Paul Berry

For this issue of Railways Illustrated, we bring you another excellent selection of photographs, centred this time around Lancashire and Cumbria and from the lens of Paul Berry.

Paul was born in the late 1950s in Lancaster, moving to Kendal while still a baby. As a youngster he became interested in railways and discovered the West Coast Main Line, which ran through the area he lived, and also the Windermere branch.

As a young lad he saw out the last years of steam on the BR network, with his native North West being the area where steam managed to remain until the very end in August 1968.

He first picked up a camera to point at the railway scene during the early 1970s, as the WCML was electrified and the Windermere branch was reduced to single track by BR into what Paul describes as a “10-mile long siding.”

The period also marked a time of great change on the railway, with many changes taking place on the BR network, and which Paul wanted to capture with his camera. As a result, he now boasts several thousand monochrome and colour negatives, along with slides, to his credit. He made the move to digital photography in 2008, having run slide photography and digital side by side for a couple of years.

Paul loves the history of his region and its railways. Having first discovered the Settle & Carlisle line at Dent on a Sunday afternoon in April 1975, he was hooked on the scenic route, particularly when a Class 40 came south with a neat rake of blue and grey liveried Mk.1s in tow. He truly loves the railways of the area where he was brought up and doesn’t see the point of going anywhere else, which is why his selection is concentrated on his home area.

Although now aged in his early 60s and having been photographing the railways in North West England since the early 1970s, he still enjoys the sight of a locomotive-hauled freight battling the gradient on one of these lines.

Having retired from Greater Manchester Police in 2014, he was able to spend more time with his camera at the lineside, and this has been reflected in the volume of his work.

Having lived in neighbouring Lancashire for a number of years, he moved back to Cumbria in 2021 and can now see the S&C route from his kitchen window.

Some of Paul’s images have been published in the railway press before, but he says he is still a relative newbie to being a published photographer; the May 2016 issue of Railways Illustrated was the first time one of his pictures was published in a railway magazine. He regularly posts his images on the popular Flickr photography website and also supplies images to Ian Furness at the WNXX website.

These are Paul Berry’s 10 Pictures.