In this book, the author adds to descriptions of the buildings and rolling stock around heritage railways with fascinating anecdotes of personal experiences before and after their preservation.

The names of the heritage railways in this book will be familiar to most enthusiasts, but many will be unfamiliar with what can be seen and experienced when they visit them.

Within these pages, Simon Elson describes the amazing results achieved by volunteers who have spent countless hours resurrecting and reopening many of them.

Rather than simply providing a dry history of the lines in preservation, their rolling stock, and their vision, he tells of his time travelling on them and what sparked his interest in specific parts of them.

Instead of endless photographs of trains at work on the lines, he shares in text and photographs the history and architecture of the stations and personal stories by the volunteers without whom there would be no lines to visit.

Published in May 2024 by Amberley Publishing and written by Simon Elson, this soft-cover book measures around 16.5 cm x 23.4 cm, and has 96 pages and 100 colour photographs.

It has a published price of £15.99, but at the time of writing it can be purchased for £14.39 from Amberley Publishing and for £12.39 from Amazon.

In a short introduction, Simon Elson describes what attracted him to heritage railways, and follows it with 11 chapters that cover the most significant heritage lines in the Midlands.

These include The Battlefield Line, Peak Rail, Rocks by Rail, Midland Railway – Butterley, Great Central Railway, Severn Valley Railway, and the Foxfield Railway.

The author’s definition of “The Midlands” is rather conservatively extended to include the Didcot Railway Centre in Oxfordshire and the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway in West Yorkshire.

Surprisingly, although they could not be termed heritage railways in their true sense, there is also a chapter about the Advanced Passenger Train (APT) at Crewe Heritage Centre and a replica of the Burma-Siam railway at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.

In the first chapter, the author sets the tone of the book with a description of his visit to the Battlefield line from Shackerstone to Shenton in Leicestershire and reveals in the images below the results of the volunteers‘ efforts.

Visitors cannot fail to appreciate the many hours of work that went into restorating Shackerstone station’s platform 1 at the top right, or the welcoming atmosphere of the tearoom at the bottom left.

In the chapter on Peak Rail it is apparent that there is more to heritage railways than trains and stations. The photos below show that recreating traditional signalling is part of the heritage scene, and many older enthusiasts will remember the sight of a steam locomotive being turned effortlessly on the type of turntable at the top right.

The dismantled footbridge at the bottom right shows that work at a heritage railway is never finished.

At the Great Central Railway, the work that has gone into recreating a period railway has been rewarded by its stations featuring in many television dramas.

In the scenes below, the visitor could easily imagine themselves being transplanted into a bygone age, long before the advent of one of the last steam locomotives to be built by British Railways seen at the bottom right.

Although the Keighley and Worth Valley Rail is in West Yorkshire rather than the Midlands, its inclusion adds value to the book.

The railway sprang to prominence when it was used for scenes in the film The Railway Children, but just like the other railways in this book, the author’s photographs show a dedication to making visitors welcome.

This is an outstanding book where the author has captured facts and figures about the railways and entwined them with his personal experiences when visiting them and travelling on their trains.

His captions do not overload the reader with extraneous information but add to the story about their railways.

The author’s eye for detail even extends to two photographs of a bath in the Severn Valley Railway chapter. The explanation here is they show the bathroom in a carriage from a Royal train and also shows a line that marks the maximum depth of water that could be used because of wartime water restrictions.

If anyone is looking for photographs of steam or diesel locomotives hauling trains on heritage lines, this book is not for you.

Instead, it offers a fascinating and extremely readable insight into the stories behind some of our heritage railways and fully deserves its rating of 5/5.

The book is available to purchase from Amazon and Amberley Publishing.

We would like to thank Amberley Publishing for providing us with a copy of the book for review.