Following the success of the enchantingly written and highly personal account of a lifetime’s love of the steam railway in A Friend in Steam the author by popular request has dipped into his extensive picture archive to bring us this companion volume.

His more than 60 years’ experience as train-watcher (and occasional railway employee during school and university holidays), brought him into contact with many railway characters, incidents and anecdotes that occurred along the way.

Elgar Dickinson’s beautifully crafted autobiographical account of his long and close companionship with the steam railway - A Friend in Steam - afforded us a fresh new perspective on that most absorbing of pastimes – train-watching – and man’s relationship with perhaps the most ‘alive’ of his creations – the steam locomotive. This new volume which Includes more than 150 unpublished photographs, all with detailed captions, takes us back once more to those magical days

It all started in his native Leicester when the sights and sounds of the 1930s railway first impressed themselves on a susceptible toddler. He befriended S. W. A. Newton, who many years earlier had recorded photographically the building of the Great Central Railway’s London Extension, and his son, and cycle rides and choir outings introduced him to railways further afield. Four years at university in Durham brought him North Eastern delights, and holiday work in the 1950s saw him as porter and carriage-cleaner at Leicester Belgrave Road station. His enthusiasm eventually took him to all round the country.

W. Elgar Dickinson BA MLitt is a retired modern languages teacher, now living in Edinburgh. He was born and educated in Leicester and attended university at Durham.


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