Book excerpt: Extensively illustrated with photos, a history of the many locomotives that became part of this British Railways region. This book investigates the vast number of locomotives that came to the London Midland Region in 1948 upon the nationalization of the four largest railway companies in the UK. It is a class-by-class survey with over two hundred illustrations, covering all the top link and freight classes and also looking at the smaller types of locomotive, operating on branch lines and doing more humble tasks. The author explores what happened to them, and also looks at those that eventually made their way into preservation.