The Green Shelf

I seem to remember that there was once a movie called "The Green Mile" but here is part of the contents of "The Green Shelf" in my study.

This is my most regularly read railway book for sure. It's "Locomotives of the LNER" published by the RCTS (Railway Correspondence and Travel Society) over the years. It comes in eighteen volumes and not all are in print but if you watch UK Ebay they often come up there. Each volume is around 150 pages so that's around 3,000 pages packed with photographs of every variation in every class, details of when boilers were superheated, liveries, shed locations and descriptions of main duties. This is indeed a series for rivet counting gricers like me.

A wonderful piece of work by a whole team of writers; I think maybe the greatest railway book in the world but then I'm an LNER afficionado.

But here's a thing. Last year I tracked down one of the out-of-print volumes and thought I had the set. But then I discovered that they had published a volume 10B so I still have that to hunt down. If you ever see it let me know!