PICTURE postcards were a vital form of communication in the early 1900s - the best way to deliver urgent messages was through the postal system.

A hundred years on they provide historians with a snapshot of people and places of the time, the towns, villages, industry and transport of a bygone era.

Now, a postcard collector has compiled enough for three books in a 'Yesterday's Lancashire' series, focusing on trams, collieries and railway stations and including scenes from our own communities.

Picture postcards were first published in 1894, but it was to be a decade later before they really became popular - when the Post Office allowed a message to be written on the address side.

Photographic view cards became popular and the years up to 1914 proved to be their 'golden age', when millions of designs covering all kinds of subjects were published by a host of companies.

Railway stations were among the favourite locations - as the train became one of the most popular means of transport, be that for carrying passengers or goods, with coal and cotton at the heart of the system in Lancashire.

By the 1870s, the country's rail system was almost complete, with Lancashire having one of the greatest concentrations of lines, thanks to its status as an industrial powerhouse.

Railway companies brought their expertise to the county and while they set their sights on conveying freight, they did not forget the needs of passengers and built stations to accommodate them.

Stations usually offered a booking hall, waiting rooms, a goods office and sometimes a stationmaster's house.

There is a plethora of picture postcards dating from 1900 to 1920, which also feature trams at opening ceremonies, in street scenes or at the terminus.

These tramscapes would be converted into cards, which could be posted with a message to the family or a friend.

With much of the north west, including East Lancashire built on million years old coalfields, many postcards a century ago features miners, pit heads and collieries.

They also showed pit brow girls who worked in the industry, for according to the 1841 census, of the 118,000 coal miners in Britain, 2,350 were women - and around a third of these worked in Lancashire.

The following year, however, it became illegal to employ boys under the age of 10 and all girls and women underground, so instead, many of them got jobs at the pit top, sorting out the different sizes of coal.

* Yesterday's Lancashire, compiled by Norman Ellis into three books, is produced by Reflections of a Bygone Age.

Each sells for £3.95 and are available at local bookshops, from www.postcardcollecting.co.uk or by telephone 0115 937 4079.