ohn Snell was with Tom Rolt and David Curwen when they opened the doors of Pendre Shed at Towyn in April 1951, starting the worldwide preservation movement, and he retired in 1999 after 28 years as General Manager of the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway. Between times he has always been actively involved with railways on many fronts, including writing or contributing to numerous books on railways; his only novel, published in 1958, must be the only family saga set against the background of a Welsh narrow gauge railway - see Jennie.
John has travelled widely, always with camera to hand. What is surprising is that very few examples of his photography have been published before and, as is very evident here, he is fully the equal of the well known photographers from the 1950s on - Derek Cross, W. V. Anderson, Eric Treacy, Marc Dahlstom, Felix Fenino et al., although he was perhaps a more enthusiastic, and earlier, user of colour than most.
If you were into railways, home and 'abroad', from the 1950s to the mid 1970s in particular, this is incredibly nostalgic and will bring the memories flooding back. If you are too young, just see what you missed! Not that this book stops in the 70s - it continues much later in South America, and South Africa in particular.
The text is a delight, being informative and interesting, with an underlying dry humour, but it is the photographs that will take your breath away. Whilst the locomotive or train is always the centrepiece, these are not sterile photographs of lumps of machinery, but are full of life with lots of incidental details, which is why we chose a large landscape format - 245 mm x 297 mm, with a good number of the photographs printed absolutely full page. And there are a lot of photographs - 386 in full colour and 48 in black & white.
The main chapters cover: The U.K in the 1950s, Fiji and the sugar cane railways, Wales - mainly, but not exclusively, the Talyllyn, New Zealand, Australia, Scandinavia, France, Spain and Portugal, Java and Thailand, Germany, the U.S.A., Switzerland, Austria and Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania and Czechoslovakia, Columbia, Ecuador and Peru, South Africa, and the Last of British Steam.
There are 256 pages, so this is a big book in every way, and we are sure that it is one you will enjoy for many years to come. Give yourself a huge treat! Hardbound.
