During the last 20 or so years of the Steam Age in Britain, Neil Davenport and his father, the late Arthur Davenport, were lucky enough to visit many parts of the country observing and photographing the railway scene. Choosing and captioning this selection from his and his father’s photographs has enabled Neil to recapture the pleasures and variety of that now distant era.
The result, a superb collection of top-quality images, the majority of which have never before published brfore, forms a worthy addition to Silver Link’s gallery series for the best of black and white steam railway photography. Neil has divided the selection into a number of contrasting themes. Railway centres visited by father and son range from Basingstoke and Bromsgrove to Stratford-upon-Avon and Edinburgh. Branch lines featured include those on the Isle of Wight and the Kent & East Sussex Railway, now subject to preservation schemes, as well as long-dismantled branches to Dunstable, Guildford, Buxton and Wensleydale. We make shed visits to Dalry Road, Devons Road, Neasden and New Cross Gate amongst others, and trains are seen in action on the East Coast, Midland, Great Western and Southern main lines. Finally, locomotives and trains move out of the limelight for a section celebrating some of the attractive semaphore signals that survived from pre-Grouping days into the British Railways era.

The different themes all combine to produce a book which gives a technically accomplished, varied and wide ranging view of everyday steam on Britain's railways.