Colin Boocock

About Colin Boocock

Colin Boocock is a life-long railway enthusiast and an experienced railway mechanical engineer. Brought up near the green electric multiple units that passed over the level crossing at Addlestone in Surrey, he was enthralled when his parents took him to watch steam expresses at nearby Weybridge. His love for steam traction extended to modern forms as the railways developed and modernised.

The sight of pictures in the then Canon Eric Treacy’s booklet My Best Railway Photographs gave Colin the idea that he, also, could take photographs of trains if he had a camera. But he was only eight years old at the time.

A year later, in 1947, Colin persuaded his father to take him to the nearest station, then Bournemouth Central, to take some photographs of trains. Using his father’s camera, set up for him, Colin took three pictures, two of which appeared in print decades later.

For Christmas 1949 Colin received a second-hand Brownie box camera. He used this until, in 1953, his parents expressed their satisfaction at Colin’s photographs and said he could have on permanent loan his father’s folding camera, a Nagel Librette from around 1930 (he still has this in 2022 – and it still works!).

Colin’s best quality black-and-white work came when he purchased a second-hand Zeiss Super Ikonta, by which time he was doing his own developing and printing. A visit to the stunning Austrian Alps with the RCTS in 1958 convinced him that he had to embrace colour slide photography, which he did with a Voigtländer Vito IIa folding 35mm camera. This was so good that he used it for slides for nearly thirty years.

Other 35mm cameras came and went for black-and-white work until 1985 when he bought his first proper SLR, a Minolta X-300. He bought a second X-300 for colour work in 1986. Colin switched from slides to colour negative film from 1996 because of the promise of better quality, and then went totally digital in 2004.

When a Konica-Minolta A2 got soaked in Chinese rain in 2008, and failed, he replaced it with a Sony Alpha 200, the camera he still uses for serious work. But Colin has also made good progress with the cameras in his successive mobile ’phones, realising their potential for producing good quality A4-sized images.

In 2022, his railway photographic career has reached 75 years and still continues. It helps to fill the pages of his railway books and magazine articles and theoretically keeps him out of mischief!

CPB 18-4-2022