About my photostream.....

Since the 1970s I have travelled extensively on Britain's national rail network, largely photographing stations rather than trains. My enthusiasm for station architecture was largely fired up by my twelve month stint in 1979-80 as personal assistant to Bernard Kaukas, British Rail's first and only Director-Environment, who did so much to raise awareness of BR's architectural heritage both inside and outside the industry.

On my first day, Bernard handed me an Olympus Trip camera and said "Get out of the office as much as you can and take photographs of stations and other railway buildings. Concentrate on the buildings, not the trains!" So started a habit that has lasted a lifetime.

I also made about 40 week-long trips to western Europe by train, travelling each day and staying in a different place each night or else travelling by sleeper.

Until a few years ago, I took transparencies using a Canon SLR camera. In general I looked at the images once or twice before filing them away. The results are often grainy in comparison with today's digital photos, but the thousands of shots I took make up a large archive which I have now shared on Flickr.

Acknowledgement...

As I have uploaded my photos of British railway stations, I have in some cases added a brief architectural or historic description. The words are mine but I have increasingly found it useful to include details referred to in Gordon Biddle's majestic book "Britain's Historic Railway Buildings - A Gazetteer of Structures and Sites" published by Ian Allen. That volume is necessarily limited in the photographs it can include to illustrate the written details, so I hope that my shots of railway stations will complement Gordon Biddle's book, although they naturally cover far fewer locations than he does.

In 2015 I was asked by Amberley Publishing to write an illustrated book on Britain's station hotels. "Railway Hotels", published in 2016, includes a few of my own photos but I'm immensely grateful to other Flickr members for their co-operation in allowing me to use some really wonderful images of this under-appreciated aspect of our railway heritage. "The Great Railway Stations of Paris" followed in 2017, again illustrated with the help of Flickr photographers. "Europe by Sleeping Car" was published in February 2019. It tells the story of some of my own journeys across Europe by sleeper and again features images taken by Flickr members as well as some of my own.