Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i Steam World

In the summer of 1963, at the age of 16, I left school with no job and not much idea what I wanted to do. My mother was a clerk/typist at a paint factory on Runnymede. Yes, there was industry on the Thames-side beauty spot where King John had signed the Magna Carta in 1215! Mum got me a summer job in the laboratory mixing small batches of special paint. I took prescribed quantities of a thick, treacly resin and coloured powder pigments and put them together into a ceramic flagon. This was then topped-up with steartite balls (abrasive pebbles) and rotated for hours by one of those old-fashioned belt-drive systems, to grind the resin and pigment together. Next day the paint was drained off into a can for the…

From the earliest days of my interest in GWR stations, I kept a ring-binder log of my station visits, although sadly not every one, just those that had interested me enough to warrant taking a photograph. When I stopped keeping the log, it ran to three ring binders. Though I had no particular personal attachment to the Hemyock branch, it is notable that I logged and photographed all three branch stations. Unfortunately the pictures suffer from my poor camera, my home processing of film and my lack of darkroom skills. Nevertheless, I do have that small record of the three slightly different buildings, taken at a time when there were few branch line history books or books about minor railway stations. All three of these stations have been completely razed.…

Much to my father’s horror I started as an engine cleaner on August 14 1961. He had visions of me going into his butchers shop, but I had other ideas. The process of joining the Railway had been swift and painless. I had visited the BR recruitment centre at Queen’s Drive, the thoroughfare that separated the LNWR side from the Midland side of Birmingham New Street station, I was told, after filling in a form with my personal details, to obtain three references and send them in. This done, after a couple of weeks I was told to report to Queens Drive at 9am for a medical check and interview. The medical was to check my eyesight, colour vision, blood pressure and sugar levels. Next, I was told to report…

Regular contributor Gavin Morrison’s brand new top-quality album – Steam Photographer: My favourite photographs from the BR years – has just been published by Steam World. This 200-page casebound album features a section depicting the Somerset & Dorset line, and this photo-feature has been compiled from the shortlist of images which Gavin compiled for his new book, from which the final images for publication were selected. We thought that those that didn’t ‘make the cut’ for this new book were very much worth sharing-and so here they are. If you’d like to order Gavin’s new book, we can send it by next day courier, at no extra charge-see the ad on page 15.…

Robert Riddles – Britain’s last giant of steam. David Maidment recounts an interview with the man who standardized British steam a decade too late while David Maidment analyses a damning indictment of WR steam. THERE’S LOTS MORE, PLUS OUR REGULARS, INCLUDING Comment, Great Shot! Call Attention, and Crossword February 2022 issue on sale January 21, price £5.45 RE-LIVE THE GLORIOUS DAYS OF BRITISH STEAM WITH STEAM WORLD Britain’s biggest-selling historical railway magazine.…

The Bedford to Hitchin line was originally part of the Midland main line to London. In the 1850s, with the growth of the Midland Railway, the company was seeking a direct route to the capital rather than having to rely on its connections over the LNWR via Rugby. In 1857 it opened its new route to the south with the Leicester to Hitchin line via Kettering and Bedford. At Hitchin it joined the Great Northern Railway which took it into King’s Cross. In the first few months passengers for London had to change at Hitchin but from 1858 the GN agreed Midland trains could run through. Unfortunately, although the Midland paid a high price for the privilege, there were some serious delays as the GN always gave preference to its…

My family moved to Sheffield from the North East in 1953. I was seven years old and the road to my new school passed under a rail bridge near Heeley station. It was there that my fascination with steam trains began. This location is on a long and quite steep climb south from Sheffield Midland station, and southbound trains pounding up the hill could be heard long before they were seen. Huge clouds of smoke announced their imminent arrival while northbound expresses passed by at high speed with brakes squealing as they slowed down for Midland station. I was well and truly hooked. I quickly made friends with the local ‘spotter fraternity’ and they introduced me to what became my favourite spotting location, afew hundred yards further south opposite the…

It is with much regret that I have to report the death of well-known railway photographer Brian Green, in his 89th year. A superb photographer, Brian’s pictures illustrated countless books over many years as well as the Ian Allan Abc spotters’ books. I first came into contact with Brian around 1988 when I was putting together my first book covering the Woodhead line. A Foxline publication, the book proved very successful thanks in the main to Brian’s splendid images. As my writing progressed and my friendship with Brian developed, more images flowed and once more helped to bolster the photographic element of my writing. Brian’s camera work was always ‘spot on’. Handling his negatives in the darkroom was pure joy, so consistent were the exposures, focus always sharp and pictures…

Most enthusiasts will have heard of the ‘Withered Arm’, the description given to the Southern Railway’s former routes in Devon and Cornwall that all fell to the Beeching axe, leaving only Barnstaple. Given that these were, and still are, traditional holiday areas, the daft nature of the traffic survey that only counted ‘booked’ tickets outgoing, on which the Reshaping report was based, shows up today in what feels like an annual slew of features about how poor the roads of North Devon and Cornwall are. Perhaps things are slightly on the up now for this area’s railways with the return of Okehampton to the network by the end of 2021 and possible plans for the link from there through to Bere Alston. (Though the latter requires complete reconstruction of the…

Ask any ten people with railway knowledge what the Great Western Railway means to them and you are sure to hear phrases like ‘broad gauge’, ‘the only railway to retain its name after Grouping’, ‘Paddington’ and ‘Brunel’. However. I would not mind betting that if you asked any one of those enthusiasts to give you a list of things GWR, ‘branch lines’ would be on that list. Did the GWR have more branch lines than any other railway? Did GWR branch lines become notorious because they served more obscure and unsuitable places than other railways? Or were GWR branch lines simply more scenically attractive than those of most other railways? I don’t know that there are straight answers to any of those questions but it is certainly true that some…

GER ‘N7’ 0-6-2T at Chelmsford I am sure that Mr Shepperson (page 36, Steam World, October) would like to know that there was a group of like-minded spotters up the track at Chelmsford equally interested in the humble ‘N7’ which he saw at Shenfield. On behalf of a small band of 1960s Chelmsford spotters I’d like to thank him for sharing his recollections in the October edition of his spottings in 1961/62 just down the track at Shenfield, and to add some of our combined recollections too. This article brought back very happy memories for all of us of watching ‘our Coffee-pot’ set off towards London every evening at about 7.30pm from Chelmsford station with its parcels train. For many years this unheralded working was taken for granted by our…

In Steam World 403 I documented my experiences as a trainspotter at Brighton station in the early 1960s. Unlike a lot of articles written by other spotters, I did not have the luxury of a bike to take me to other locations and, even if I had, anything worth seeing would have been many miles from home and I know my parents would never had allowed it, so I had to rely on school holidays, parents and relatives to take me further afield to get my fix of something different. Brighton - West Coastway line Many journeys were taken heading west in the general direction of Portsmouth, either to Pompey itself or the Isle of Wight. Leaving Brighton, you immediately passed the engine shed to your right before veering left…

Ipswich is an historic East Anglian town 66 miles north of London and ten miles from the east coast on the River Orwell. The county town of Suffolk, it is one of those claiming to be the oldest continuously occupied town in England. Certainly it has been occupied without a break since Saxon times – being previously known as Gippeswic (from an Old Saxon personal name or from an earlier name for the Orwell), Gyppewicus and Yppswiyche. From the town’s Gippeswyk Park, which runs alongside the railway yards on the Norwich side of Ipswich station, the trainspotter in you can be within a few yards of the main railway lines to catch all the traffic going through. Ipswich had an important engine shed for more than 120 years from 1846…