More Christmas 2011 - books and inspiration

One of the blogs that I follow is the Elly, James & Keith Light Railway which is a new Garden railway, although much further advanced than mine and with it's main proponent, James, having a substantial background in railway modelling it seems, and not afraid to take to take the hacksaw and paintbrush to LGB stuff.

One of the books he mentioned was European Narrow Gauge Steam by Trevor Rowe which looked very interesting (and which would be in English).

Full of black and white photographs from the late 60's and early 70's.  Vol 1 - which James mentioned is Germany and Austria but Volume 2 had Holland and Switzerland in, so a trip to Amazon.co.uk netted one second hand and one new for a good price.  I've yet to detail my trip to Hoorn in Holland and the Dutch Steam tram museum, but suffice to say that I now have a soft spot for Dutch narrow gauge railways.   All sorts of nice inspiration such as the following picture of a Tram engine hauling colliery dump trucks in Belgium:

Finally, a Christmas present that I wasn't expecting.  It's local so interesting and one of the nice things about buildings is that often enough has survived to put the photograph and modern day reality together.  Only had a quick dip into this so far and one to put in the car as I travel around.