A TREAT for train buffs with a glimpse back to the twilight years of the Steam Age in Worcester - courtesy of Chris Wilkinson.

His love of the giant puffing locos began as a schoolboy train spotter, and he was then able to indulge his passion for steam engines in the best possible "hands-on" way by spending his youth working on the railways during the early 1960s.

Chris looks back with great nostalgia on his four teenage years employed in the huge loco sheds at Shrub Hill, where he lavished loving care on a wide variety of steam engines, cleaning, polishing, firing up and shunting them.

From the age of 12, he travelled all over the country train spotting and, on leaving Christopher Whitehead Boys School in 1962, got a job on the railways at Worcester, starting as a 15 year-old messenger boy.

However, Chris soon graduated to being a cleaner in the loco sheds as part of the 15-strong team of charge-hand cleaner Fred Jones. It meant helping look after the 30 to 40 steam engines based at Shrub Hill, getting the ashes out of the pits, smoke boxes and fires of the locos and generally caring for their upkeep and appearance. He rose through the cleaning ranks to become a firemen and tackled many tasks, including shunting a lot of locos around the Shrub Hill sidings and sheds and making sure they were "coaled up" and watered.

He was fireman on the foot-plate of many a freight train but had only one passenger train run in his comparatively short railway career.

It was also Chris's privilege to help look after some of the prestigious Castle class locos which ran on the London-Worcester-Hereford route in their final years. A proud possession is a photograph of himself standing on the last steam loco built by British Railways - the Evening Star.

At weekends too, he would occasionally take groups of train spotters around the "popular" Worcester loco sheds.

However, Chris says the mid-1960s and the arrival of diesel trains spelt the death knell of the Steam Age, and he and colleagues in the loco sheds at Shrub Hill saw a dramatic drop in their workload. In fact, so much so that in 1966 - the year the last scheduled steam train ran from Worcester - he opted for redundancy and got the princely sum of £60!

Chris doesn't believe it's with rose tinted glasses that he fondly remembers his railway years as being "the good old days.

"I loved steam engines and there was nothing quite like working on them."

He keeps in touch with a few of his former railway colleagues and believes that charge-hand cleaner Fred Jones died only two or three years ago, having lived into his 90s.

But perhaps the most significant legacy from Chris's railway years is his bumper photo album packed with a comprehensive collection of "snaps" he took between 1962 and 1966.

They feature numerous steam locos, primarily at Worcester, and form a poignant and important pictorial archive of the last days of steam in the Faithful City.

From the railways, Chris Wilkinson went into the building trade and then spent several years at Metal Castings before taking up his present role as a self-employed gardener. His home is in Tollhouse Drive, St John's, Worcester.