IN his mind's eye he can see the locomotives rushing through the winter darkness, smell the steam and the sharp acrid smell of the burning coal.

"As well as recording things I have the ability to emotionally involve myself in the lives of the people I'm writing about," says Ralph Caple.

Such a degree of empathy is necessary in a novelist but is rare in those who write local history. Ralph Caple's book though, is not in the ordinary run of things. He has chronicled the lives of the railwaymen and some women working in the Sirhowy Valley from the 1800s until the present.

Ralph Caple, 60, lives and writes in his beloved Sirhowy Valley at Wattsville. After school he got an engineering apprenticeship, then worked at Whiteheads in Newport and at Llanwern, until finally he got a job with the part of British Rail that has since metamorphosed into Network Rail.

Ralph Caple's journey from dreamer to author was to have unexpected twists and dead ends, diversions and byways.

"My brother Christopher and I had a train set which fascinated me. When my son, Dene, asked for a lay-out I started to make a model of the railway system at the nearby Nine Mile Point, getting deeply involved in the railway's history.

"I quickly found that if you open one historical door others appear in front of you.

"At about this time I met the local historian William Tasker who happened to have the track plans and timetables for Nine Mile Point. He was the beam of light on my road to Damascus.

"At that time I had no thought of a book. I was gathering everything I could find out about the history of the Sirhowy Valley in one huge mass, purely for my own enjoyment. The railways were a part of it but I was interested in the social and religious history as well.

"I was always more interested in people than objects, though."

Getting a job with British Rail provided the catalyst.

"If something inside me needed to be got out my instinct was to write a poem. I was the last signalman at Aberbeeg signal box and when it closed in 1997 I began to think about all the men who had worked there and what they had seen and thought.

"I should add that I was also a part-time countryside warden at Nine Mile Point which is based in the old crossing house. When I'm around there I can see and smell the old trains and hear the old crossing gate which used to be there as it clanged shut. That was another stimulus to my imagination.

"I had hoped to do a little book with poems and pictures as a keepsake of Aberbeeg but all the publishers I showed it to wanted more text. I started to interview Aberbeeg men who had memories of the railways going back before the war."

But the old hands who had seen service with the Great Western Railway before nationalisation in 1948 were not content merely to talk about the railways.

"I was going from one person to another, notebook in hand, taking down all sorts of stories and the stuff was growing and growing with stories of shunters and signalmen, drivers and porters and line men and the women who worked on the railway all thrown in.

"I had over a 100 profiles of people each one involving at least three generations. It has ended up as the most complete social profile of the railways in the Western valley there has ever been."