Working Locomotives

Of all his steam railway work, paintings of locomotives in their working environment make up only a small part of the overall collection.

My dad was never a fan of what he called “chocolate box” paintings – the typical scene of a bright, shiny engine, usually shown puffing merrily across a picturesque bridge in beautiful countryside with small boys waving as it passed! To him, paintings of this style were far removed from his memories of steam as a child in the ‘40s and ‘50s during his “shed bashing” days when locomotives were working machines, dirty, grimy and black from soot in packed sidings or dark and dingy engine sheds.

The majority of his paintings of working locomotives are taken from many hundreds of grainy black and white photographs he took as a teenager with primitive cameras on regular trainspotting trips around the UK. It has always amazed me how he managed to translate these black and white references into full colour paintings decades later and is testament to the strength of his memories from that era.

Working Locomotives

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Artwork Collections