Welcome to my railway website. I hope you will enjoy browsing through these pictures, which include both recent and historic images taken over the last 34 years. As well as a few current pictures, numerous archive pictures will gradually be added to the site, with classic diesel traction predominating. I will try to add a few pictures every few days with the emphasis on variety. In addition to the more commonly photographed locomotives, you will also find various less well covered subjects on this site, including the often neglected DMUs. The picture on the home page will change each time new pictures are uploaded. Many thanks to all those people who have provided information (both for current workings and archive material), and have commented on the pictures. The compliments with regard to the quality of the archive pictures in particular are very much appreciated. High resolution versions are available for publication use, please contact me for details.

During the 'golden years' of the late 1980s and 1990s I traveled extensively throughout the UK in search of railway subjects, and this will be reflected in this website. Unfortunately before then I very rarely strayed from the local area, therefore completely missing many interesting workings. In hindsight more effort should have been put into photographing the numerous trip freight workings that still existed in the 1980s. Nowadays, with far less of interest happening, I find that I tend to concentrate on my local area once more, with the Cotswold Line, Oxford to Banbury, and Didcot to Swindon lines being my usual subjects. I do still make occasional forays to other areas, but I very rarely chase railtours the length and breadth of the country like I once used to. Although obviously like everybody else I have favourite classes (37, 50, etc), I have generally taken a broader view than a lot of photographers, believing that the mundane and seemingly uninteresting will one day seem historic and interesting. I have always liked HSTs and the humble DMU and certainly nowadays I find them just as interesting as the depressingly dull freight scene. In fact it was the demise of the classic classes of diesel locos and the general downturn in freight traffic at the end of the 1990s that curtailed my desire to be traveling all over the country in search of freight workings. You will notice that the modern images tend to feature units and HSTs in greater abundance than freight. In fact I find the privatised passenger railway with its seemingly never ending livery changes far more interesting than the very repetitive freight pictures that some photographers seem to regard as the only 'proper' railway photography. Also, whereas generally freight trains look much the same countrywide, the same cannot be said of the ever changing passenger franchises! Interestingly, as time goes by more and more photographers seem to chase fewer and fewer workings and in part this is what puts me off following what everybody else does. When I first started railway photography and there was far more of interest to photograph I very rarely ever met another photographer!

Like most photographers, I prefer photos to be taken in full sun, with the sun 'on the nose', however, I will also take pictures in other lighting conditions, and I particularly like atmospheric lighting (sunlit with dark clouds behind, etc). I will sometimes take pictures in dull conditions, but these will usually either be unrepeatable workings or taken in locations that would be impossible in full sun. Unlike a lot of websites featuring present day traction, this site will not be padded out with endless pictures of light engine moves and Class 66 hauled freights in poor light, and this together with the desire wherever possible not to repeat locations too frequently, will result in less pictures being added than you may be used to seeing elsewhere. Also, as each picture is accompanied by a proper caption, I will have to think of something interesting (or totally irrelevant!) to add to each one. Researching some of the archive captions can be challenging at times, and very time consuming. I try to write the captions so they will not become out of date too easily, however this is inevitable for some subjects. I will try to alter any obvious ones as they occur later on.

This website now contains 4820 images. To make navigation around the site easy, the 100 most recent images (including scanned archive pictures) can be seen on the Recent Additions page, with the latest pictures at the top of the page. All images including these new additions are available from the various individual class or category pages. On these pages, the pictures are arranged numerically, or in the case of the various miscellaneous and EMU pages, by class, then numerically. Each individual loco or unit's pictures are then arranged chronologically. A slight variation is the placing of the newer classes of 750V DC EMU that have a dual voltage capability at the end of the page, as otherwise this would break the approximately chronological order of the previous classes. The nameplate page also includes a few worksplates and train headboards.  The nameplates are in locomotive number order. Generally speaking the order of the diesel locos follows TOPS numbering regardless of number carried, but due to the complicated and multiple renumberings of the Class 37 & 47 fleets in particular, the pictures are arranged by the number carried, so the same loco may appear in several different places. Certain classes, such as 40 & 52 will tend to feature numerous pictures of the same loco in different locations, mainly because I took so few pictures of the locos when they were more numerous, and of course in one or two cases there are only a couple of locos extant!  A few pages are arranged alphabetically, including the narrow gauge & miniature, where the particular railway is listed alphabetically. The Miscellaneous Locomotives and DMU pages contain pictures of all the various types that I only have a few pictures of, whereas the Miscellaneous Steam page contains pictures of locos of other than the big four companies, principally ex industrial locos.

Most of the subject pages are fairly self explanatory. I have given Class 73s their own page, in view of their unique electro diesel design, and because I have as many pictures of them as all other electric classes put together. Also most of the time I have photographed them running on diesel power rather than on the third rail! The distinction between Narrow Gauge and Miniature being the generally accepted one that miniature lines employ scale models of full size locomotives. Also, narrow gauge covers track gauges between 1 ft 11½ in and 3 ft, and miniature 20 in and below. Where there are a large number of pictures of one class, they will be spilt over several pages. In this case there will be arrows near the page title allowing you to move between the various pages. These multiple pages often (but not necessarily always) correspond with loco sub-classes. Generally all the pages feature motive power of some sort, but I have also included a few pages which don't. I have always been fascinated by disused railways where the rails are still in situ, there being something fascinating about a line of rusty rails disappearing into the undergrowth. I have therefore added a small selection of these pictures on the Disused Railways page. These all feature closed (or virtually so!) lines with the rails still intact. Sometimes these have subsequently been lifted and sometimes the line has been resurrected. I have also added pages for signal boxes and other railway infrastructure.

I have deliberately designed this site with a clear uncluttered minimalist look, a result that could not easily be achieved with any of the more common picture hosting sites. Not only did I want an individual look to the site, but I also find that most of these sites either have poor navigation and are very cluttered (Flickr) or have some odd quirk (Zenfolio), with it's laughably over contrasty and dark thumbnails. SmugMug seems the best compromise, but bearing in mine what happened to Fotopic, the extra security of a proper domain name far outweighs the extra work required to learn HTML! For the technically interested this site was built using Microsoft FrontPage, along with various manually written HTML additions. For reliability it is hosted on a Linux server. Ideally this website should be viewed at 1600 x 1200 or the widescreen equivalent - 1920 x 1200. However it will also work well at 1280 x 1024, although it may be necessary to press F11 in order to clear away the various toolbars to allow more room and prevent unnecessary scrolling. In order to show the pictures at a reasonable quality, all images are uploaded with a width of 1230 pixels and a height varying between 820 and 920 pixels, depending on the subject. For the small number of users still viewing the website at 1024 x 768 the following procedure will ensure full screen viewing. Using Firefox (version 3.0 onwards) select zoom from the view menu. First make sure that 'Zoom Text Only' is unchecked, then use 'Zoom Out' to make the website the required size for your monitor. If using Internet Explorer, the zoom feature in the lower right corner can be used, although like everything else with Internet Explorer this doesn't work anything like as well as the Firefox solution. Some website elements may be distorted or misplaced.

To help you search for a particular loco, location, railtour operator, or just about anything else, please use the search facility below. Please bear in mind however, that it will take at least a day for new additions to appear in the search results. 

All images and website design © copyright 1978-2012 Martin Loader.