Innehållsförteckning för Vol 35 No 5 - May 2021 från Backtrack

STEAM RAILMOTORS AND PUSH-PULL AUTO TRAINS IN THE WREXHAM DISTRICT PART ONE GWR STEAM RAILMOTORS 1904-1933 BY IAN TRAVERS The Denbighshire coalfield around Wrexham and Ruabon formed one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-eighteenth century shallow coal pits, early blast furnaces and stone quarries were being worked. Transport of materials and products slowly evolved from pack horse and carting to narrow gauge horse-worked plateways. Some fed the canal wharf at Telford’s 1805 Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. Volume output awaited conventional standard gauge railways. A dense network was to develop between 1847 and 1901. Most of the branches were single lines which became Great Western Railway. The London & North Western penetrated marginally from Mold. Later incursions saw the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire/Great Central reach the coalfield over the…

EAST ENDERS The Great Eastern Railway’s local and suburban trains out of Liverpool Street station and into the East End of London and Essex came to be dominated by firstly 0-6-0 tanks of what later became Class J69, 2-4-2 tanks of Classes F4 and F5 and then by the N7 0-6-2Ts, production of that class being continued by the London & North Eastern Railway. Here are some of them at work in their natural habitats.…

RAILWAYS OF BRADFORD DAVID JOY explains the difficulties the city experienced in establishing and maintaining its main line railway status. Few towns were as badly placed as Bradford at the dawn of the railway age. Situated in a saucer-shaped depression, the sole low-lying exit faced north away from such key centres as Leeds and Manchester. The combination of coal, iron and ample amounts of water in the surrounding hills nevertheless led to Bradford rapidly becoming a one-trade mill town and ‘capital of the wool world’. In no decade in the 40 years from 1811 did the rate of population growth fall below 50 per cent. Yet all attempts to benefit from a railway at first proved futile. There had been no progress by 1840, when Leeds found itself served by…

CRANE SOLUTIONS AT DERBY WORKS BY BRIAN CHANDLER Derby Locomotive Works In 1973 British Rail’s Derby Locomotive Works was under great pressure to improve the throughput of servicing main line diesel locomotives, both by reducing manpower employed and time taken. The Works Engineer of the day was Albert Summers, a hugely experienced mechanical engineer. His righthand man, and Chief Electrical Engineer, was Vernon Rose. Both men were highly respected within their own works and throughout the rail maintenance industry. The main locomotive traction repair hall had two ancient, cab-controlled overhead cranes which dated from the age of steam. The coming of diesel locomotives meant that the huge traction engines were now mounted deep inside the locomotive shell. The crane drivers, up in their cabs, at one end of each of…

‘ON THE DIFFICULT STRETCH FROM THE TYNE TO THE BORDER’… AND ONWARDS Many would argue that by far the most interesting section of the East Coast Main Line is north of Newcastle where the railway does indeed at last encounter the sea from the clifftops, crosses the Tweed at Berwick by a superb viaduct and runs through some of the route’s finest scenery. GAVIN MORRISON is our photographic guide.…

STRABANE – A LOST RAILWAY CENTRE: KILLED BY PARTITION AND RELIGION PART ONE BY JIM McBRIDE Any visitor to Strabane in 2020 would struggle to believe you if you told them that Strabane was once one of the largest railway centres in Ireland until 1965. Today virtually no evidence remains of the railway station in Strabane, which has mainly become yet another supermarket car park near Railway Street. Strabane was once a major railway town served by five different railways of two different gauges, owned by four different railway companies. The geographical location of Strabane made it into an important market town over 200 years ago, linked by canal to Derry/Londonderry since 1796. The location of Strabane would attract railways in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth…

OPERATION DYNAMO JOHN CHAPMAN looks at the Southern Railway’s role in the Dunkirk evacuation in World War II. A great deal has been written about ‘Operation Dynamo’, the huge logistics exercise that took place in 1940 to rescue much of the British Expeditionary Force and its allies from the beaches of Dunkirk and at least two feature films have been made on the subject. However, much less is known about the extensive operation mounted by the Southern Railway, at very short notice, to carry those rescued troops from the ports of disembarkation to Army bases and hospitals around the country. The General Manager of the Southern Railway during the war was Sir Eustace Missenden who had started his railway career as a junior clerk at Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, on the…

THE PRESTON & LONGRIDGE RAILWAY including the Whittingham Hospital Railway BY GORDON BIDDLE The first railway into Preston was the North Union Railway from the south in 1838, followed in 1840 by the Lancaster & Preston Junction Railway, the two eventually forming part of today’s West Coast Main Line from London to Scotland. However, a few weeks earlier Preston’s second railway had been opened on 4th May 1840, a horsedrawn line of 6½ miles to convey stone from quarries at Longridge to build many prominent buildings in Preston, docks at Liverpool and Fleetwood, and sea defence works on the Fylde coast. Longridge stone was also included in the North Union Railway’s bridge over the Ribble at Preston. The Preston & Longridge Railway was authorised by Act of Parliament of 14th…

ORBITING LONDON The renaissance of some old London rail services – a 21st century surprise? BY ERIC STUART Travelling on a London Overground train from Clapham Junction, comparing it with a similar journey not so many years ago, I could not help again being struck by the query: “Where on earth have all these passengers come from?” – and noting again the amazing transformation that has taken place over a comparatively short period of time. But we need to go back to a date about 100 years ago, if we are to get the measure of what has happened – and is still happening. In the second half of the nineteenth century, London was well into the stage of urban development beyond being a ‘foot city’ – that is, a…

THE ‘LITTLE’ NORTH WESTERN LINE The ‘Little’ North Western Railway (often so-called to distinguish it from the very much bigger London & North Western) began with a line from Skipton to Ingleton in 1849 and later completed a branch from Clapham to Lancaster and Morecambe in 1850. It was leased by the Midland Railway which, together with the Furness Railway, added a link from Wennington to Carnforth in 1862. JOHN SPENCER GILKS took these photographs. FROM THE PENDEANGON ARCHIVES…

STOCKPORT BY STARLIGHT PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID RODGERS…