EXPERT INSIGHT Know your times tables!

Planning and preparation are crucial to getting great steam train shots, and even though Phil visits the SVR around 15 times each year, he was not leaving anything to chance. The first thing is to pick a day where there are lots of trains running. Gala days and charters are a good choice, he says, but so is a December weekend (like we had chosen) when railways such as the SVR run a full schedule of ‘Santa Specials’.

A timetable is just the start for knowing where to be where when. A key consideration for Phil is to find out which way each locomotive is facing. Some will go ‘tender first’, so will essentially be facing the wrong way as they pull the carriages. The shots he wants are with the locomotive travelling forwards – or ‘smokebox first’. A detailed timetable showing the engines being used on a specific day is normally only issued a day or so before, but even then this will not tell you which way each one will be facing. To get this, Phil rings up key contacts at the railway to know which trains to concentrate on. If you can’t get this information, he says a good alternative is to look at shots taken the previous weekend on Flickr, as engines are unlikely to have been turned round mid-week.