Indholdsfortegnelse for Vol 35 No 7 - July 2021 i Backtrack

A DERAILMENT WITHOUT APPARENT CAUSE BY ALISTAIR F. NISBET (George R. Grigs/Rail Archive Stephenson) Sometimes a railway accident occurs for no apparent reason and in spite of all the technology available to the investigators of the time the cause remains a mystery. Such a one was that which occurred at Buddon on the Dundee & Arbroath Joint (D&AJ) line in 1924. Her Majesty’s Railway Inspectorate (HMRI) has been, right from the very earliest days, adept at investigating and determining the cause of all kinds of railway accidents although at first it had no statutory duty to do so; nevertheless the inspectors were sufficiently concerned for the safety of the travelling public that they took it upon themselves to carry out investigations and to provide reports on their activities to the…

GOING ROUND THE ‘HALLS’ The Great Western Railway’s ‘Hall’ Class was the start of the mixed traffic, general purpose 4-6-0 genre which the LMS and LNER went on to adopt in large quantities. The ‘Halls’ had thei r origin in C. B. Collett’s rebuilding of a ‘Saint’ 4-6-0 with 6ft driving wheels in 1924 – and the rest is history, with construction of these ‘do almost anything’ locomotives lasting from 1928 to 1950 – a final total of 330 can’t be wrong! We welcome back DEREK PENNEY with these photographs of an outstanding design.…

STRABANE A LOST RAILWAY CENTRE KILLED BY PARTITION AND RELIGION PART TWO BY JIM McBRIDE (John Langford c/o Donegal Railway Heritage Centre) The end of the GNRB and its effects 1955 to 1959 The future of the Great Northern Railway Board appeared uncertain in 1955 and the board of the new company embarked on a policy of modernization, to reduce operating costs and to avoid major closures across the GNRB network. In 1954 the GNRB, after months of delays, had been given funding to purchase another 24 new diesel railcars which were to be partially built by BUT Ltd. in England and assembled at the Dundalk works of the GNRB. Due to a steel shortage and other problems, the first of these new BUT railcars did not enter service until…

GONE TO GLOUCESTER Photographs from the JOHN EDGINGTON COLLECTION FROM THE PENDRAGON ARCHIVES…

DARK TIMES AT LIME STREET Liverpool Lime Street station’s curved, two-span roof is widely admired and the lighting effects of night-time give a different aspect to it. STEWART JOLLY took these ‘after dark’ photographs.…

MAKING TRACKS BRITISH TRANS PORT FILMS AND THE HISTORY OF BRITISH RAILW AYS 1950-1983 BY IAIN KITT On a Saturday night in 1952 a young couple has gone to the cinema to see The Gift Horse, a new wartime drama starring Trevor Howard. As usual, the feature is accompanied by a short. As the lights go down and the film starts, a patrician voice intones “Spring in England, West Cornwall to be exact. Broccoli is the crop of the moment, and there is a rush for it.” For the next 30 minutes the couple is entertained by a film outlining the problems that transporting the broccoli harvest causes the nation’s railways. The film was Train Time, one of the early films produced by British Transport Films (BTF), established in 1950…

HELLIFIELD RURAL BACKWATER TO MAJOR RAILWAY JUNCTION BY JEFFREY WELLS (John Alsop Collection) In his book The Railway in Town and Country 1830–1914, Jack Simmons refers in Chapter 6 to the concept of the ‘railway village’. He cites Didcot, Craven Arms, Bletchley, Tebay and Hellifield as typical examples, the last-named hailed by Simmons “as a new railway town when it became a junction of the Midland’s line to Carlisle with the Lancashire and Yorkshire’s from Blackburn, but it never grew to more than a village”. [my italics] A mid-nineteenth century description of Hellifield appears in Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of England, Vol.2, published in 1848: “Hellifield – a township in the Parish of Long Preston, union of Settle, West Riding of Yorkshire, six miles SSE from Settle; containing 273 inhabitants.”…

POSTCARDS FROM ‘T’OWD RATTY’ DESCRIBED BY DAVID MOSLEY The original Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway was England’s first narrow gauge line. ‘T’owd Ratty’, as it was affectionately nicknamed, was a seven-mile-long, 3ft gauge line intended to serve iron ore mines around the village of Boot and making a connection with the Furness Railway main line at the coastal village of Ravenglass The line opened for goods in 1875 and passengers were carried from1876 but the initial hope for, and prosperity of, the mines was shortlived. The line struggled on from crisis to crisis in the hands of the Receiver, goods and passengers were carried up and down the Valley and at holiday times the line found itself busy with the new-fangled tourists. An attempt at a major revival was made in…

SUMMER SATURDAYS TO THE COAST PART ONE Problems with overseas travel due to the pandemic have led to an upsurge in British holidaymaking. Today most travel by car but in the 1950s the train was still the favoured form of transport. PHILIP BENHAM sets the scene. (John Spencer Gilks/Colour-Rail.com BRW1160) ‘Let’s go to the Seaside’ The British summer holiday was very much a creation of the railways. Until the mid- 1800s only the upper classes could entertain the idea of a holiday. For such, escaping from the heat and stench of city life to the family seat in the country was normal, while for the young aristocrat, ‘The Grand Tour’ of Europe was all but obligatory. Arrival of the railways made it possible to reach much of the country within…

TRAGEDY, TRESPASS AND TRIVIA ON THE TANFIELD BRANCH, NORTH EASTERN RAILWAY Happenings on a Co. Durham industrial railway highlighted by ROB LANGHAM (Beamish Museum) The Tanfield Railway, running passenger trains as a preserved railway on the trackbed of the Tanfield Waggonway (as well as using the 1854 Marley Hill engine shed and yard of the Pontop & Jarrow Railway) since 1977, has a justifiable claim to be the oldest railway in the world. The history of the original Tanfield Waggonway using horse-drawn wagons on wooden rails has been extremely well documented elsewhere, and the impressive scale of the development on the line in the eighteenth century has been well preserved. The wooden rails lasted until 1837 when the line was taken over by the Brandling Railway, which took three years…

‘GO WEST – LIFE IS PEACEFUL THERE’ Between 1927 and 1929 the Southern Railway converted ten surplus ex-London, Brighton & South Coast Railway E1 Class 0-6-0Ts into 0-6-2 radial tanks, with enlarged bunkers and extra water capacity, to be rusticated to the West Country for use on local passenger and goods work. These became classified E1/R. At first Barnstaple Junction had the biggest allocation, notably working on the lightly constructed line to Torrington and Halwill, but in early British Railways days the new London Midland-designed 2-6-2Ts supplanted them and later one of their best-known duties was banking heavy trains on the 1 in 37 incline between Exeter St. David’s and Central stations. The end for the E1/R Class came in 1959. (Trevor Owen/Colour-Rail.com 392326) (Colour-Rail.com BRS1539) (Colour-Rail.com BRS967) (Colour-Rail.com BRS618)…

THE MAIL – SECOND DELIVERY Following our feature in the February issue, GAVIN MORRISON returns with another selection of Postal Specials.…

THE LNER PHOENIX – No.2000 Introduced by DAVID P. WILLIAMS In the dark days of World War II some strangely conflicting decisions came from the London & North Eastern Railway higher echelons at Doncaster Works. Following the outbreak of war in 1939, life continued as normal for a time at the ‘Plant’ with main line express locomotives being turned out in their usual green or garter blue livery, but within two years the need to pare costs to a minimum made such standards impossible to maintain. Thus it was that from November 1941 the supplies of green and blue paint were put into store and all overhauled locomotives, large and small, left the ‘Plant’ in plain unlined black livery with the letters ‘LNER’ displayed on their tanks or tenders. In…