ENGINES 1962-1966

 

After more than 50 years, I have, if anything, an even greater regard for the steam locomotive than I had in my early teens. This monumental concatenation of iron, fire, steam and water, hurtling along on the edge of explosion, without the aid of a single coerced electron, has to be one of the most wonderfully bonkers creations of the human imagination there has ever been.

 

Early 1962, last year at primary school and all sorts of boys were getting hooked on collecting locomotive numbers. I held out for a while, but I remember my conversion as having religious overtones. That I should commit myself to accumulating runs of numbers all suddenly made sense. And I was now one of a group. I belonged. For my eleventh birthday I was given a Brownie 127 camera and my mum took me to Paddington Station for the morning so I could photograph the engines. My next four years were then dominated by engines, initially their numbers but latterly their imagery. The photographs here trace that progression.

 

Special thanks are due to David Perry, without whose no-limits approach to trespass, the timid early teenager I was would likely have remained entirely hidebound.