During a clear-out at the home of my late mother a memento of my childhood was retrieved that stirred instant nostalgia when I again clapped eyes on it.

This was a battered, scrawled-upon, even, I confess, hacked-about copy of the Ladybird Book of British Railway Locomotives, published in 1958.

A gift at Christmas that year, when I was seven, it helped stir in me a love or railways, and of reading, that has never left me since.

Though not a member of the Ian Allan Locospotters Club – not, ‘trainspotters’, note – I possessed by the late 1950s a number of Allan’s ABC books in which engine numbers and names were listed. A prized possession was the ‘combined volume’, which had them all.

To digress at this point, I thought some of the obituaries a bit measly when Allan died in June at the age of 92. The Daily Telegraph’s was placed beneath one for some dull Eton College beak who had had far less influence on the youth of Britain.

Underlining the numbers in the ABCs constituted the principal activity of spotters, once the particular locomotives had been seen in motion or at rest. It was always a vexed question, however, in my circles at least, to determine what constituted a sighting.

On Sunday visits to sheds around the country with my school railway club, brave souls would risk the foreman’s fury by ‘bunking’, that is entering without the necessary permit. Were the numbers gleaned to be shared with the other members of the bus-borne party who had glimpsed only the boiler tops and chimneys? They usually were, but some remained chary.

But back to my Ladybird book. This contained, as its introduction stated, “illustrations representative of the principal classes of steam locomotives in service in all regions of British Railways”.

The images were based on photographs supplied by BR which made me wonder, even as a child, why the publishers had not simply used the originals.

In truth, there is something more curiously ‘real’ in an artist’s depiction of the railway scene, as work by the likes of Terence Cuneo and David Shepherd shows.

Some of the classes of engines were familiar to me. Brought up in Peterborough, I was lucky enough to see the gleaming Brunswick green Pacifics, designed by Sir Nigel Gresley and others, follow one after the other at the head of expresses to and from King’s Cross.

A favourite spotting place was at Marholm, a few miles north of the city, where trains were starting to decelerate from their dash down Stoke Bank before reaching the notorious 20mph ‘dog leg’ curve through the station.

It was on Stoke Bank that Mallard – a near-daily sight in my childhood, along with Flying Scotsman – achieved a never-to-be beaten world speed record for steam, 126mph, on July 3, 1938.

AH Peppercorn’s A1s and A2s (some of the latter by Edward Thompson) were high speed performers there, too.

Popular classes both, it was a matter of regret to enthusiasts that none of the 49-strong A1s was preserved (though the A2 Blue Peter was).

The matter was dealt with by the construction from scratch of the 50th A1, the hugely popular Tornado. Now there are plans to fill another gap on the preservation front by recreating Gresley’s giant 2-8-2, Cock o’ the North, which ran in the 1930s between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

The six members of its class, the P2s, were turned into more conventional Pacifics by Thompson in 1943, to overcome the problems caused by their long and rigid wheelbase. They became the first A2s.

Sugar Palm, the member of the class shown in my Ladybird book, was a new-build example, dating from 1947.

It was one of the A2s given a double blastpipe and chimney, the explanation for the daubing in my childish hand beside the picture.

Ever conducive to high-speed running, the refinement gave Mallard its ‘edge’.

Sugar Palm, though I didn’t know it as a boy, became one of few steam engines to top 100mph. This feat, too, was achieved on Stoke Bank.