THE NICK PIGOTT
Interview
Humphrey Platts: a railway
photographer for almost
three-quarters of a century.
PICTURE: NICK PIGOTT‘Castle’4-6-0 No. 111Viscount Churchill– the loco rebuilt from the unique GW PacificThe Great
Bear– stands on the right of this busy scene at the north end of Shrewsbury station in 1946.
Stanier‘Black Five’No. 4863 waits in the centre road and on the left is‘Hall’4-6-0 No. 4999
Gopsal Hall.Right: Humphrey as a young
man during an official cab
ride from Grantham to
Newcastle on‘A3’No. 60105
VictorWildalmost 70 years
ago.HUMPHREYPLATTS
Nick Pigottmeets Humphrey Platts, who began
photographing trains just after the Second World War,
capturing a fascinating transitional period on the railways.
I
T IS rare these days to come across
a ‘Big Four’ cameraman whose work has
not been published widely in books or
magazines. Such a photographer is 90-year-
old Humphrey Platts, who not only began the
hobby in the immediate post-war period when
film was hard to obtain, but who managed to
record examples of trains on the GWR, LMS,
LNER and SR before British Railways had even
been formed.
Only recently have a few examples of his
work begun to appear online, and it was thus
with keen anticipation that I made my way to his
Lincolnshire home to see what other treasures
lay in store. I was not to be disappointed, as the
images on these pages show.
Newly built ‘Castles’, streamlined ‘Duchesses’,
Gresley Pacifics bearing two-digit numbers and
even a four-wheeled passenger carriage running
on a main line. All these and more were recorded
by this remarkable enthusiast in the mid-to-late
1940s; he was also active with his camera during
BR’s 1948 Locomotive Exchanges.
Born in London on June 25, 1929,Humphrey’s earliest memories are of trains on the
former Metropolitan & Great Central Joint line
at Northwood, Middlesex, and it was the sight of
an express roaring through the station there that
sparked his lifelong passion. His parents weren’t
particularly interested in railways but did treat him
to a trip to King’s Cross in the summer of 1937
to see the new ‘Coronation’ express. “I was only
just turned eight but I can remember seeing the
‘beaver tail’ coach and the ‘Silver Jubilee’ stock in
one of the adjacent platforms,” he told me.
His interest in railways really began to take
off a couple of years later when he was sent to
boarding school in Seaford, Sussex. “Steam was
what really captivated me but the Seaford branch
had already been electrified by the time I got
there, so it looked as though my school days
would be pretty barren from a railway point of
view. However, just a few weeks after my 10th
birthday, war was declared and the threat of
enemy invasion on the South Coast meant our
entire school had to be evacuated to central Wales.
“The scene in Wales was as different to Seaford
as I could possibly imagine. The school’s newRAILWAYPHOTOGRAPHER
LINESIDEINTHE‘40sAND‘50s