Ian Allan - ABC series of locomotive listing books
View current stock of ABC books by published Ian Allan or Ian Allan Ltd
I first encountered Ian Allan in 1961. I should make it clear that I never actually met the man himself, indeed at that time I doubt I realised there was an Ian Allan. No, my encounter was through his ABC series of locomotive listing books, the first of which was published in 1942.
As a result of losing his left leg at the age of 15 Ian Allan was exempt from military service. He joined the Southern Railway in 1939 for a salary of 15 shillings per week and left in 1945 when his salary was 2 pounds and 15 shillings per week. Amongst other duties he responded to individual requests about rolling stock and it was then he had the idea of collecting all the information in one place. This led to the production of the first of his small format books, priced at one shilling, listing the numbers, names, classes and locomotive shed allocations of Southern region locomotives. It was an instant success, the two thousand copies produced sold out rapidly. There then followed books for the remaining regions of the big four: Great Western, London Midland Scottish, and London North Eastern.
His first trade order was from W.H. Smith for just 12 copies! But it wasn't long before Wymans gave the young Ian Allan an order for 2000 copies of each of the early ABCs. The embryonic business progressed rapidly and when the ABC of London Transport was produced, the initial print run of 20,000 (not 2,000) sold out in a few days.
From 2000 copies of a one shilling booklet making £100, the Ian Allan group is now a £60 million pound turnover business, still with a large part of its business associated with publishing railway books and other transport subjects such as buses, lorries and aircraft but also including a travel business and a masonic publishing arm.
With Mollie Franklin (later his wife) he formed the Ian Allan Locospotters’ Club in 1944, which eventually grew to some 230,000 members. The Trains Illustrated magazine launched in 1946 later became Modern Railways which remains today THE magazine for the rail industry. He also produced Buses Illustrated and numerous other transport related magazines.
It is said that Ian Allan created the hobby of trainspotting. He didn't - people had been interested in trains, their numbers and names and performance since the railways began but he codified it. He “invented” the list to be ticked or underlined, gave all the boys and men (and it was a male hobby) a shared language as they compared their ABCs at the end of some cold platform having bought their two pennies platform ticket. The “Combined Volume” in hardback was the book to have - as its name implies, it had all of the big Four regions in one book and as you can see from the photo I still have my copy from 1962!
Ian Allan, born June 29 1922, died June 28 2015
Contributed by Cliff
(Published 10th Aug 2015)
