In the History section on this website we gave a brief account of how Barry Vokes and David Newberry met at Croydon College of Art, in 1966, and came to the conclusion that bringing the drawings back to life should certainly be filed on the ‘too hard (and too costly) to do pile; and that it has only been due to the advances in computer technology that has enabled Frederick’s drawings to appear pretty much as he originally drew them. Here is a brief description of the amount of retouching involved in order to resurrect them.

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Each pencil drawing was scanned, originally at 600dpi to try and capture as much detail as possible. That was the easy bit . . . then the (literally) hundreds of painstaking hours spent retouching began. The scanned file was opened in Photoshop, and the first attempt to find as much detail in the mid tones began. Because the amount of fading, (both paper and sketch) differed significantly throughout all the sketches, there was no automatic route to finding the most effective, and realistic rendition of the original, and each and every scan had to be judged by eye alone. If the paper had faded really badly, and Frederick had been quite gentle with his pencil, you may imagine that there was very little tonal range to initially work with!

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On a few occasions Frederick ran out of paper, so the buffers would be missing, or on a couple of sketches, the whole of the buffer section would be missing. A great deal of debate then ensued, should the prints appear as Frederick had originally drawn them, or, aesthetically, do we ‘borrow’ parts from similar locomotives and rebuild in Photoshop to produce a complete drawing. We do hope you’ll forgive us, but we chose the latter.

This project, all in all, will have taken in the region of 300 hours to reach the stage where the sketches are able to be printed. We hope you’ll agree, the effort involved has been so worthwhile.

​As shown on the Homepage, all of the steam locomotive prints display the locomotive number (plus name where appropriate), type; manufacturer; and the railway company it operated on . . . together with Frederick Cole’s signature and the date he drew it.