A railway enthusiast from the age of 5, Frank Hornby started loco-spotting while at school, and began to travel around the UK by train from about 1941. Since that time he has kept copious diaries of all his travels – dates, times, routes taken, depots visited and locomotives and trains observed. Full of fascinating detail, these diaries now number many volumes, and are still being kept by octogenarian Frank to the present day.

Silver Link asked Frank to make a selection from his many journeys during the 1950s, and the result is this unique first-hand record of British and Irish railways
during that decade, long before the Beeching era changed everything for ever, when a staggering variety of motive power was there to be seen, and many hundreds of miles of railway, since lost, were there to be travelled.

Setting out from his home in South London, Frank describes visits to the West Country and Wales, the Midlands and East Anglia, Scotland and Ireland, the diary entries supported by more than 125 photographs taken by him during those trips.

Frank Hornby is retired and lives in South London. At the age of 83 he is still an active railway photographer recording the modern railway scene in words and pictures.