Salvete et vale… I welcome you to the last issue of Modern Railways for which I am editor. It is a landmark for me: much of my adult life has been taken up with the business of getting this magazine before you, the reader, every month. I’ve had a ball: what a privilege, to report on such an interesting industry. For what it is worth, I have been the youngest ever, oldest ever and longest-serving (31 years) editor of this illustrious organ.
Not that it is a large field in which have competed for those records. It is almost six decades since 1962, when the first editor, Geoffrey Freeman Allen (‘GFA’ as he was known), recognised that there was a wide public hunger for reliable information on the railways of the day, their business and their vision for the future, and took the inspired decision to rename Trains Illustrated as Modern Railways. In that time there have been but four other editors besides him and me: Geoffrey Kichenside, Bill Cornwell and Charles Long in the 1970s and early 1980s, and Ken Cordner in the late 1980s when I had a spell in North America.
After he left Modern Railways publisher Ian Allan, GFA went on to edit the Jane’s World …
