Oswald Stevens Nock was born 21 Jan. 1905 in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, UK, the son of a bank employee, Samuel James Nock, and a schoolteacher Rose Amy née Stevens.
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Oswald Stevens Nock (1905–1994), nicknamed Ossie, was a British railway signal engineer and senior manager at the Westinghouse company; he is well known for his prodigious output of popularist publications on railway subjects, including over 100 books, as well as a large number of more technical works on locomotive performance.
One of those who shared authorship of the series after his death was the Great Eastern Railway engineer Cecil J. Allen (1886-1973) who became sole author from 1911 until succeeded by O. S. Nock in 1958, when Cecil J. Allen moved his performance column to Trains Illustrated (later renamed Modern Railways), edited by his son, G. Freeman Allen.