Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i Steam World

June 11 1965 January 3 1966 March 6 1966…

One does not need to look far into the story of Britain's railway system to realise that few railway schemes came to fruition as originally intended. If they did, then they were usually eye-wateringly over budget. It's still true today. High-Speed 2 (HS2) which is under construction, will neither start nor finish at the original planned locations, and it's over budget, too! So, it will be no surprise that the Manchester & Milford Railway, planned to link the manufacturing area around Manchester with a deepwater port at Milford Haven, never reached either place. Joining the GWR at Carmarthen, and switching its northern aspirations from Manchester to Aberystwyth, it became known to those with an interest in bucolic GWR backwaters, as the Carmarthen-Aberystwyth line, with more than two dozen minor stations…

The Great Western Railway agreed to the War Office's request that it prepare 100 ‘Dean Goods’ 0-6-0s for service in France at a meeting on September 12 1939, fewer than two weeks after war was declared. The agreement was on the proviso that the LMS supply 40 ‘2F’ 0-6-0s and the LNER supply 40 ‘J25’ 0-6-0s as replacements. That's about as far as the story goes so it's particularly fascinating, thanks to a collection of letters and memos that are now in the National Collection, to learn of the internal dialogue within the LNER and between it and the GWR about how the ‘J25s’ were prepared for their move down south. We start with an internal LNER memo, dated September 14 1939: Condemned engines stored for emergency use Of the…

Like many boys in the 1950s, my interest in trains started with collecting numbers, mainly at Stratford. ‘Britannias or ‘B1s’ were the highlights but I saw many ‘L1’ 2-6-4Ts hauling empty coaches between London Liverpool Street and Channelsea Carriage Sidings. My interest widened when I bought the Ian Allan Abc British Railways Coaches for 1958. As it's actually the coaches that we ride in, we have a more intimate relationship with them than with locomotives, unless we’re lucky enough to be invited onto the footplate! Apart from London Underground, the only trains that I had been on in the 1950s consisted of compartments with a side corridor (Paddington to Reading), or without corridors. I rode on these between Stratford Low Level and North Woolwich, on day trips from Upton Park…

If you were to describe all the duties that the Churchward ‘43XXs’ worked from all the sheds they were allocated to, you’d soon end up with a tome as thick as… well, insert the title of your favourite thick book here! Instead, I thought it best to concentrate on just one shed and chose Taunton, partly because it's close to where I now live but also because it includes two classic GWR routes. First is the coastal branch to Minehead, which is now today's West Somerset Railway. The other is that much-missed line across Exmoor to Barnstaple, which took the ‘43XXs’ on to Ilfracombe, on the North Devon coast. The class became regular workers on the Barnstaple-Taunton line during the late 1920s and became more common in the 1930s. At…

Varsity Line - travel by degrees Chris Leigh's Oxford-Cambridge line article in SW461 stirred a memory of my only railway journey from Cambridge to Oxford in the winter of 1965. I’d joined the RAF in November 1964, and, after square-bashing, I was parked at RAF Waterbeach for a few weeks, pending the assembly of my Trade Training course at RAF Hereford. When my day to travel arrived, I packed up all my kit, and, furnished with a rail travel warrant, headed on foot towards Waterbeach station for the six miles, or so into Cambridge. As I trudged along, looking more like a pack-mule than an Airman, a tanker-driver pulled up and asked if I would like a lift into Cambridge? Yes, I would, so I hopped aboard, and was dropped…

RAILWAYS AROUND BOURNEMOUTH…

The village of Killamarsh lies next to the river Rother in the top, northeastern corner of Derbyshire. The Rother occasionally floods and so much of the village is built on the surrounding hills. The district is rich in coal, thus its mining and transport is the raison d’etre for six of the seven lines which form a tangle in the Rother's flood plain between Killamarsh and Beighton, the next village to the north. To the west of this tangle lies Sheffield, just over the border in South Yorkshire. Further north is Rotherham, a smaller city, but equally proficient in the manufacture of steel. Railways in the Rother Valley were preceded by the Chesterfield Canal, which ran northwards from Chesterfield on the east side of the Rother Valley. At Killamarsh, it…

Atotal of 342 ‘43XXs’ were built between 1911 and 1932 but the class was only complete for four years. The first withdrawals took place in 1936 and, in the space of three years, 100 had been condemned. However, of those 100 engines, 80 would be rebuilt as ‘Grange’ 4-6-0s and 20 as ‘Manors’. These were more paper rebuilds than, say, the ‘Stars’ that were rebuilt as ‘Castles’ in 1937. The 2-6-0s mainly donated wheels and motion to the new 4-6-0s. The GWR had planned to convert all of the ‘Moguls’ but the Second World War put an end to that plan.…

WIN A PRIZE WORTH £70! This month we will be giving away a special prize worth £70! A copy of Steam Photographer by Gavin Morrison along with a copy of An Illustrated History of Her Majeysty's Railway Inspectorate from 1840 by Ian Prosser & David Keay to the sender of the first correct answer opened on December 19, 2025. Answers (with your name and address) to SW462 Crossword, Steam World,4 Milnyard Square, Orton Southgate, Peterborough PE2 6GX. Photocopies welcome, but please do not enclose correspondence. Crossword compiled by Alan Frost. Clues Across 1 Collett ‘Castle’ numbered 5031 and seaside resort (6) 7 Reliable aim of ER ‘A2/3’ No. 60512 (6) 8 Largely rebuilt ‘Hall’, No. 4925, in Oxfordshire (7) 10 See 19 Down 11 Replenishing tank water supply, before reason to see dentist? (7) 13…