About Video 125
Phone: 01344 628565
Video 125 is a specialist independent video production and distribution company based in Berkshire, England. We produce and sell DVDs, and downloadable videos about trains and railways from our online store.
History of the company
Television cameraman and director Peter Middleton formed Video 125 in 1984.
Having started a long and successful career in ITV at an exceptionally young age (just 18 years), Peter learned the art of television production at the highest level. Peter worked on classic TV shows as diverse as Morecambe and Wise and Upstairs Downstairs, from Tommy Cooper and Des O'Connor shows to Rainbow and Magpie and from Bless this House to News at Ten.
Back in the 1980s and even to this day, whenever a railway programme was shown on TV it always seemed to talk down to the enthusiast. As often as not a camera would show the view from the driver's cab but only for a precious few seconds. As a life-long rail enthusiast, Peter wanted to see more - much more. Domestic video was in its infancy but it gave the opportunity to view specialist content in one's own home for the first time.
The Driver's eye view format was born and in April 1984, Peter took a week's leave from ITV to film the Settle and Carlisle line. Living in Shepperton, the home of Ian Allan Ltd, he immediately offered his services to this fully established company. Sadly, and somewhat short-sightedly, they declined, so Peter formed his own business calling it Video 125 after the country's most successful train.
Following the success of this first production, made with semi professional equipment that Peter owned to fulfill a horse racing contract for Racetech , the following year he produced another Driver's eye view, this time made to full broadcast quality and with a much higher budget - Steam to Mallaig.
In 1988, with Video 125 going from strength to strength, Peter quit his full time broadcasting career to concentrate on the video publishing business. By 1990, Video 125 moved out of the Producer's home into modern commercial premises in Sunninghill, Ascot. Here a broadcast quality production facility was established. VHS videocassette duplication was also brought under the same roof in a successful attempt to improve the quality and reliability of the dominant format at that time.
DVDs then took over and once again Video 125 was able to obtain the replication from dedicated factories because the disc format was much more robust than cassette.
In 2008 Video 125 invested over £50,000 upgrading cameras and editing facilities to High Definition. From May of that year, starting with Belfast to Londonderry, all filming has been in HD, archived for the future but published in standard definition on DVD. Since 2009 we began publishing new productions on Blu-ray disc, the domestic HD format producing a full 1080 lines resolution. By 2016 our customers had taken to the format and by 2020 we were selling 1 Blu-ray disc for every 2 DVDs sold. With the players forever coming down in price and TV screens getting larger, we expected Blu-ray sales to continue increasing but this was not the case and in 2025 the decision was taken to no longer produce Blu-ray discs but concentrate on HD downloads which has become our customers' preferred platform.
DVDs remain our best seller and are replicated in quantity from glass masters and are therefore of full industry-standard specification compatible with all DVD and Blu-ray players.
As and when stocks of older DVD titles run out, the productions will still be available to download.
We have been encouraged by the 90% Trustpilot 5 star rating that our customers constantly award us. Customer service and satisfaction are what we strive to achieve. We hope that Video 125 will remain number one for specialist railway programming for many years to come but at the end of the day we owe all our success to you, our customers. A big thank you to all of you from all of us at Video 125.