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About Island Publishing

Home page of island-publishing, the web-site of John New, transport historian/researcher, author, photographer, and also model maker. John has had several  non-fiction and fiction stories published.

Located on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, Island Publishing was created in 1987 to undertake small scale-work in general publishing, pre-press work for catalogues, exhibition guides, menus etc…, plus website pages for small businesses. Our activities have evolved and we no longer quote for this type of work; however, currently, we continue to support the site for the York Model Railway Show and support and sponsor the Waggonway Research Circle.

Island Publishing – current projects

In the fiction arena John has recently posted several short fan-fic stories on the Archive of Our Own (Ao3) platform under the username 5972OltonHall and this activity is on-going. In addition, several drafts for further children’s books and railway related topics are available for publication. As a keen photographer John also has a series of talk and film shows available for showing.

In the non-fiction arena John is currently continuing his research into the life and times of Huntingdon Beaumont together with additional research into horse railways and development of the early steam locomotive. In addition John was Editor of the SLS Journal (2018-2021) and until August 2022 is continuing to act as PRO for The Stephenson Locomotive Society. He is also active with his model making activities and interests.

In November 2008 John was finally able to exchange the wage-slave rat race to working as a full-time Researcher/ Historian. John successfully completed a BA in Communication and Media at Bournemouth University in 2016. As part of this course a journalism blog was added which evolved to the current edition; however, the old section remains live, but is currently dormant for new posts (Link is below).

Former versions of the site

In line with my blog post on the Transient internet (8th January 2016) it is appropriate to add links to archived copies of earlier versions of this site. This includes links for the Waggonway Research Circle as the material, formerly available separately, is being incorporated within this main site during 2017. The reason is that the intended idea of establishing the WRC with an independent dot-org URL has been dropped as uneconomic. The links are all to the excellent Internet Archive Wayback Machine site.

To reference any pages from this site – location = Portland, Dorset, UK.

Last updated 27 March 2022.