Some railway paintings and their artists 5. A Roundhouse Scene featuring two 2-10-0s - Mike Jeffries

Mike Jeffries’s roundhouse is a typical 1960s view around the turntable, which also includes ex-LNER V2 and B1 locomotives - and could well, therefore, be showing York or Leeds Holbeck, for example. The overall grey atmosphere and the intermittent shafts of daylight bring back strong memories of such places, which were treasure troves of potential cops for young spotters like me.

Mike Jeffries is today best known for his paintings of road transport vehicles, but much of his earlier work was of the 1960s steam railway. He was born on the 26th April 1939. A professional artist, he now specialises in road and rail transport in authentic settings of the mid-20th century. Born in Plymouth, Mike attended Central Grammar school, leaving in 1955 with five GCEs, including art, but he had for years been winning a half-a-crown (12p) in the weekly Daily Express art competition which supplemented his income from his paper round.

Bored with a life at a work bench, and much to the despair of his parents, he joined British Railways as a locomotive fireman at Saltley shed, where he worked on all types of steam engines from 0-6-0 tanks to the mighty 9F 2-10-0s, until called up for National Service at the end of 1958.

Mike counts his time on the railway as one of the happiest of his life, where the dirty, arduous and sometimes dangerous but always exciting life on the footplate gave him a working knowledge of the railway and the steam locomotive, which stood him in good stead as a railway artist later on. At an exhibition in London in the eighties, his work was spotted by art buyers from Eversheds, at that time a leading trade calendar producing company. The success of the road transport calendar was immediate and seeing old vehicles in their proper settings gave him more scope to develop his approach. As he says on his website, this is when his career finally took off.

Mike was introduced to vehicle historian Peter Love who was about to launch a new magazine aimed at the growing vintage commercial vehicle market. His work now started to appear on the covers and the centre spreads of the new magazine. Print sales and commissions followed, including the use of his images on greetings and postcards. Mike has become one of the country’s leading transport artists. He aims to show the past as he remembers it, in his words “not through rose-coloured spectacles but as it really was, warts and all.”