Search results for ""Author Mick Pope""

Being a lover of steam locomotives is a bit like chasing a setting sun - with the real diehards searching out survivors further and further from their home territory. Many enthusiasts would mark August 1968 as the end of ‘proper’ steam locomotives in the United Kingdom, the date when British Rail withdrew their final examples. However, for those in the know, steam continued to contribute to the British economy in industrial settings for nearly a further two decades. In the coal and ironstone mining industry, in power generation, in chemical factories, steelworks and foundries, small, rugged locomotives continued to toil away on a daily basis. Some were lovingly cared for, while others were worked into the ground. The author discovered colliery steam by accident and often explored this world while accompanied by his younger, equally enthusiastic, brother. This led them to some of the more obscure and less traditionally scenic parts of the country, but some of these industrial settings had a haunting beauty of their own. The photographs featured here give a taste of this particular setting for steam workhorses.

Read more less

Turkey, the country that straddles Europe and Asia, reflects this in the mix of cultures from both continents to be found there. The western and southern coastal areas are the most familiar to Western holidaymakers but the interior, Black Sea coast and east of the country are less visited. As Western railway enthusiasts found less and less to attract them in Europe they discovered that Turkey had steam locomotives aplenty, reflecting the fact that this was a country that had embraced Western industrialisation and modernisation ahead of most other Middle Eastern countries. This, and the shifting alliances Turkey had embraced, was also reflected in the variety of countries that had built the steam locomotives. Examples could be found from builders in Germany, Sweden, France, the United States and the United Kingdom. These varied from ancient specimens of Prussian State railway design to modern ten coupled designs built after the Second World War. Finding and photographing trains presented certain problems. Train services in this large country could be sparse, timekeeping notoriously unreliable and the roads, very often of dirt, hazardous. However, if these problems could be endured the landscape offered fantastic photographic opportunities.

Read more less