IF it's got wheels or if it floats Paul Heaton's your man.

Especially the wheels. He's written about merchant shipping with some success, but it's the seemingly unending stream of books about lorries and buses that have them queuing outside the book stores.

"Funnily enough at least half the people who buy my books are women, who you wouldn't expect to be all that interested in buses and trucks, which of course they are not. But they are the ones who do the Christmas shopping.

"And nothing pleases your average bloke more than a book about transport."

Paul Heaton is 60, a burly figure with a broad local accent carrying the unmistakeable stamp of authority honed during his years as a Monmouthshire motorcycle policeman.

His three latest offerings - Road Transport: Wales and Borders, Road Transport: Monmouthshire and Road Transport: The Read Story bring to 27 the total of books bearing his imprint, and there are more on the way. The prose is informative and stripped of waffle.

If Heaton tells you that such-and-such a company bought its first diesel lorry in such-and-such a year and operated it for so long before selling it to so-and-so, then that's the true gen. When it comes to Gwent transport this is a man who knows whereof he speaks.

"In 15 years as a motorcycle policeman escorting loads and chatting to the drivers - and occasionally having to book them - you get to know an awful lot about the drivers, their world and their vehicles," he says.

"We were all in the same job in a way, bound up with the community of the highways. Just like an ordinary policeman might have his beat, so my patch was a mobile one. When I started on the motorcycles in 1963 there was no dual carriageway in Gwent with lorries flashing by at great speed giving you no chance to talk to the drivers.

"It was a more leisurely time. Drivers would pull over for a break, or perhaps they'd break down or maybe be waiting for an escort. There was time for a young policeman to listen and to find out about their world.

"In those days it could take two days to go to London and back. Now they can be there and back in the same day. In some of the wagons they had to try their best to get up to the speed limit, never mind breaking it.

"Those days are gone but the nostalgia lingers."

Perhaps it was the relative freedom of the road that makes middle-aged men hark back to those days; a time before the breathalyser and the tachograph, when health and safety was an advisory matter only and a freebooting, almost gypsy spirit prevailed.

And there were the lorries, too. Not only the Bedfords and Fords but the Leylands and Albions, Seddons and Commers that have long since driven off into oblivion. Fortunately for modern-day enthusiasts vehicle operators tend to be nostalgic about their wagons as well, which means that an excellent photographic record exists.

In Heaton's books it's not only the lorries and buses (and diggers and steam traction engines) but the streets and buildings, many of them long gone or altered, that are a nostalgic backdrop. And of course, there are the characters.

"And they were characters, too. They say every generation throws up its characters but these men had a special way with them. I'm not sure we'll see their likes again."

The Read dynasty that thrives just over the Gloucestershire border is one such family. From the First World War on they have operated their vehicles, first traction engines and steam rollers and now mighty diesels, each vehicle as it arrives from the factory photographed with its driver by its side. The men have a jaunty, almost piratical look that sets them apart. Truly, they were the aristocracy of the highway.

As an author, Paul Heaton is as diligent as any police detective hot on the scent of a wrongdoer.

"The books are packed with pictures which are the real selling-point, and you have to know where the pictures are. I decide on a subject, start at the beginning of the book and work my way through.

"The facts have to be accurate. I know a lot of things for myself but there are still old hands around who will help me fill in the gaps," Paul Heaton says.

"Accuracy, though, has to be the watchword. I'm writing for a very knowledgeable group of enthusiasts."

Paul Heaton, Pontypool-born but now living near Abergavenny, was also for a time a merchant seaman, and he writes about the sea with a passion. It is, though, for the road transport books that he is known. "I expect I shall write about road transport in the Valleys or in South-East Wales generally in my next books," he forecasts.

"There's still plenty to say. "Like road transport itself, the books just keep rolling on."

* Road Transport: The Read Story, Road Transport: Monmouthshire and Road Transport: Wales and Borders at £25 each are published by Paul Heaton and available from bookshops in Gwent.