He firmly believed this was a way of making railway photography accessible to a far wider audience, although it would be many years before his approach was fully vindicated. In the early 1960s Gifford joined the publishing house of Ian Allan as art editor and began slipping the occasional railway photograph into the magazines he designed. He took many of his most famous shots – including some stunning images of Bulleid pacifics at speed, captured from trains on adjacent lines – during the course of his daily commute; thirty years later, one of these images would be featured on a Royal Mail stamp. At Shepperton he restyled many familiar publications, such as the Combined Volume (the Winter 1962-3 edition is now a design classic, with its yellow cover featuring a green 4-CEP emu) and the expanding Ian Allan magazine stable. He was instrumental in reshaping and reinvigorating the austerely academic Railway World and helping transform the enthusiast-focused Trains Illustrated into Modern Railways, a quality large-format monthly for transport professionals that was driven by a strong visual dynamic. In a branch of publishing that was increasingly falling prey to nostalgia, Gifford's imaginative photographs of the current scene brought excitement and a breath of fresh air – the 'new' Euston was a particular favourite in Modern Railways. Many Ian Allan pictorial albums from this period benefited from his visual flair and creative design. There were even some elaborately contrived trompe l'oeil covers for Model Railway Constructor, including a speeding Trix 'Warship' and a 00 gauge BR Standard Class 9F seemingly emitting an enormous plume of smoke. Away from the Ian Allan design studio, Gifford continued to build a photographic record of every region of British Railways using a Rolleiflex medium-format twin-lens reflex camera. He was also busily photographing the full length of the River Thames with the idea of one day making a book out of it. His work was predominantly black and white and for 35mm colour work he used cheaper, less sophisticated cameras such as the Russian-made Fed; in later years a Pentax SLR joined the faithful Rolleiflex TLR. All this creativity came together with the publication in 1965 of Decline of Steam. Its effect on British railway photography was nothing short of cataclysmic – certainly to an audience that, for the most part, had never seen the work of Jean-Michel Hartmann. In place of endless front three-quarter views (with the sun always coming over the photographer's shoulder and the locomotive number clearly visible) here were misty industrial landscapes, sweating railway workers, rainswept nocturnal platforms, sulphurous engine sheds.