Career
Whitehouse reached the rank of Squadron Leader in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, navigating Lancaster bombers. After his tour of duty, while navigating a transport plane he was shot down in the Mediterranean and survived for four days in a life raft before being rescued. His colleague, the pilot, died on the second day.
In 1951, Whitehouse and other railway enthusiasts formed Britain"s first railway preservation society at the Talyllyn narrow gauge slate railway in mid-Wales.
He became vice-president of the society and went on to help with the restoration of the Ffestiniog Railway in North Wales and the Dart Valley Railway in Devon. Whitehouse purchased Great Western Railway 4500 Class Small Prairie Tank Number.4555, and then bought Castle Class Number.7029 Clun Castle for its scrap price of £2,400.
Both were intended to be used on the Dart Valley Railway, but inlight of his campaign for main line steam preservation that included face-to-face meetings with Doctor Beeching, then chairman of British Rail, he stored them at Tyseley TMD. The residual elements of Tyseley depot became Birmingham Railway Museum, a 16-acre (65,000 m2) site equipped to preserve and maintain main line steam engines. There he led a team which restored the Learning Management System Jubilee Class class Number.5593 Kolhapur, which with inspiration from his collection of photographs artist Terence Cuneo painted her climbing the Lickey Incline.
By the 1970s Birmingham Railway Museum housed up to 15 locomotives, and now leases engines to preservation lines throughout Britain.
lieutenant is also the home of the Shakespeare Express on the BR main line from Birmingham to Stratford. Whitehouse was the author or co-author of 53 books on railways, and built up a collection of more than a quarter of a million photographs of British and foreign railways. Whitehouse co-presented the BBC1 Children"s programme Railway Roundabout with John Adams.