MGR Coal Trains

With previously unpublished photographs documenting merry-go-round coal trains on Britain's railways.

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As electricity became more widely used to power and light Britain’s towns and cities a number of municipal boroughs built their own power stations. In the early years these were inevitably fed by coal, of which the UK had a plentiful supply.

In the 1960s and early 1970s the government embarked on a programme of constructing new power stations. The majority of these were constructed with direct rail-connected on-site coal handling facilities and thus was born the Merry-Go-Round, or MGR, coal train.

The book features a UK panorama of a wide variety of coal trains on the move, with previously unpublished images from across many years and locations.