STEAM REMINISCENCES: SOUTHERN

John Beckett started to take railway photographs in 1954.In is innocence he tried at first to use a pre-war camera with a nominal shutter speed of 1/100 of a second.Four years later, after a change of cameras, the first of his pictures to be published appeared in the Railway Magazine.Since then he has supplied a steady drip, rather than a stream, of pictures to the railway press and to various authors.In 1968 he also contributed to the photographic collection published under the title of images of steam by `Fenman' where he appeared as Quintus. This book contains a selection of his collection of photographs taken in the Southern Region of British Railways in the period 1956-1968.At that time he visited areas of particular interest from the Kent coast in the East to Padstow in the West.It is not claimed to offer a complete coverage of all that happened then and there, only a collection of railway activities that caught his attention or that offered the chance of a good photograph - his reminiscences in fact.