Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Steam Days

It may seem strange to describe the quiet suburban town of Feltham as a border point, but that is precisely what it was since it was the location, only six miles in from the boundary with the London Midland, through which impressive tonnages of goods from the other regions – the manufacturing north, the coal-producing Midlands, and East Anglia – was accepted, remarshalled and forwarded on to the dozens of small dormitory towns which formed the huge south-western quarter of Greater London. Estimating the population of this area at about three million people, this equates to 1.2 million households, shops and business premises, each of which demanded a thousand and one commodities, of which the most regular was probably coal, and indeed up to about 60 years ago a coal…

Shed code and number plates Sir: My friend Mike Yeoman asks questions about the fonts used on BR steam locomotive smokebox numberplates and shedplates (‘Tail Lamp’, April 2024). During the first year of my engineering apprenticeship at Eastleigh locomotive works in 1954, I spent a few weeks in the iron foundry. One of my tasks was using wooden numberplate patterns to create sand moulds for casting numberplates to be used on BR class ‘4’ 2-6-4T locomotives being built at Brighton Works. I now know that the lettering style officially used was Gill Sans (as described as ‘normal’ in the 61A and 46201 pictures in the April issue). The numbers on former GWR and BR Standard locomotive smokebox numberplates were 5in high, whereas for everything else they were supposed to be…

I don’t remember the date, although it must have been 9 October 1954, I recall reading the headlines in my father’s Daily Herald of the appalling accident at Harrow & Wealdstone on the previous day where, as a result of a series of coincidences and errors, the 8am Euston to Manchester and Liverpool service ploughed into the wreckage of a southbound express which had collided with a local train in the station. The result was 111 deaths and many more injuries. Since then I have been fascinated with the fate of one of the locomotives involved, No 46202 Princess Anne, the erstwhile ‘Turbomotive’ which was the train engine on the Manchester/Liverpool express and had only recently been rebuilt as a traditional reciprocating locomotive at Crewe Works and given the name…

On Thursday, 6 May 1954 I was lucky enough to be staying with my aunt just outside Bristol, which gave me the opportunity to travel to Gloucester, and then to board the branch line train to Ledbury, a cross-country link between the original South Wales main line and the route between Worcester and Hereford. The official distance noted in working timetables was 18 miles 79 chains between the two main line stations, with seven intermediate stops, albeit four of those were denoted as halts. It is exactly 70 years since I made this journey, so to refresh the grey matter a perusal at the line’s timetable has helped, which seemingly remained largely unchanged from the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. Due consideration of the daylight in certain of…

The term ‘strangers’ in this context will be for those locomotives that appeared on the lines of the Highland Railway (HR) that were not built, designed or ordered by the Highland Railway throughout the days of steam, and such ‘strangers’ did appear quite early in the days of the Highland Railway and its constituent companies; the Highland Railway came into existence on 1 February 1865 upon amalgamation of the Inverness & Aberdeen Junction (I&AJR) and Inverness & Perth Junction (I&PJR) railways, both of which had previously absorbed companies as part of their own growth. The independent Perth & Dunkeld Railway (P&DR) opened to both passenger and goods traffic between Dunkeld and a junction with the Scottish Midland Junction Railway (SMJR) at Stanley on Monday, 7 April 1856, and it was…

The Ipswich Land Transport Society ‘shed bash’ bus tours of the early to mid-1960s were legendary. Why? Because they were usually 24 hours packed with visits to engine sheds and motive power depots that were alive with steam locomotives in places that one might not normally visit – certainly not on such an intensive programme. They featured, in the words of Chris Hurricks, organiser of many of the trips, ‘Some very swift visits in some cases, and also some very short times between sheds’. While we were very good at recording numbers, times etc., I have to admit that, as my old spotting friend Graham Hardinge comments, ‘Most of us were only interested in writing down numbers, without actually absorbing what we were seeing, something I regret at times’. Hindsight…