EMU at Colchester on New Year's Day, 1979.

Unidentified Brush Type 2 leaving Norwich Thorpe, 19 May 1984.

31317 leaves Chelmsford with an up service in the late-1970s. Just look at those cars in the car park of the College of Further Eduction - 'Life on Mars'!

37050 outside Colchester MPD in February, 1977, photographed from the long 'up' platform - always a cold, windswept place to watch trains!

47337 shunting a train of seacows at Colchetsr in February, 1977, when Brush Type 4s were almost too common to waste precious film on!

What's your favourite colour? Many deplored the tide of corporate 'rail blue' that flooded BR from the late-1960s but this shot of 08228 and 08258 at Colchester depot in February 1977 shows how drab the old green livery could look with a few years of grime.

A Stratford '47 with the depot's trademark silver roof restarts its Liverpool St-bound train and will shortly plunge into the darkness of Ipswich Tunnel. Taken in the late 1970s, before electrification reached the Suffolk county town.

One of the LNER-designed class 306 EMUs that once provided the backbone of GE suburban services from Liverpool St to Shenfield, seen here outside the London terminus in the late 1970s. The units never saw blue-grey livery. One set has been preserved in green livery and is kept at Ilford depot.

On a warm and sunny Saturday in July, 1976, a class 104 BRC&W DMU ticks over at Southminster, terminus of the sleepy rural branch line from Wickford in Essex. I spent countless hours on this line in my youth, enjoying cab rides and signal box visits. Today, the line is an electrified commuter route with extended platforms and frequent services, some direct to London Liverpol Street. But I shall never return, preferring to remember the line as I knew and loved it.

A pair of BRC&W DMUs crossing at Fambridge, half-way along the Wickford to Southminster branch. These units had a very distinctive gearbox whine, and superb forward views from the leading passenger saloons.

A rather muddy scan of an old shot of Sudbury. The site has since been redeveloped and a new station with a 'bus shelter' erected behind and to the right of the camera.

A Cravens DMU at Sudbury in Essex. Until the mid-1960s, the line continued via Long Melford and Haverhill to Cambridge, with branches to Bury St Edmunds and Audley End.