According to Chris…
His grandchildren call him ‘Granddad Trains’ and he’s been a dedicated railway modeller since the 1960s but, despite popular legend, Chris Leigh doesn’t remember when dinosaurs roamed the Earth!
Chris talks about the relevance of books and publications in today’s digital world.
There’s something very special about books. Even before I started working for a publisher, at the age of 16, I enjoyed being involved in the production of them. I recall being encouraged at school to assemble a diary of a school trip to Switzerland, and I won a writing competition run by Brooke Bond. I can’t recall what I wrote but I still have the railway book by Cecil J. Allen that I bought with the prize voucher. Once I started taking railway photographs with my Kodak Brownie camera, I put any passable prints into an album. I still have the three albums that I assembled in those years but many of the photographs have long since fallen out and been lost. A couple of them will, however, appear on this page in the next issue. It was in 1979, after I had produced a couple of articles entitled ‘Western Country Stations’ for Railway World, that editor Mike Harris suggested I expand them into a book. Mike was a remarkable character. To those who didn’t know him he appeared off-hand and was often described as ‘bumptious’. But he knew his stuff. His speciality was carriages and he had written a book on GWR coaches while studying for an MA at York. He died in the early 1990s at a tragically young age. In his position as one of Ian Allan’s trusted senior editorial team, he pushed
forward the idea of a book about country stations of the GWR. I enlisted the help of a fellow fan of Much Wenlock, Adrian Knowles, and some support from one or two other photographers and GWR Country Stations was published a year later. There was serious consternation beforehand. Would a book about stations really sell? “We publish books about trains – not sure this is a good idea.” When the designer produced a dust jacket with hand-drawn brickwork and Gwr-style lettering, the sales people nearly had apoplexy! It was gratifying, therefore, that Volume 2 was quickly commissioned and that the original volume was repeatedly reprinted over a period of more than 20 years. I should perhaps add that I didn’t get rich on the proceeds. As a novice, I had sold the rights for a flat fee and that’s all I ever got. It had, however, established me as a viable author and several more projects followed. They included The Western Before Beeching (really a large-format Volume 3 of GWR Country Stations), Portrait of the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway and two volumes of Britain’s Railways From the Air, as well as several model railway publications. There is something very special about seeing one’s work in book form. I still get a thrill when I open one of ‘my’ books! Even the likes of Google are rubbish compared to the information to be found in books. I have a wall of my study, shelved floor to ceiling, full of reference books. Even now, when I research a subject for Model Rail, I find far more information from books (often from my own bookshelves) than I find on the internet. I enjoyed assembling my albums and those Ian Allan books. In recent years I’ve become ‘hooked’ on producing Vistaprint albums for my own entertainment and to ensure that the best of my photographs and memories are recorded in a more permanent form than is possible with electronic systems. For these albums, I’ve scanned my old photographs, added electronic images from my present camera and laid out the pages on screen. I’ve also created albums from the highlights of my recent holidays in Canada. I was introduced to Vistaprint by the late Keith Willows who put together an album of photographs of the various Canadian ‘HO’ layouts that we built at Egham & Staines Model Railway Society. In the large format that I prefer and with the glossy paper that really makes the best of the photographs, these albums are not cheap, but they make superb ‘coffee table’ books that family, friends and visitors enjoy browsing.