Welcome to British Railways Illustrated Vol.6 No.9. There certainly are, as Allan Baker guesses, certain moments in our lives when events of many years before are recalled - usually unpredictably - with startling clarity. For the boy Baker it was his first day at work. Now many of us probably can't recall our first job, let alone the day we started it, but in this case it was different. This was a trainspotter going not to the world of work but to heaven on earth and how we envy him, given the run, aged fifteen, of a place like Crewe North. No boring lunchbreaks for him - he'd go and help turn a Duchess! So, wake up with the boy that fateful mom, lunch packed by mum and waved off (complete with 'new Army surplus' haversack and skool blazer) to the exotic mysteries of the Middle Shed, The Cage, 'Abba' and the 141b sledge hammer - This Steam Shed Life.

Far away, 'almost on another planet, Southern trains ran behind 4-4-0s, Moguls and Battle of Britain Pacifies from Cannon Street and Victoria, carrying businessmen and holiday makers to Kent. Serving Thanet, the railway carried both well-heeled commuters living in sedate parts of Kent and rowdy trippers, intent on beer and candy floss. The Southern wrought a complete change in the Isle of Thanet, closing two terminus stations at Ramsgate and building a new art deco(ish) structure ('bold but draughty') on new ground outside the town. It was a complex web of services which had to cope moreover, with punishing summer Saturday peaks. D.W. Winkworth, long a chronicler of all things Southern, unpicks it and lays it bare.

Brill's own Pevsner, Paul Anderson, returns to describe his local patch in Thirties File. A wonderful collection of photographs from 1935 give us an unprecedentedly detailed look at a major Great Central station - Leicester Central. At least the GC could not be called stingy in the matter of its Great Adventure, striking out from its lucrative northern heartland to London. The fashionable Jacobean revival style made for the most exotic facade on the whole London Extension - 'the exterior at Leicester Central was something of a Jacobean fantasy, featuring curly mock-gables, umfinials and a bulky and somewhat precarious clock tower perched above the main entrance.' And that's just the first picture. A Sort of Streamliner was unveiled on Monday, 27th September 1937 when the 'East Anglian' express made its first run. It was a fast business service between Norwich, Ipswich and London; unhappily the difficult route meant 'streamliner' speeds were not really a possibility and the cost of streamlining the stock was not worth it. Undeterred, the LNER streamlined the engines instead, to look like short A4s and left it at that...