David St John Thomas is Britain's one-time bestselling railway author, who built a formidable publishing empire first based mainly on railways. In 'Farewell to Trains', he summarizes his lifetime's passion. Personal reminiscences and evocative descriptions of railway life are interspersed with extracts from over 65 years of the author's railway writings, and illustrated throughout with archive photography. In this poignant love letter, the author says farewell to the restaurant cars, the sleeping carriages, the non-stop expresses and the cheap excursion trains, the local stations bustling with the railway's peripheral trades and liveried staff, the semaphore and signal boxes, and of course the great steam engines.