Images from a Disappearing World: The Leicester & Swannington Railway

By Vic Millington (softback, Leicestershire Industrial History Society, www.lihs. org.uk, 130pp, £25 plus p&p, ISBN9781-99977937-5).

THIS really is a book with a difference. At first glance, I did not think it would appeal, but within a dozen or so pages, I was hooked.

Vic Millington is an artist who decided the best way to convey the essence of a line as old as the Leicester & Swannington was through a series of paintings. In so doing, he has not only brought one of England’s earliest railways to life, but has also created a world in which readers who never saw the line in use can somehow feel as though they did… in LMS and BR days, and in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, too.

He has achieved this by producing more than 100 colour images and presenting them in a semichronological/semi-geographical format, starting with the opening of the L&SR in 1832 and coming up-todate with Class 66s on the presentday freight-only section.

Artistic licence is employed in a couple of the paintings to show trains and people of different eras in the same location at the same time, a curious but effective technique.

The book will appeal to colliery and quarry enthusiasts, as well as railfans, as some of the Leicestershire coal and granite sites served by the line over the years are featured in addition to stations and goods yards.

It should be noted that, apart from a few newspaper cuttings and extended captions (most of them handwritten), the book is almost entirely pictorial – but that is one of its strengths, for it is not intended to be a detailed history, more a visual ‘journey’.

SUPERB REINTERPRETATION IN ART FORM OF PIONEERING RAILWAY HISTORY