Company History

Many people have asked us how two Brits have now published more books on Canadian railways than any other company. The initials B.R.M.N.A. stand for The British Railway Modellers of North America.

The story is really quite simple. In 1977, we hosted the annual Calgary Area Model Railway Show and were struck by the absolute dearth of data available on the CP Rail mainline west of Calgary. At that time Don was working with Nick Morant, Canadian Pacific's Special Photographer, on the PanCanadian Annual Report and Nick kept giving him these wonderful black and white photographs of steam and diesels in the Rockies. Because of his contacts with the printing industry, Don took these photographs and with help from Nick, Bill, Floyd Yeats, a CP Rail engineman and others, prepared the captions for Canadian Pacific in the Rockies (Volume One) which was published on April 1, 1978.

Since then our publishing has, like Topsy, just growed! The company is very much a cottage industry but we have now published 73 soft covered reviews of Canada's railways, an airline and a transit system. Many copies have been sold through the bookstores and gift shops throughout Canada as well as directly by B.R.M.N.A. The first book has now sold over 17,500 copies and Canadian Pacific Airlines (published by Kishorn to differentiate from our railway books) has sold well over 22,000 copies. We are very proud of our record of never having received any government assistance or grants.

More on the Book that started it all

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