Just ordered a copy - only £3 (with free postage!) on eBay. Will let you know what I think.
Just started reading Dickinson's book, mentioned in post #85. Think this might be a Marmite-type of work; I don't like Marmite.
Three chapters in and I'm already getting irritated. The author likes to use ten words when two or three will suffice. I know it's easy to go off on a tangent, along the paths and trackways towards a golden sunset, with clouds scudding across the horizon, but... Help! It's catching! Also, he overuses the exclamation mark. Occasionally it's fine, but please, not so often! Honestly! No, certainly not!
There are some photos to accompany the text and are well reproduced. However, the author often explains how such-and-such a photo was taken, but it's not included in the book. So frustrating! Yes, really!
I hope it gets better. Yes!
A week or so later....
Haven't given up on the book yet! There are, actually, some very interesting sections when he worked as a porter/carriage cleaner at the main stations in Leicester during his school/uni holidays. I don't recall those aspects of railway life ever having been written about before. There are still parts which grate though, especially when he's always maligning mere trainspotters. Also, as already mentioned, he refers to photos in great detail which are not reproduced in the book. The selection of photos are also not arranged chronologically, which doesn't help either.
However, I've just won a bid on eBay for his title "Steam - The Mystic Harmony", which hopefully will have more illustrations.
@Western Sunset: I must apologise -- I was of course aware of your initial 29/1 posting (the one line, "Just ordered a copy... will let you know what I think".) There then came on the scene, a present-day feature of these Forums which drives me mad -- if one makes a post, and then follows it up with another, with no post from anyone else intervening: unless one's follow-up post is made at least seven days after the initial one; the follow-up post is auto-merged with the initial one -- and there is thus no way for people looking at the "index of threads", to know that anything has been added to the thread, since one's initial post; so they don't log on to the thread ! I've fallen into that error: have discovered your follow-up, above, two-weeks-and-some late -- and only because I was contemplating making a fresh post on the thread, about a completely different subject; and therefore logged on.
Re your "Marmite" comment -- I find applicable to Mr. Dickinson's work, another food-related figure of speech: the curate's famous comment on his egg...
Unlike yourself, I found little problem with his writing style: I'm maybe rather undiscriminating there -- so long as an author is essentially literate, and doesn't knock himself out trying to be ever-so-ever-so-clever, I'm usually happy enough. And (just me) I tend not to put a great deal of importance on the photographic aspect of the hobby, as a whole.
The author's recounting his "vacation / casual" railway employment is indeed most interesting; a special attraction for me, being the part of it involving Leicester Belgrave Road station as was -- have always been fascinated by that whole, seeming to me mildly dotty, Great Northern / LNW secondary (tertiary?) system east of Leicester. As said in my previous post, for me the book is fine while the author sticks to railway content. When he goes off onto other themes; well, to be frank, I'm glad that I don't know the bloke personally -- what he comes out with, raises my hackles in several ways. He's clearly a card-carrying member of the "I love me -- who do you love?" club; and big on, as you say, maligning numerous folk who are not like him -- among them trainspotters who are not in his style thereof.
Hope you've been enjoying
Mystic Harmony. As touched on in my previous post: if Dickinson had not been a Great-Britain-only man (as I've been able to find out for sure, that he is) I think I'd have "held my nose" as regards his non-rail-focused opinions and "airs", and sought out other books by him -- I'm a big fan of foreign railways. Each to their own, of course; and no-one is obliged in any way to cultivate hobby-type interests, which they prefer not to. In
A Friend in Steam, Dickinson touches on his having around the mid-1950s, spent a year in France as part of his university languages course, and mentions in passing, a rail-related sight or two encountered in the course of that; also mentions having visited the Irish Republic in his relative youth -- but one finds that railways for him are essentially "GB only". Fair enough, his choice; but mine is, not to pursue further writings by him.