This site is a photographic collection with a single subject - the steam railway engine, being used, maintained, abandoned and restored.

This is not a history or railway enthusiasts' site with all the usual expected elements of information; you won't find engine details, camera settings, captions, dates or stories of experiences and circumstances behind the image - just look purely at the image and add your own thoughts, emotion, memories and knowledge. I have been so lucky from 1970 to the mid 1990s to be able to be present at locations, which presented to me engines, trains, architecture, and personnel all on a special canvas!

I accepted and recorded it, sometimes adding some fresh paint of my own but not much. Now, decades later, with new tools and experience I have applied a lot or a little new paint to these tiny pieces of old scratched and fuzzy film which I hope you enjoy.

This site aims at portraying the beauty and inherent art often present as an ingredient of the steam engine and its environs.

Whether hot or cold, gleaming or rusting, viewed or ridden, the steam locomotive has a quality of creative display unlike other machines.

This explains the tolerance of its short-comings, the world-wide devotion found to its restoration, care, and operation and the love of its power, majesty and heritage experience it provides.

I have been a professional photographer since 1983 but started shooting steam around 1970. The first image I took was on a borrowed rangefinder Voigtlander on horrible but cheap Agfa CT18 slide film and was of a railway subject. For the next decade I was another keen devoted train enthusiast with cameras. As these cameras became better and more numerous, I became better at using them and also walked through the door of a room with a "darkroom" sign attached. When I got the ability to travel over the seas with my cameras as well, the steam train began changing me into a photographer who was learning the craft from the love of trains. Soon the cameras got better, the subjects more diverse and I moved forward to the larger and more difficult terrain of a professional.

Long gone is the studio and film, paralleling the demise of my subject, in a world which has mostly lost the ability to see creativity and art for its own sake.

...on this site are mostly scanned film in conventional and panoramic ratios. These images may be in '120 format' from Pentax 6x7, Bronica ETRS or Art Panoramic 6x17 cameras on Kodachrome and Agfa 35mm slide film taken on Pentax and Contax units along with Ilford B&W film. The few digitals came from Nikon D300 or D800E cameras.

You have the opportunity to order a print of any image in a simple, single size, postage paid system.