The author, who died in April 2016, pursued steam as a vocation. His engineering career began in the late 1970s on the Ffestiniog Railway in Wales and went on to encompass Sudan, South Africa and Russia. In the late 1980s he began working for the Alfred County Railway in South Africa, settling near Durban where he spent the rest of his life.

This book focusses on the locomotives that he worked on, ranging in size from a diminutive 2-4-0 on the Ffestiniog, to a massive 4-8-4 express locomotive in Russia. He was in correspondence with the eminent steam engineers Livio Porta and David Wardale, and applied some of their techniques to improve the performance of the Ffestiniog’s Linda.

In the mid-1980s, Phil worked on a project to alleviate famine in Sudan, in which it was planned to rehabilitate a limited number of steam locomotives to haul food supplies to remote locations. The opportunity was taken to fit a Lempor exhaust to one locomotive that resulted in a 12% reduction in (oil) fuel consumption.

In 1988, after a brief sojourn in Brazil, Phil moved to South Africa to take up the role of CME on the newly privatised 610mm gauge Alfred County Railway which operated a fleet of ex-SAR Garratts. Two of these were modified with GPCS fireboxes and Lempor exhausts. While at the ACR, Phil worked on the trial conversion of an SAR 15F 4-8-2 to oil-burning. He also undertook design modifications to an Australian (ex-Victorian Railways) R-Class 4-6-4. In 2002, he travelled to Russia where he was commissioned by GW Travel to make modifications to a P36 4-8-4 to improve its performance when hauling the TransSiberian Express. In 2004 he undertook the design, construction and export of a 500mm gauge Garratt for use on the Ferrocaril Austral Fuegino (FCAF) railway in Argentina.

This book was published posthumously after editing by David Wardale.