Originally from North London and after 33 years living in Maidstone, Kent I moved back to North London in 2000. Happily married....

I started off my railway career in 1988 and was involved in the retail side of European rail tickets until 2015. Originally with British Rail International, in 1997 the business was acquired by French Railways (SNCF). After redundancy in 2015, I found my way to Southeastern, a UK train passenger operating company. A new career began in the control room looking after passenger information via station screens, websites, apps in addition to running Twitter. In April 2024, I retired after 35.5 years on the railway and 10 years prior to that in the food industry.

One of the "perks" of the job is an extremely valuable quota of free rail travel both at home and abroad. As such I have made use of the facilities over the years to reach many obscure destinations in Europe as well as the entire UK. I make an average of two x one week trips to the European mainland per year, generally concentrating on one or perhaps two countries. Visits are centred around covering new lines and I have a passion for visiting dead end branches.

This Flickr collection is mainly devoted to railway photographs I've taken since the early 1980s. Initial rail travel and photos were to the length and breadth of the UK. In 1985 I made my first trip to mainland Europe. Since then I have visited most of Europe as well as to some countries in North Africa and Turkey on rail trips. It would be fair to say I'd always prefer loco hauled travel. However what ever type of traction took me there (& back) I'd go with as my key aim was always to cover the line. Hence this collection will show many multiple units as well as locomotives.

Photographs up to around 2001 were all taken on Kodachrome 64 transparencies. For a short period, I used Kodak Gold film before I went over to digital. After a couple of years of railway inactivity around 2004/5, I started again to make regular trips abroad as well as in the UK.

Around 2006/7 I embarked on a big project to scan my entire collection of over 5,000 slides and smaller number of negatives. Over time many will get uploaded. Some will get some minor treatments and enhancements to remove dust, colour corrections etc. but of course will never be up to today's digital standards. However often the subject is more important and as stated in the descriptions, many trains or the surrounding infrastructure have since gone.

As far as organising the pictures here on Flickr, this loosely resembles my cataloguing system I started off for slides. For pictures taken outside the UK it is simple enough - one set per country. For the UK I've basically split it into two sections - British Rail and post-privatisation. For British Rail due to the quantity I have, they are split up by BR region for locomotive pictures with separate sets for multiple units. For digital pictures everything initially lives together in one set. However over time as the numbers increase that could change.

Please feel free to ask any questions about the photos you see. All photos have a Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license for use on Wikipedia type pages. In fact, many photos correctly attributed can be found on Wikipedia pages mainly relating to railway rolling stock. I am happy for photos to be used elsewhere for publications on the understanding they are properly credited to me.