Covering My Tracks - Robert Adley

It is just twenty years since the last regular steam-hauled train ran on British Railways, and only a little longer since Dr Beeching's infamous axe decimated the railway map and virtually rendered obsolete the branch lines and meandering cross-country routes that for so long epitomized Britain's railway system.During that melancholy yet frantic eleventh hour of steam in the mid-60s, railway enthusiasts suddenly realized the full implications of what was taking place around them, and many - though all too few - used their pens and cameras to record the vanishing era.

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One such photographer - providentially using colour film - was Robert Adley, who used every opportunity afforded by his employers and nascent political career to travel the country with his camera.

The results are seen in the atmospheric and evocative pictures included in this book. Now, twenty-five years later, he 'covers his tracks' once more to revisit some of those locations and reflect on the changes that have been wrought in the name of transport progress.

In a highly personal, impassioned yet entertaining text, supported by a collection of superb early and more recent colour photographs, Robert Adley takes us to wildernesses of rose-bay willow-herb where formerly was industry and vitality and the smell of live steam, but where now nature is reclaiming her own. He takes us to once important junctions where today skeletal single tracks seek to maintain a rail service able to compete with the lavish facilities provided by the tax-payer for the pampered road industry. He takes us to Turkey in search of the very last Stanier 'F' in regular service anywhere in the world.

He concludes by comparing the famous locomotive graveyard at Barry with the ruins of Palmyra in Syria. This is not such a far-fetched image, for this book, at once an exercise in industrial archaeology and unashamed nostalgia, demonstrates that we are all surrounded by the memories, the monuments and the follies of our own ancient civilization - the Steam Age.

Robert Adley has been a Member of Parliament since 1970, but a dedicated railway enthusiast for as long as he can remember. He is an ardent campaigner on railway matters as well as being actively involved in railway preservation; his latest project is to rescue ten of the few remaining steam locomotives from Barry scrapyard for permanent display in Cardiff. His vast collection of colour photographs from the last days of steam has formed the basis for several best-selling books, but this is his first for PSL.