Destination Blue Volume 2: St Pancras and the Midland Main Line

AUTHOR: Ted Reading PUBLISHER: Under My

Stairs Books

PRICE: £15 (including P&P) TELEPHONE: 01460 63904 EMAIL: irisandtedreading@ gmail.com

IT’S NO secret that I am a fan of Ted Reading’s Terminal Blue series, which focuses on the railways in and around the various London terminus stations. With that series now finished and wrapped up, the author has moved on to cover a much wider geographic area with his follow-up series, Destination Blue.

This second volume covers the route between London St Pancras and the Midland Main Line, but it covers so much more throughout its 188 pages. Our journey up the Midland Main Line includes plenty of stations, as well as lineside locations, depots, works and yards. The period covered was at a time when the Peaks dominated passenger services on the route and there are many evocative images of these popular locomotives within the pages and plenty of other locomotives, HSTS, units and shunters also included for good measure.

The author has managed to capture the railway as it was at the time. Many station images show the ordinariness of the period, images that many photographers would have probably ignored; but that is the brilliance of these books, to my mind. They help paint a picture of the railway when locomotivehauled trains were the norm and at a time when the BR network felt rather down-at-heel, yet it is an era that many enthusiasts remember with fondness.

As with the previous books, all of the images featured are black-and-white. Whereas most publishers prefer colour photography these days, the pictures selected exude a quality and realism that makes them atmospheric and the lack of colour does not affect this.

I had worried that, as this series grew, the quality of images may start to decline, but that fear is completely unfounded; it is clear that the author was a prolific and accomplished photographer.

This is a real time-machine look at a long-gone era of the railway, but which still feels like yesterday to those of us who were there at the time.

These fantastic books are self-published, and any reader interested in adding this book, or any of Ted Reading’s previous volumes which may still be available, can order them directly from him by telephone or email. These volumes are worth every penny and are arguably cheaper than if they had been produced by a bigger publishing company. I cannot recommend these books highly enough. Buy it!

AMC