1960s Iberian Railway Holiday

Description

The author's holidays as a child with his parents in the 1950s and 1960s were as much, if not more, about railways than about 'normal' holiday pursuits, and with the decline of British steam by the mid-1960s thoughts turned to further afield. From 1965 until 1969 family summer holidays became two weeks in either Spain or Portugal: 1965 - Sitges, about 25 miles to the south of Barcelona, Spain; 1966 - Benidorm, about 30 miles to the north of Alicante, Spain; 1967 & 1968 - Ofir, about 30 miles to the north of Oporto, Northern Portugal; 1969 - Tarragona, about 60 miles to the south of Barcelona, Spain. '1960s Iberian Railway Holiday' explores Iberian broad- and narrow-gauge railways with an emphasis on steam, although diesel and electric power locomotives are also featured, as are trams and trolleybuses. All the photographs (both colour and monochrome) were taken by the author and his late father, and virtually all of them have never previously been published. Each image is accompanied with an extensive and informative commentary. This is a captivating time capsule of Iberian railways from over fifty years ago created out of the private collection of an internationally renowned authority on steam locomotives and their history.

Michael Clemens and his late father lived in Worcestershire but travelled all over Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, from Penzance to the north of Scotland, filming many now long-closed railways and the steam locomotives that worked over them. Their movie film collection, the largest of its kind in the UK, has been released by the author on forty videos starting in the 1990s. The first volume of still photographs was published in 2007 and this is the author's fourteenth book. The author's website can be visited at www.michaelclemensrailways.co.uk and contains many hundreds of pages of railway memorabilia.