Class 56s and 58s Designed specifically for heavy freight operations in the UK, British Rail’s Class 56 was introduced in 1976–84. The first 30 of ...

Class 159s: 30 Years’ Service By the late 1980s, the Class 50 and Class 47 locomotives working Network SouthEast’s West of England line from London...

Class 47s: Jack Of All Trades In 1962, construction of the first Class 47 began – the first of many. These ubiquitous locomotives were very popular...

Brush Type 4 to Class 47s – The First 20 Years It is 60 years since the first Class 47, No D1500, entered service with British Railways (BR). For m...

East Coast Main Line Locomotive Haulage The East Coast Main Line (ECML) runs from London King’s Cross to Edinburgh Waverley, with branches to Leeds...

Class 47s: Inverness to Newquay 1986–87 In the mid-1980s, the winds of change were blowing through British Rail and often not for the good; the pac...

Class 50s During the mid-1960s, British Rail (BR) was looking to introduce a high-powered diesel locomotive to improve services on the West Coast M...

Class 66: 3/4/7/8 In the late 1990s, English, Welsh and Scottish Railway (EWS) had led the way with its Class 66s. As other operators followed suit...

Class 66/0 In the late 1990s, most of the current locomotives in use on the national network were becoming very tired and evermore unreliable. It w...

HSTs: Around Britain: From 1990 to the Present Day For almost 50 years, High Speed Trains (HSTs) have been the mainstay for express services for ma...

Class 66: 5/6/9 In the late 1990s, English, Welsh & Scottish Railway (EWS) was having great success with its Class 66s, and Freightliner, which...

Grand Central Grand Central is an innovative and pioneering railway open-access operator with a relatively short, but varied history. Beginning ope...

Britain’s Preserved Railways The preserved heritage museum railways of Britain are thriving. There is nostalgia for the steam locomotives of a bygo...

Class 67s In the late 1990s, English, Welsh & Scottish Railway (EWS) ordered a large fleet of 250 Class 66 locomotives to replace a variety of ...

Class 59s In the mid-1980s, one of British Rail’s major customers of heavy block trains, Foster Yeoman, suggested the unusual arrangement of runnin...

Class 442: The Wessex Electrics First introduced in the late 1980s, the Class 442s were like nothing that had been seen before in terms of Southern...

Class 47s: From Inverness to Penzance 1982–85 The Class 47 diesel locomotives were a mainstay of British Rail with 512 built in the 1960s. They wer...

Cornish Rail: St Austell to Penzance This, the second of two volumes covering the railways of Cornwall, follows the railway through the beautiful ...

Canadian Pacific in the Rockies The Canadian Pacific Railway was built to unite all the Canadian Provinces with a transcontinental line running fro...

Class 70s In the late 2000s, Freightliner was looking to expand its locomotive fleet towards more powerful and fuel-efficient locomotives. The new...

Czech and Slovak Railways: Three Decades of Change, 1990–2020s The Czech Republic and Slovakia emerged as independent countries in 1993, as joint ...

HSTs: The Western Region From the late 1970s, for more than 40 years, the High-Speed Train (HST) was the mainstay of express services for many tra...

BR: From Green to Blue A fascinating but much overlooked era for the modern traction enthusiast is the changeover from the old British Railways gr...

Highland Railways: Four Decades of Diesel Traction North of Perth Set against a backdrop of Scotland’s Highlands, this book illustrates the area’s ...