Last Days of Steam: Southern Region

By the mid 1960s steam had pretty much
disappeared from railways in the South
West of England save for a small pocket on the
Southern Region which survived until 1967. To
one enthusiastic teenager living in Plymouth, the
nearest place to see working mainline steam was
inWeymouth, Dorset, with other operations
such as the Somerset &Dorset Joint Railway
and the Isle ofWight also in their final throes of
steam. And so, armed with camera loaded with
Kodachrome transparency film, the fifteen-yearold
Roger Malone set out to record the final
months in these outposts of steam.
Now, over 40 years later, these images are
again seeing the light of day in this fascinating
new book. The colour photographs taken all
those years ago capture the essence of the
times, as the last embers died in the fireboxes of
elderly locomotives `put out to grass' in sleepy
westcountry pastures. Added interest comes
from the author's memories of those days, the
locomotives he found and captured on film.
Over 150 photographs appear in the book taken
at locations in Devon, Dorset, Cornwall, Somerset
and Hampshire, and includingWeymouth, the
Isle ofWight, Bournemouth, Corfe Castle,
Eastleigh, Launceston and the Exeter area.
A section contains photographs taken at the
famous Barry scrapyard where so many
locomotives ended the days.
Anyone with an interest in railway history will be
fascinated by this unique pictorial memoir.