Growing Up With Steam Trains

My first memories are of growing up in a quiet street in South Chingford, very close to the Walthamstow border, where the street lights were mercury vapour green, and people at night all looked like ghosts.

 

I can clearly remember the surprise when my Dad lifted me up to see a steam engine rush past very close to me – I must have been 2 or 3, so not long after the end of World War 2. The level crossing was at Higham’s Park, and the engine was an N7, still in LNER black, heading to Chingford from Liverpool Street. From that point I was hooked on steam. I know the livery, not from memory, but because for a long time I had a notebook where my Dad had written the pre-BR number, now sadly lost – the notebook and the engine.

 

I spent many happy hours in my school days watching trains, at first with my Dad, who encouraged me and took me to most of the London termini by train and tube, and to many lineside locations to the north and east of London on our motorbike and sidecar.

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In my early teens I went trainspotting with friends, at first around London, and then further afield, but sadly without a camera. Then, in the summer of 1959, aged fifteen and a half, my parents bought me a Zeiss Contina 35 mm viewfinder camera for a school trip to Switzerland, and that became my constant companion for four years.

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This website showcases the best of the over 1000 railway photographs that I took in those few years, while steam still dominated the UK railway scene, and the few I took after then. Most of the negatives, and slides, lay unseen in their sleeves until digital technology allowed me expose them to a wider audience. I used a dedicated film scanner, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom to get the best images I could out of negatives that dated back half a century or more.

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I've grouped my photos in four collections - links to these collections are below:

                      My Story showcasing many of my best photos;

                      Engine Portraits showing all of the photos I took on shed and works visits;

                      Lineside covering all of the photos I took in many lineside and station locations -

                      Life After Steam with all the railway photos I took after 1968 - not very many

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All Photographs by Alan Lewis Chambers ©