Although railway enthusiasts have been aware of the Todmorden born engineer for some time - as a boy Robin was interested in the railways and bought railway books from about 1960 onwards, in which Ramsbottom's name occasionally cropped up - the scale of his achievements have perhaps not been as recognised more widely.

This should certainly change after the Todmorden author's book John Ramsbottom: A Victorian Engineering Giant is published this week, with a special open day on Saturday, August 16, at Todmorden Tourist Information Centre (11 am onwards) to mark its launch.

Having noticed Ramsbottom's name in his boyhood reading, although more concerned at the time with the locomotives of 1960 rather than those of a century previously, he began to focus on him more when joining the Todmorden Steam Centre Trust in the early 1990s.

But with Ramsbottom's last surviving daughter having died in the early 1970s, getting material which brought the man to life did not prove easy.

"I started doing my own research into him in 1994 and thought I had three years before the centenary of his death and what could I do by then, but the answer at that point was 'not a lot'! It was another couple of years before I had written the first version of a talk given to the town's Antiquarian Society and others," he said.

"A big problem was the lack of information about him. There were whole swathes of company minutes but 19th century company minutes are incredibly dry.

"What I wanted to do was find out as much as I could about the man, and if you look in the right quarters there is quite a lot of information about him - the real test was putting the man onto the background.

"We know the Ramsbottom books and papers were there in 1931 when his son John Goodfellow Ramsbottom died and tracing the family was not too bad.

"Ramsbottom is not a common name and the family were relatively straightforward to trace.

"But I came to a series of dead ends.