Coal was the muscle and railways the sinew in the days when Gwent coal powered an empire. MIKE BUCKINGHAM spoke to a publisher who is recreating that world in words and pictures

BEATS there a middle-aged male heart that doesn't thrill to the hissing, surging power of steam locomotives?

To anyone born before the 1960s the railway of the steam era evokes memories of going to school or on holidays, the joy of arrival and the sadness of departure.

Vic Mitchell, who takes a special interest in the railways of Gwent and South Wales, sums up the unique magic of steam.

"Steam is the nearest thing to a living machine that has ever been invented. It sighs and breathes, and has real vitality.

"The appeal is not just in the locomotives, but in the bridges and the railway stations, the sidings and embankments and the sheds where the locos were kept, all of which form a backdrop to some of our most potent memories.

"My fascination with steam goes back to the earliest days of my boyhood and it will be with me for the rest of my days."

As recently as November last year Vic Mitchell and his camera were in Gwent, taking pictures of railway buildings for his 371st book about steam.

The 370th, which is on sale from this month, is entitled Monmouthshire Eastern Valleys, with the subtitle Featuring Newport Docks, and deals with the period from the middle part of the 19th century to the first couple of decades of the 20th, which saw railway lines spread across Gwent like veins on a drunkard's nose.

The story of Gwent railways is the story of coal. If the trains were not actually hauling coal they hauled those whose job it was to dig it.

Steam power thrust itself into every nook where coal was to be found, the beauty of the system being that the locos were fuelled by coal mined quite literally from under their own tracks.

Vic Mitchell declines to get into the politics of the sudden extinction of steam, except to say, with some vehemence: "The race to eliminate steam was obscene.

"They were building steam locomotives in the 1960s that could have gone on for 30 years or more, but which were being scrapped after five. It was a disgrace."

In the 1940s, when Vic Mitchell was a boy, steam was still king, taking its power from the most important mineral resource war-torn Britain did not have to import.

"But by the 1950s, which was when I went to the RAF station at St Athan, near Barry, to do my national service as a dentist it was already under threat.

"It was in South Wales my boyhood interest in steam railways became more than passive. I was one of those who pressed for the preservation of the Ffestiniog railway in North Wales, which of course came about.

"That was more than 50 years ago now. My latest book explores the interesting situation in the Eastern Valley, where two rival railway companies operated side by side.

"In detailing the railways servicing Newport docks north to Blaenavon I have tried not to dwell too much on the locomotives.

"I like to think of my pictures as historical documents in which the docks and the houses, the streets, canals and stations have their importance.

"The coming of the railway had more impact upon the British countryside than anything else. They are relics of a truly remarkable part of our history."

Former publications by Vic Mitchell (he owns the Sussex-based Middleton Press imprint) include the Brecon to Newport and Brecon to Neath lines, Abergavenny to Merthyr, Gloucester to Cardiff and Pontypool to Mountain Ash railways.

He said: "One of my daughters, Deborah, works with me as the production manager, so it's not just a thing for the boys!"