several regular sellers and I find it worth keeping an eye on what's available, not because I want to squirrel it away in ‘my collection’ but th

1954, and the world was still in recovery from the long and destructive war that had touched all but the very remotest areas. Britons could be forgiven for thinking that the war hadn't ended nine years earlier: meat was still on ration (it ended that

Steam World reader Geoff Spencer celebrated his 85th birthday by walking up Great Gable, a mountain in the Lake District boasting a height of 899m (2949ft). Geoff, a long-standing volunteer at the Bury Transport Museum, completed the walk in May to r

It was one of the most famous conversations in railway history. Surely, Caerphilly Castle can't be more powerful than Flying Scotsman? asked LNER General Manager Sir Ralph Wedgwood. Why not find out? retorted GWR General Manager Sir Felix Pole. The c

You can't understate the importance of William Stanier's arrival on the LMS on January 1 1932. Relations between Crewe and Derby factions had eased but the bubbling tension always threatened to boil over. This was an improvement over the early years

Though Beeching's Reshaping of British Railways was published in March 1963 it took a year or more to work through the consultations and legal process to actually close a railway or a station. Those which closed in 1963 were largely in the closure pr

The D-Day landings are still, 80 years on, the largest seaborne invasion in history. The statistics are quite mindblowing. Over 7,000 vessels took part, with 5,000 of them responsible for landing the 150,000 plus troops on the Normandy beaches. Allie

Ben (pictured right) was the 6th child of a farm worker and was born in Ely. He was forced to leave school at 11 to work on the land. He joined the railway at 15, starting as a ‘call boy’, progressing to a cleaner. He became a fireman at March in 192

The Eastern Region train planning teams could see an opportunity to improve matters on the former Great Central Railway ‘London Extension’. Although timings had to be on the basis of unfitted trains, the planners recognised that the new ‘9F’ 2-10-0s