I (Justin Foulger) am a Railway Enthusiast from Basingstoke, England. I have been interested in railways all my life. I have a strong interest in the operations side of the railway such as train driving, signalling and control rooms. I currently work for South Western Railway as a Route Information and Customer Experience Controller in the Basingstoke Wessex Integrated Control Centre.

I got interested in the hobby through my dad who was also into it from a young age. My dad grew up in Ipswich in the early 1950's and regularly did train spotting at Ipswich station, the docks and on the steam shed nearby to where he lived and went to school. My first interest came from model railways, where my dad had an N gauge layout in the spare bedroom when I was growing up. I really enjoyed playing trains and I slowly started to learn about the different types of trains from my dad. My mum although not interested in railways herself used to take me on the train a lot to different nearby towns to go shopping from Basingstoke such as Reading, Winchester and Eastleigh. I was born in 1993 and during my childhood years I grew up with South West Trains, 400 series slamdoor units and Class 442's. I also travelled on Class 165's to Reading and I just about remember the final years of HST's and Class 47's on Virgin Cross Country services. I knew very little about freight trains at the time but I knew lots about my local passenger trains and I enjoyed many trips on them. I have very found memories of travelling to and from Bournemouth on my beloved Class 442 units to visit the seaside in the summer months during school holidays.

From my dad's involvement in model railways we used to help run a family friends layout at model railway exhibitions around the country. We did this for many years and in 2006 my dad and I brought our own layout. It was a small branchline terminus station with a few goods sidings with a small market town based in North Hampshire. My dad and I called it "Just Sidings" and it visited various model railway exhibitions around the south of England from 2007 until its withdrawal in 2012.

In 2006 I started doing a little bit of railway photography. I was never interested in photography before hand, mainly because of my young age but also because I never felt the need to, I just enjoyed seeing and riding on trains. I first started with a old film camera my dad had, it was okay to use however the quality of the photos it was producing soon became materialised and the camera packed up. After this I used a throwaway film camera for the odd diesel gala I was going to at the time. I wasn't really bothered but I did take a few decent pictures with the throwaway film camera. The idea of this however soon became boring and I gave that up. During 2007 I unintentionally brought a PlayStation Portable Go Cam from a games shop which took my fancy. Looking back It was a horrible 1.5 megapixel camera but it was a fun picture taking concept for the PSP at the time. From this I started to use it to film trains and take photo's, the quality of the photos were bad however the filming was okay. I never took this seriously and I enjoyed the concept of being able to play my games and use the same device for filming trains at the same time. I used the PSP go cam until early 2009.

In 2009 I decided to upgrade to a more decent but small practical camera. I bought a Canon Powershot SX200 which had 12.1 megapixels and a 12X optical zoom. When I used my PSP go cam I used to prefer filming trains rather than taking pictures so this camera enabled me to film trains as well as take decent quality photos. I used this camera for a few years and upgraded to a Canon Powershot SX220 HS which had better functionality to it previous model I had. I still have this camera today as it very small and lightweight as I love practicality.

I have filmed many hours of trains over the years with 1159 videos on my YouTube channel which can be viewed at www.youtube.com/user/justinfoulger/featured.

During 2015, I had stopped filming trains and moved onto photography. From 2015 to 2020, I was using a Canon PowerShot SX60 bridge camera.

From 2021, I have been using a Sony RX10 M4 bridge camera as my main camera and an equivalent Sony RX100 M7 compact camera for travel.

I very much enjoy doing railway photography and has become the mainstay of my hobby for many years now.

Thank you for visiting my Flickr site

Justin F