WHEN David Husband was at school, his favourite pastime was to squeeze through a fence into a busy ironworks and watch steam locomotives chugging around pulling long lines of wagons.

"I never tired of looking at those wonderful engines and dodging in among them, I just loved them," he said as he recalled his underage visits to the smoky site at Skinningrove, east Cleveland.

His fondness for the locos never left him and now, 50 years later, he has fulfilled a dream by producing a 146-page paperback book about them to keep their memory alive.

He followed in the footsteps of his father, Eddie Husband, and worked in the yard for several years, some of the happiest of his life.

Mr Husband, who lives in Barnard Castle, County Durham, records that there were 36 steam engines which clattered around 35 miles of criss-crossing tracks in the widespread works.

Most of them had names as well as numbers; Mary, Margaret, Lizzie, Rakie, Midge, Minnie and all the others were cared for and looked on as colleagues, rather than pieces of machinery.

"Minnie was probably the best loved and most affectionately remembered locomotive to ever steam on Skinningrove metals," he writes.

He includes a photograph of retired drivers bidding farewell to Minnie - "an old workmate, an engine, who was to some degree held in great respect and fond esteem by all who drove her."

Dear old Minnie was No 385, built in Bristol in 1878. She arrived at Skinningrove in 1883 and gave more than 80 years of service there.

Mr Husband mourns the fact that the steam workhorses were retired and turned into scrap in 1964, to be replaced by cleaner but much less romantic diesel engines.

He includes many photographs of the locos, some taken with his old Box Brownie, and also gives a detailed history of the company, which was founded in 1880.

The site employed more than 2,000 people in its busiest spell, but there is a far smaller workforce now.

He dedicates the book to his father who died two years ago, and has decided that all profits will go to the Tom Leonard Mining Museum, at Skinningrove. It is on sale there and in bookshops at £12.99.

The book, The Steam Locomotive Era of the Skinningrove Iron Company, is published by Peter Tuffs, of 48 Mackie Drive, Guisborough.