Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: british rail

I wasn't expecting to take this. I was walking in a field on my first visit to England in 1993, being fully aware that I was next to a mainline (in this case the Great Eastern, if I'm not mistaken), and more worried about being electrocuted, as the trees hadn't been cut back very well. Nevertheless, I had my Kodak Star 735 in my hands, and then I heard an indescribable roar doppling towards me. The trees were blocking my view, but I raised the camera, caught this BR freight coming down the line at what must have been at least 80 m.p.h., and possibly faster, and swung around as it came by, getting this pan shot. It was all over in about 2 seconds, and I got the shot more or less by pure luck combined with reaction time, but I still think that it's one of my best train shots of all time. The blur of extreme speed (at least to my American mind of the time), combined with the memory of the noise, keep this shot in my head today whenever I'm attempting another one like it, which I should note I've never again succeeded in taking, even with a good SLR.

I know that many, many people already have HST/IC125 pictures on Flickr. I'm sorry. :-) This is mine. Actually, I have a few, due to be uploaded soon. I took this when I was stranded in York on my way back to Norwich from the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, having missed both of my trains. Obviously, this was the next morning, when I decided to give the National Railway Museum a second visit, and photograph some of the traffic through York Central. This service, while still lettered for BR Intercity on the lead locomotive, was a Virgin Cross Country service. GNER had repainted all their IC125s by then, and notice the Virgin livery on the Mk.III coach the Class 43 diesel is pulling.

St. Pancras station, and the Midland Hotel which is incorporated into the front of the building, was arguably the most beautiful, spectacular commercial failure in the history of London when it was constructed in 1867. Overwhelmingly the most grandiose and beautiful of London's stations, it was redundant when (over)built, and a product of the rivalry between the various private companies vying for the London market during the mid-19th Century. The Midland Railway, the original owners, spent 2,000,000 pounds on its construction, enough so that the company never recoupped the loss, especially since someone made the blunder of building the hotel without modern plumbing!!! Although the station was built as a combination passenger and freight station, with the underground freight handling facilities specialising in overnight beer shipments, little of the station has ever been put into full use. This may have a happy ending, though, as since I took these photos the building has been undergoing a massive renovation to serve as a successor to Waterloo International once the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is built, with the old beer cellars being reused for dedicated international platforms and a car park.

Here's the fatter of St. Pancras's two towers. I love the arches on it!! :-)

I took this the very first time I watched trains (trainspotted??) in Britain!! It was a very exciting day, as I had never seen so many trains running at once, and doing it so well!! :-) This was during the first year of privatisation, but you couldn't see the negative effects of it at all yet. Most of it was still public-sector, and very clean and well-maintaintained. Waterloo was so spotless that day that it was a little bit hard to believe, and this mind you was without the dreadful experience of privatisation to compare it to. Instead, I was comparing it to Amtrak, which is a way is an even starker contrast when you think about it. These trains are EMUs, although I don't have my books handy to found out exactly which classes. Most of the BR Southern Region EMUs were, of course, a bit hard to tell from one another. If someone with books handy could fill me in I would be very grateful. :-)

This is, in actual fact, only a model. It's one of the most accurate model locomotives I've ever seen, and the only notable flaw I can see with it is that the "soot" around the chimney (smokestack) just looks like a finger smudge or spilled model cement. I think it was in O Scale, but I'm not sure since I don't remember, and in any case the model is far too good to identify as one scale or another based solely on a photograph.