Preserved Shunters
OFTEN staying out of the limelight in modern traction preservation, shunters perform an important task on heritage railways, as they did originally on their main line counterparts. In fact, it’s probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that some heritage operations would struggle without at least one of these relatively cheap to maintain and operate machines to move rolling stock and even haul services in their own right. The ubiquitous Class 08 has been part of the main line landscape for 70 decades (see p34), and while these venerable
workhorses are covered in this book, perhaps the real joy is seeing the sheer variety of many other classes of shunter, some of which had an astonishingly short career with British Railways. The book, in the traditional Amberley format of two captioned images per page, is arranged in TOPS class order, ending with a miscellany of shunters used originally by British
Rail but which, for various reasons, failed to be given a TOPs classification. Even those who claim they aren’t that interested in shunters might well find something appealing in this collection.