Colin Alexander looks at the interwar period, a high-water mark in industrial design as the benefits of streamlining were realised.

Colin Alexander has been a railway enthusiast for more than 30 years and volunteered on preserved Deltic locomotives. He was born in Northumberland, and has a life-long passion for local and transport history, sparked by his mother's copy of The King's England--Northumberland. Appreciative of the county's unique place geographically and historically, he has explored most of its once-inhabited hilltops and its medieval castles, and walked the length of its greatest defensive monument--Hadrian's Wall. He lives in Whitley Bay.