Railway photographer and retired railwayman Bernard Mills has put together this illustrated history of all 50 Class 50 diesels published by the Fifty Fund.
The first chapter covers their first few years of service on the West Coast Main Line between 1968 and electrification north of Crewe in 1974, and the second chapter contains photos of all 50 members of the class arranged in numerical order and mostly taken on the Western Region with which the class was associated from the mid-1970s onwards.
Chapter 3, entitled The Last Hurrah, features the class in their last few years of service in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including several examples in Network SouthEast livery on services such as London Paddington–Oxford and Waterloo–Exeter along with Plymouth–Penzance locals and summer Saturday Newquay trains in 1987, the last year of loco-hauled trains serving this popular resort before the simplification of the track layout here.
The last few pages are given over to railtours worked by the class in 1993 and 1994 before their final withdrawal from main line service.
Photographs are presented in two-per-page format, with extensive captions accompanying each image. 136 pages.