This large volume provides an illustrated tour of a staggering variety of narrow-gauge railways from around the world, with most photos taken within the past 15 years.

To quote the book’s sub-title of Steaming Along the Rustic and Narrow, the scenes range from what looks like a toy train meandering through fields to express trains that would not be out of place on main lines.

James Waite has gathered an impressive collection of photographs from his travels through 49 different countries around the world, from North, Central, and South America, through Europe, Africa, and Asia, to Australasia.

We see railways that appear to be run down and near the end of their life, while others show both heritage and commercial operations that are still very much alive.

The photographs, some from very remote places, are enhanced by the book’s large size with often a single photograph per page and accompanied by extremely detailed captions.

Published in September 2021 by Pen & Sword and written by James Waite, this hardback book measures around 22 cm x 28.7 cm, and has 296 pages and 430 colour photographs, and extensive maps and diagrams.

It has a published price of £40.00, but at the time of writing, it can be purchased for £21.56 from Amazon.

The 49 countries included in the book are covered in a logical order, starting with Canada and the USA, and working through seven countries in Central and South America.

Twenty-two European countries are followed by three in Africa, two in the Middle East, 11 in Asia, and concludes with Australia and New Zealand.

Some images show locomotives standing on plinths as a memory of a bygone age or having been preserved and running on a heritage railway.

Others illustrate them hard at work in forests, deserts, and mountains and in unbelievably confined spaces through towns and villages.

By their very nature, narrow-gauge railways often provide opportunities for more spectacular images than their standard gauge counterparts, as seen in the images below on the White Pass and Yukon Railway which links Skagway in Alaska, USA with Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon territory.

The images below are typical of rural French railways, many of which have now sadly disappeared. The photos below are of the Vivarais Railway in France, which remarkably after the line closed in 2008, was taken over by another organisation that resumed commercial operations and built the station at the top left and the engine shed at the top right.

Many of the railways of Southern Africa were built to the metre gauge, but the size of their locomotives often masked that they were essentially narrow gauge lines.

Two such examples are shown below, with the train on the left a scene from the East African Railway and that on the right a freight train on the Tanzanian Central Railway.

There could be no greater contrast from the previous images of trains running through rural landscapes in Kenya than those from Jordan on the left and Pakistan on the right below.

This book provides as good a world tour of railways around the world as one could wish for without leaving home. Informative and well-written captions add to the pictorial journey and allow the reader to savour places where it seems impossible for railways to venture.

The reproduction is superb, and the single or sometimes two large illustrations per page make full use of the book’s large size.

To most readers, many of the locations in the book are unknown places, but the author’s very informative captions make them less of a mystery.

James Waite’s book would be equally at home on every railway enthusiast’s bookshelf or as a coffee-table distraction to be perused at leisure, and fully deserves its rating of 5/5.

The book is available to purchase from Amazon and from Pen & Sword.

We would like to thank Pen & Sword for providing us with a copy of the book for review.