Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i Steam Days

Variety is the spice of life, and the magazine in your hands has plenty of that, authors Colin Boocock, Jim Lindsay, Leonard Rogers, Roger Griffiths and Chris Watford taking us on a broad tour, not just of the nation but also of subject matter: there are travels on the 3ft gauge County Donegal system on the Irish border; a delve into the mind of the Great Western Railway when it named the Halls, and a few surprising twists along that journey; an overview of the family of LNER Pacifics once the work was beginning to dry up; a collection of rare photographs inspiring ‘visits’ to little known engine sheds; and then there is a chance to appreciate a long lost railway that is returning, and seemingly, quite soon. It will…

On Saturday, June 23, 1962, our family visited York, a birthday treat for my younger brother and I, whose birthdays fell five days later and five days earlier, respectively. For this nine-year-old trainspotter who’d never been anywhere on the railway other than around my native Hull, it was special… the drawback being that I only got short spells on York station, just after our arrival in the morning, and as we were about to go home on the train again! Otherwise, the day was spent going to visitor attractions, as they’re now called. Personally, I would have spent all day trainspotting, but other family members did not share my passion! We arrived on the usual diesel multiple unit (DMU) from Hull via Beverley and Market Weighton, over a line that…

Ffordd (Road) 6G North Wales Dear Editor: An interesting question for all your readers? Next to the A55 dual carriageway in North Wales at Llandudno Junction. Adjoining the A55 at intersection 18 is a link road numbered the A546, which has a road sign name of Ffordd 6G! This road, which opened in 1992, is partly built on and next to the original four-track engine shed beside Llandudno Junction station. The engine shed numbered 6G was demolished years ago, along with the carriage shed. This location now next to the A546 is a multiplex cinema and three popular food outlets. My question for Steam Days magazine and your readership of rail enthusiasts: Are there any other locations in the British Isles where a road has been named after an engine…

The County Donegal Railways system was surprising in many ways: in the mountainous terrain (to Irish standards) that its trains had to get through, in the lovely cherry red colour with which it blessed its locomotives, railcars and carriages, and because it was ahead of other Irish railways in its almost total use of diesel railcars for passenger services, even though freight trains were, with one exception, always steam-hauled. While the CDR was not the first Irish system to adopt diesels, it ended up with the largest fleet of narrow gauge railcars in the British Isles. I should have known better, but I missed the big exception to the railcar rule. While my visit in 1956 to travel on the railway included the August bank holiday, I did not know…

Locomotive sheds go back to the railways’ earliest days; thus many have never been seen in an illustration of some kind; we know only of their existence from company records and in many cases, luckily, from their presence on Ordnance Survey maps. Even so, a surprising number of depots have been caught, perhaps only partially, in a single photograph, sometimes an official railway image, or quite often by accident as part of a background. Other early sheds though, many still standing in the 1920s and 1930s, were hunted down by a dedicated handful of cameramen, such as Bill Camwell, Bill Potter, Bernard Matthews, Henry Casserley and so on. Going back to the beginning of the 1960s, it was the writer’s privilege to have personally known such pioneers and generously be…

As a young spotter, this author once encountered No. 5926 Grotrian Hall at Stafford Road shed in Wolverhampton. It seemed like a pleasant name, invoking an image of a little ivy-covered country house somewhere deep in the Marches, a name probably lightly Anglicised from the Welsh. Many years later, it came as a surprise to find out that it actually belonged to a concert hall in London which carried the name of a German piano manufacturing company. This awoke the memory of having been booked into Saint Edmund Hall in Oxford some years ago for an academic conference – certainly, not a gentleman’s seat in the countryside, its name was worn by Collett 4900 class No. 5960. This raised the question – where did the Great Western Railway actually get…

Over the years, what notes I made at the time of my photography have disappeared, so I’ve been dependent on looking at my old photos, which have gradually brought back happy memories of 70-plus years ago. Also, it has been useful to carry out further research on the internet, although one or two of my photographs appear to disagree with other people’s statements; therefore, I prefer to believe the old saying that photographs do not lie! My visit to this part of the railway network in the spring of 1954 was at the end of my active involvement with taking railway photographs. As the office junior, by the time the holiday sheet reached me there was little room left to mark which fortnight I’d like to take, so most of…