'Walking back to happiness - whoompa - oh, yeah-yeah!' The year Is 1961 and 14 year-old schoolgirl Helen Shapiro is storming up the charts with her first No 1 smash hit, joining the pop aristocrats of the day. To tell the truth, I had a schoolboy 'crush' on the then 'Queen of Pop', but her hit-making career lasted only two years in the chiefly male-dominated hit parade: Elvis, Cliff, Adam Faith, Marty Wilde, Jess Conrad, Billy Fury and a spikey-haired Joe Brown. By 1964, however, the music scene was to change forever. I'm talking about the 'Liverpool Sound' which knocked spots off everything in the charts. Against a backdrop of Beatles' smash hits, countless thousands of youngsters set about the task of photographing steam before it vanished from the scene entirely.  That's why I began photographing the Aire Valley line before it was too late. 

Indeed, no matter how long ago it all now seems, the memory of the fun-loving 'Swinging Sixties' will never go away, but the decade was also marred  by sadness. The certain knowledge that BR steam days would end in August 1968 cast a gloomy resonance over the spotting fraternity. But the one thing I remember above all else, was the mendacity of the Beeching cuts. The publication of The 'Reshaping of British Railways' in 1963, had one aim in mind - to make our railways pay, yet in spite of the obvious hardship it would cause millions of people throughout the country, Beeching seemed doggedly determined to slash the rail network to a shadow of its former self. To witness our railways being ripped apart was a truly sad sight, which, in an odd sort of way, is even more poignant today. The number of proposals put forward for the reopening of closed stations is a constant reminder of how things were.