MLI Plus
UK magazine
MLI Plus, formerly Modern Locomotives Illustrated and Locomotives Illustrated, was a British bi-monthly railway publication published by Ian Allan Publishing and later Key Publishing.
History
Locomotives Illustrated was founded in 1975 by Geoffrey Freeman Allen with the intention of creating a series of magazines, each issue dedicated to an individual class of British steam locomotive. By mid-2007, the magazine had covered almost every class of steam locomotive. Publication ceased in early-2008 after 170 issues.
Ian Allan Publishing, were keen to revamp it. Colin J Marsden, former editor of Railways Illustrated, was approached to take over the editorship and re-launch the magazine as Modern Locomotives Illustrated with a focus on modern diesel and electric locomotives and multiple units. The first edition was number 171 in May 2008.
It was included in the sale of Ian Allan Publishing's magazine business to Key Publishing in March 2012.
The publishers originally envisaged a run of 66 issues, in the end there were 100 issues. The magazine was published bi-monthly.
“MLI Plus” enters the record as uK magazine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Plus and magazine can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“MLI Plus” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Plus and magazine provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q18161916. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975, 2007, 2008 and 2012.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “MLI Plus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.