Don Benn

Southern Day Rail Rovers Spring 1964 Don Benn

2nd Edition on higher quality interior paper. In the 1960s the Southern Region offered three local Area Rail Rovers each valid for a day within a defined area at a cost of 10 shillings (50p today). To us hard up youngsters these tickets were too good to miss and the Area 2 Rover in particular was a big attraction as it covered the South Western main line from Waterloo to Woking as well as the Guildford to Redhill line, the latter being 100% steam worked until the end of 1964. The line from Waterloo of course carried the steam hauled trains from Waterloo to Basingstoke, Salisbury and Southampton and beyond, many of which stopped at Woking and so were ideal for us ardent train bashers. I have lost track of how many of these tickets I bought but a dozen survive in my ticket collection spanning the years from 1960 to 1964. The tickets I bought in the spring of 1964 were mainly to time the train running of steam hauled trains into and out of Waterloo and to photograph them on the main line as far as Woking whilst it was still almost entirely a steam worked main line. This little book tells the story of those day trips. These days out wetted my appetite to seek out loco performance further afield, which I had already been sampling since 1961 anyway and the full story of the last few years of Southern steam is told in my book ''Southern Steam Twilight''-The Untold Story'', to be published by Pen & Sword. This little book of 48 pages, size 8 x 10 inches contains 38 train running logs, descriptive text and 37 black and white images. This is the revised edition using higher quality paper compared to the first edition.