Bowing to (or should that be, despite???) pressure, I have uploaded some of my railway pictures online. I have started with a selection of pictures taken since 2006, when I bought my first digital SLR, moving on to scan and upload images from my 35mm slide collection back to 1979, plus some earlier slides taken on a Kodak Instamatic[!], although I am not entirely confident I have managed to reproduce some of them as well as they should have been. I am also planning on scanning some 126 (Instamatic) negatives dating back to 1976, although they will need some serious cleaning before going near the scanner.

After being made redundant and taking early retirement in 2022, I treated myself to a Canon EOS 90D, upgrading from a 60D (and 30D before that). I have 24-70mm and 70-200mm Canon zoom lenses. I got my first SLR, like so many people a Zenit E, as a Christmas present in 1978. In October 1981 I used some of the earnings from my harvest work and bought the camera I had fantasised about since before I got my Zenit, a Canon A1, with the fantastic Vivitar Series 1 70-210mm f3.5 zoom to go with it. In 1992 I got my first Canon EOS, an EOS 10, and in 2003 it was joined by a second-hand EOS 1.

Despite the variety of pictures I have put on here, you will probably be thinking that I don't get out much any more, and that's true. Many of these images were taken within easy reach of my home in Monifieth on the outskirts of Dundee. Some were taken on my not-sufficiently-frequent trips to Germany, and hopefully these will be of interest, along with images from the wonderful Douro Valley in Portugal.

You will no doubt gather from these pictures, what my railway interests are; and just as importantly, aren't, so I'll say no more about that. I am not impressed by the lazy way many photographs in railway magazines and photographic albums are captioned, so what you won't find on this site are captions that always tell you when locomotives were put into service or scrapped, where they were allocated throughout their lives, or what their first and/or last sheds were (unless that is in some way directly relevant to the picture). Whilst numbers, dates and trains (where the latter are known) are always shown, I have tried to make the captions more informative and possibly on occasion even amusing. Hopefully you will think I have succeeded. Shock horror, some of these pictures were even taken while the sun wasn't shining - magazine editors take note! The UK climate is, ahem, changeable to say the least, and these images cannot but reflect that. I despair at the way Network Rail and its predecessors have let the undergrowth at the side of the track (and in many places in the middle of it!) grow in such an unrestricted fashion over the last three or four decades. Whilst I have no illusions that they should be maintaining the trackside for the benefit of my photographic endeavours, there are sound operational reasons for not just weed control, but also bushes and trees. Plus their predilection for erecting large, ugly fences in the most unnecessary places, which are otiose from a safety point of view, is another source of frustration.

There are plenty of Flickr sites featuring pictures of trains, which are full of stunning and innovative pictures taken by talented photographers who find fantastic and original compositions for their shots. This isn't one of them. There's just pictures of trains here...