Choose a line of enquiry.
Plan a railway day out, follow the poster tradition or prepare your own photograph for print. The guides are organised around what you came to find.
Railway journeys
Railway journeys
Places to explore by rail, from the Settle–Carlisle line to heritage railways and seasonal trips. Start with the journey you want to make.
The Polar Express train rides, in Britain.
Every December a handful of heritage railways turn themselves into the Polar Express: bells, dressing gowns, hot chocolate, and a train that supposedly runs to the North Pole. This is…
The Jacobite, and the greatest railway journey.
Eighty-four miles of loch, mountain and sea, at the head of a working steam locomotive: Fort William to Mallaig and back. The operator calls it the greatest railway journey in the world…
Settle to Carlisle, the long way north.
Seventy-two miles of track through the Pennine hills, opened in 1876 and still carrying regular trains over the Ribblehead Viaduct. The Settle to Carlisle line is the one railway journey…
The Severn Valley, end to end.
Sixteen miles of Worcestershire and Shropshire alongside the river, six restored stations, and trains pulled by steam and heritage diesel. The Severn Valley Railway is one of the…
Pickering to Whitby, over the moors.
Twenty-four miles of North Yorkshire moorland, a string of restored stations, and a main-line terminus at the seaside: the North Yorkshire Moors Railway is the preserved line that ends…
The Bluebell, the Sussex line.
Eleven miles through the Sussex weald, four restored stations, and a collection of locomotives and carriages that has been growing since the 1960s. The railway puts its own claim…
The Snowdon Mountain Railway: the journey to the summit.
One station at the bottom in Llanberis, one visitor centre at the top of Yr Wyddfa, and the steepest thing between them. The Snowdon Mountain Railway has been pushing trains up the…
The Watercress Line: the Mid Hants Railway, and why it is called that.
A Hampshire line opened in 1865, closed in 1973, and brought back by volunteers in stages through the seventies and eighties. The Watercress Line - properly the Mid-Hants Railway - runs…
The West Somerset Railway: twenty miles, ten stations.
The old Great Western country branch line, kept alive: twenty miles between Bishops Lydeard and the seaside at Minehead, ten stations, and the coast at the far end of it. Twenty miles…
The poster
The poster
Where the railway poster look came from, what those posters physically were, and what survives of them in the national collection.
Vintage railway posters, and where the look came from
Search for a vintage railway poster and you mostly get shops. This is the reading instead: what those posters actually were, how they were printed, and why a style invented to sell train…
Railway posters, from the platform to your wall.
Type railway posters into a search box and you get shop pages. This is the other half of the subject: what the posters were, where the surviving ones live, the eras they run through, and…
Art deco railway posters, and the look of speed.
The art deco railway poster is a specific thing: the 1930s, the streamliners, geometry in place of scenery. This is what the style actually is, why it happened when it did, and how a…
The Great Western look.
Every region drew differently. The western company's posters leaned on what it sold: the coast, the countryside, and the fastest comfortable way out of London to both. This is what the…
The LNER decade.
The London and North Eastern Railway existed for twenty-five years and completely rewrote what a railway poster looked like. This is what that company advertised, why speed became the…
The British Rail years.
Nationalisation in 1948 folded the big companies into one, and the posters carried on - through the last decade of mainline steam, and then past it. This is what British Rail's posters…
Your photograph
Your photograph
The picture is the input, and it decides everything after it. What prints well, what the studio styles do to it, and how large it can honestly go.
Preparing a railway photograph for print
There is no name to set on this site, no date to add and no message field. You upload a picture and we print it, so the file is the entire thing you are buying. That makes preparing it…
How big your photograph can honestly go
Sizes sound abstract until the parcel arrives. Two things decide which one is right: the wall it is going on, and the file you are working from. The second is not a matter of taste, so…
Turning a photograph into an oil painting, and the four other styles
A commissioned oil painting means a fee and a wait of weeks. This is not that. You upload a railway photograph, the studio repaints it, and you see a watermarked version on screen before…
The gift
The gift
Who it is for, and which of their railway photographs actually lands with them. Spotters, steam people, model railway builders, dads and granddads.
Gifts for a spotter
Spotting is a record-keeping habit that happens to involve photography. That changes what makes a good gift, because the picture they are proudest of is often not the prettiest one in…
What personalised means on this site
Most personalised gifts mean a name added to something. Ours doesn't. There is no name field here, no date, no engraved message and no room for one. What is personal is the photograph,…
Gifts for a model railway builder
Everybody else on this site photographs something that already existed. A layout builder photographs something they made, often over years, and that changes the gift completely. It is…
The card that goes with it
A card made from a real railway photograph does something a shop card with a cartoon engine on it cannot, and it is not a consolation prize for not buying a print. It is a different…
Railway gifts made from a photograph somebody took
Anybody who has been interested in railways for more than about a year owns the merchandise. The calendar, the book they were given twice, the mug with a stock locomotive on it. What…
Gifts for a steam enthusiast
Steam is the one railway subject that photographs itself. The exhaust does half the composition, the light does the rest, and the difference between a frame that prints beautifully and…
Gifts for dads and granddads
The rest of this stage assumes a digital file exists. For an older enthusiast it very often doesn't, because the railway that matters to him is thirty or forty years back and lives in a…
On the wall
On the wall
Paper, frame, canvas, wood, metal, mug, bottle and cards. What each format physically is, which pictures suit it, and where it belongs.
More guides and references
Railway journeys and print guides
Follow 5 sections: railway journeys, the poster tradition, your photograph, gift advice and the formats you can print on.