EOL>Welcome to British Railways Illustrated Vol.3 No.8. Readers will notice (or maybe not) something Missing about the magazine this time out. The 'gatefold', with us since the beginning, is not there. Whilst many letters argue the toss over aspects of BRILL and its general purpose in life, it has proved almost impossible to gauge feeling on the worth of our proudly different foldy bit. It clearly delights some readers, whilst others find it vaguely irritating. Its classic purpose and intent was to display to the full large scale and complex subjects (witness, most notably, March last issue) but there is still plenty of interesting railway which was nevertheless on a far less dramatic scale. We didn't want to overdo it, and for less grandiose subjects this month a conventional format would seem to cope ably a€ with the added bonus, that readers can open the magazine on the train home without trailing pages across the passenger in the next seat. Normal service will be resumed next time a€" only four weeks away a€" but please voice an opinion; even Angels fear to tread in some places... On Track is an especially intriguing feature, deriving as it does from the account of the Southern 10-car Scheme described in BRILL 3.4. John C. Morgan takes the detailed work apart as it occurred at Charing Cross, one of the pivotal sites in the ingenious undertaking. In fascinating detail, with the aid of unique photographs from BR Southern Region, the Black Art of track renewal and replacement is revealed. Thirties File is a source of particular pride this month. Wonders are performed, to be sure, often in the most unprepossessing conditions on the preserved railways but there is nothing now to even hint at an echo of a shadow of even a faint memory of the momentous locomotive building industry that once supplied Britain, Empire and beyond. It is in truth a vanished industrial process, let alone a vanished industry, a painful indicator of decline; its secrets remain, to most of us, just that. So it is a special pleasure to see the first of a two part sequence from the peak of British steam building - the first LMS Pacifics at Crewe in 1933. A splendid description by Ron Fareham. Exhibitionist tendencies were revealed in BRILL 3.2 with a visit to the International Railway Congress at Willesden roundhouse in 1954 and this manifests itself further this month with a look at the peculiar Wembley Exhibition station and its extraordinary loop line, built initially to serve the Empire Exhibition of 1924. At the 'country town' of Wembley, where one railway magnate had once tried to build another Eiffel Tower, a vast celebration of Empire grew up, a dazzling concrete fantasy which enjoyed its own single line railway, leaving the LNER to curve into the site and return after executing a loop of a mile or so. A single line, it was both the last GC new line to be started and (probably) the first LNER one to be completed a€" The Answer Is Transport. Station Survey returns in fairly muted fashion, a short piece but an extraordinary station - one of the largest and most ornate rural stations in the country a€" at Redmile in remote Leicestershire on the Great Northern and LNWR Joint. A rather different approach from Paul Anderson (a sort of latter day Lord Clark) with the emphasis very much on architecture. The station was a riotous flowering and sprouting of brickwork, where segmented pediments, finials and even something called a porte cochere abounded, magnificently in excess of the scale wan-anted by its rural surroundings. It boasted probably the the most grandiose gents of any rural station and it owed its glories to ducal patronage - just up the road was Belvoir Castle, seat of the Duke of Rutland. Diesel Dawn makes only a brief show this issue a€" its detractors at least may be mollified by the sight of the hated things leaving the country. A photographic foray into long vanished Ayrshire a€" Before Diesels, appropriately enough, and rural Gloucestershire By Auto Train, by James Stevenson and S.G. Allsopp respectively, round up the geographical balance well, rather nicely really...