Northern Powerhouse
THERE HAS been a glut of railway bookazines of late and I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if this is one of them or if it’s a book! But it’s A4, paperback, perfect bound, so I’ll assume it is a bookazine, although a penny short of £12 is a book price rather than a bookazine price. This offering relies on the excellent photography of Ian Edmondson. He certainly knows how to use a camera to take a darn good shot and his work is mostly well showcased here.
There’s a variety of traction shown, all from recent times. It’s the privatised railway at its colourful best, with crisp shots of both old-school ex-BR locos, such as 37s, 47s and
55s, mixing with the newer 66s, 68s, 70s and the like. There are no DMUs or EMUs included, which some will like and others won’t, but there is a fantastic mix of locations, train types and liveries. Then there’s the stunning scenery in the north of England and Scotland as well. You can’t fault the photography and, let’s be fair, that’s the main selling point.
Where the publication is let down is in the design and layout. There are no borders and so pictures ‘crash’ into each other and can’t ‘breathe’. Also, the decision to run some single images over two full pages would have been great, had it not been for the fact that the perfect binding kills them stone dead. So, for example, a superb picture of a Colas 37 at Hellifield is ruined by the gutter between the pages! And it’s not alone: there are 14 other double page images that are similarly affected. Given the number of pages, this would have been better as a stapled magazine to do those images justice. It’s a real shame, because the photos are superb, they have just been spoilt by bad decisions.
However, the good does outweigh the bad, it is simply let down by things that can be easily rectified for future publications – adding some borders around the pictures and no pictures across double pages if the perfect bound format is to be retained. (PD)