Railways Remembered – Cheshire and North Wales

Presenter: Charles Roberts

Hybrid Meeting both Physically at Shenfield Parish Hall and via Zoom

Using material from Archive, Charles showed us a selection of colour images from Cheshire and North Wales including some parts of Merseyside. The material was drawn from a number of key collections in the Archive, most notably those of John McCann, Charles Firminger and Phil Tatt. The Images covered the period from the mid-1950s to the early 1970, and included steam, diesel and electric, BR, industrial and heritage settings. Many of the images were being shown for the first time and will eventually appear in a new book of the same title to be published by Crecy Publishing during 2026.

The Online Transport Archive (OTA) was established in 2000 to administer a growing collection of cine films, slides, negatives, prints and commercial postcards relating to all forms of transport. The collection now stands at over 2,000,000 still images and over 4000 hours of film footage, and is constantly growing to become one of the finest collections of transport images in Britain, with extensive collections of maritime, canal, aviation, heavy and light rail and road-based subjects. Charles Roberts is one of OTA’s trustees.

The meeting this month was a bit of an experiment – whilst we had a physical meeting in Shenfield, Charles Roberts delivered his presentation over Zoom. This worked well and opens the door to future ‘remote speaker’ meetings allowing us to cast our net wider in the search for interesting presentations.