It’s a change from the usual landscapes featured here, but I’m very pleased to have been shortlisted in the Travel category of the Amateur Photographer of the Year competition.

This is an image taken at Oxenhope on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway on a December visit ‘down south’, from where we now live on Skye, to Yorkshire where we previously lived. Leaky steam heating pipes linking the carriages created the ‘atmosphere’, with a family boarding the train providing a focal point.

I remember thinking that the scene looked ‘just right’. It created a feeling in me that I hope is conveyed in the photograph.

Perhaps slightly ironically, the steam engine itself is barely noticeable, but it is there providing a plume of steam and smoke outlining part of the old (Victorian?) lamp post, which itself may not be the ‘star’ but is an important part of the image’s ‘supporting cast’.