About John Cooper-Smith

I started photographing railways in August 1962, with a blurry shot of a King near Leamington Spa, using an Agfa Isola 120 film camera. Like so many cameras of the day, it wasn’t up to stopping moving trains, having a top shutter speed of 1/100 sec. My next camera was an Agifold, this having a top speed of 1/150 sec, which could just about deal with very slow movement. From September 1964, I started using 35mm, with a Kowa SLR. This had a major problem – early in 1965 it developed a hole in its focal plane shutter which resulted in fogging of several unrepeatable shots. So the Kowa was condemned in favour of a Pentax S1a, in turn followed by a Pentax Spotmatic, both being 35mm SLRs. Until late 1971, my photography was confined to black & white due to financial constraint. From then, I used colour transparency film as well as black & white. In 1976, I changed to medium format, first with Mamiya 645 then Pentax 6×7 cameras. In 2009, I “went digital” with a Canon 5D Mk2, superseded in 2014 by a Nikon D800 and in 2017 by the Nikon D850 which is my current camera. This progression of cameras reflects the phenomenal improvement in photographic technology over the 60 years of my railway photography.

I joined Maurice Earley’s Railway Photographic Society in 1965, when I was 16, as a member of the Midland & South Western Circle. This circulated its own folio, as did the London & Southeastern Circle and the Northern Circle. Each of the 3 circles had about 30 or so members, allowing the folio to go round in a year or so. From time to time, an Inter-circle folio was circulated, though this typically took about 3 years to go round about 100 members. When Maurice Earley passed away, the Railway Photographic Society was disbanded, but the Northern Circle members continued under the title of the Railway Camera Club. Being in the Midland & South Western Circle, my membership lapsed for a while until I was invited to rejoin what had become the RCC, since when I have been a member. The pictures I’m showing have all been in the folios and / or the Society’s Steam Cameramen and Railway Cameramen books at one time or another.

That 60 years since 1962 has seen the complete opposite in subject matter. Not only has railway photography become more restricted with the end of steam in 1968, but also the relentless diminution of photographic opportunity caused by the destruction of every feature – be it signalling, stations, trackwork, signage and so on – that gave the railways their unique character and appeal in the name of “progress”. In addition to that, access to the railway has become far more difficult, not only with rigid denial of access to railway property since about 1980 but also with the growth of lineside trees, the erection of ugly lineside carbuncles, ugly palisade fences painted in a lurid shade of green and the march of overhead electrification in which each new scheme outcompetes its predecessor in sheer ugliness.

So where the future lies with railway photography I don’t know but I take my hat off to anyone trying to make anything of the subject 60 years on from when I started.

John Cooper-Smith, Settle

All images in this gallery © John Cooper-Smith