The 40th of a second that changed a life.

It is the 14th of June In 1958 and a 13-year-old boy stands anxiously on the platform of the Down-line at Grantham Railway Station. The imminent arrival of a train was eagerly awaited ..Clutching a Kodak Brownie Cresta ll, this was not a passenger wishing to travel but a trainspotter excited by steam engines.

Roger Bamber was ready for any circumstance but as luck would have it, the train that was racing towards Grantham was the A4 Class Loco, the Golden Plover, which entered service in October 1937 and finished her work in October 1965. It was the non-stop ‘Elizabethan’ service from London to Edinburgh

Traveling at around 70 mph the Class A4 Locomotive took around six and a half hours to make the journey north from Kings Cross to Edinburgh and would not drop its speed as it passed through the station.

This was just one of the 35 A4 class Locomotives designed by Nigel Gresley and the sleek engine was built for speed.

Another of the A4 engines, The Mallard, broke the world speed record on the 3rd of July 1938, and still holds the record for the Worlds fastest steam train at 126 miles per hour.

So, it was just the one shot that the keen train spotter took to as it hurtled through Grantham

Station.

Unbeknown to 13-year-old Roger this was a life changing moment. Consulting his notes of the day decades later he recorded the exposure was a 40th of a second.

Roger was expecting to leave school and become a statistician, but this picture was the moment that his career took a different path and he decided that photography was the route he would take. This picture was part of the portfolio that enabled him to enter Leicester Art College, where he studied graphic design.

Rogers interest in steam engines did not wilt after his teenage years and Roger built a collection of steam engine nameplates that now adorn the walls of his Brighton home.

Roger now in his 7th decade is keeping himself busy by putting together a collection of his favourite pictures for a book to be published soon, so he is undertaking exhaustive searches though thousands of negatives to whittle his massive collection of pictures to a manageable portfolio suitable for his book.

It was during this research that he came across the picture of the Golden Plover.

‘To be honest ‘ he tells me ‘ I had forgotten all about it and was surprised to find it”. “But here it was” .

Checking the engine number 60031 against available records Roger discovered that the steam train he photographed when he was 13 years old was the Golden Plover and by an extraordinary coincidence that picture he took as a boy was of the very same train whose nameplate now hung on the wall of his home, part of his collection of steam engine name plates and bought just ten years ago .