Classic Steam - paperback

 The diversity of the steam age railway was at once fascinating and desperately ineffic­ient. Add in the shunters which used to bring empty trains in and out of the terminals, the even greater diversity of local trains and the whole lost world of local freight operations — and the unending fascination of the steam age railway begins to make sense.

Classic Steam reminds us of this lost world. The Yorkshire Post’s photographers — and several guest photographers — have recorded what at the time was the mundane daily scene. Today, their quality images, most of them painstakingly shot on glass plates, provide us with a glimpse of a world which some of us will remember, and which others will see for the first time.

We can take it as read that railway enthusiasts will enjoy the new insights to be found within these pages but I hope a wider audience will enjoy it too. Look beyond the number on the locomotive’s cabside and see something of that lost world: a world in which many thousands of dedicated men and women worked in difficult conditions to keep the freight and passenger trains moving and to keep Yorkshire at work; a world which affected the land­scape of every town, village and workplace. Today, from the Sprinter speeding through the West Riding to Man­chester Airport, we get only hints of that world, buried beneath the greenery — or the industrial estates — which have grown up over the old goods yards. Read these pages and you will find a real flavour of a world now totally changed.