There’s something magical – and maybe melancholic – about looking at photos of places that you’ve been to and which are now gone. The train tracks in this photo were part of the light railway that ran for many years in Kirkstall. I often  rode on the small steam train when I was a kid.  This was at the same time that I was first discovering the magic of Victoriana and Steampunk so it was the perfect way to fuel my imagination. Generally I liked to pretend I was Sherlock Holmes on his way to solve some mystery – though generally  I ended up solving the case of which ice cream to have.

Both the steam train and the railways tracks are gone now, so in a way this photo is a historical record as well as a personal one. It’s also one of the first pictures I took with a digital camera, just a few months before the tracks were consigned to the past.

Damian Mark Whittle