Innehållsförteckning för Vol 35 No 9 - September 2021 från Backtrack

FRUSTRATIONS OF FUEL EFFICIENCY: FEED-WATER HEATERS PART TWO BY MILES MACNAIR THE WORK OF F. H.TREVITHICK (Locomotive Magazine, June 1913) Frederick Henry Trevithick was the son of Francis Trevithick (Locomotive Superintendent of the Northern Division of the London & North Western Railway until 1857) and grandson of the ‘giant of steam’ Richard Trevithick, and he was the first locomotive engineer to carry out methodical experiments and trials to test different designs of feed-water heater. He had been appointed as chief mechanical engineer of the Egyptian State Railways in 1883, his first few years being devoted to rationalising and modernising the chaotic condition of the locomotive stock. Having achieved this objective, he turned his attention to incorporating improvements of his own invention in areas of feed-water heating and superheating. The level…

OPERATING THE LOOE BRANCH BY PETER BUTLER (Author) A few years ago a visit to our son and his family gave me a chance to travel over the branch from Liskeard to Looe. This raised the question in my mind as to how many services on the current railway system require the guard to get out of the train and change the points? This is the situation on the Looe branch at Coombe Junction and again on the branch from Plymouth to Gunnislake at Bere Alston. The Looe branch is really a branch off a branch, in that there are two sections trains have to pass through to reach Looe. But first, a potted history. The existence of the ores containing tin, copper etc in this part of the world…

RUNAWAY PLATFORM BARROWS BY ALISTAIR F.NISBET (S. Summerson/The Transport Treasury) Imagine that most readers will remember when almost every station had one or more barrows on the platforms, either the small two-wheeled ‘sack truck’ type or the rather battered-looking steel-framed three or four-wheeled variety with a flat wooden deck which would often be piled high with suitcases, boxes, trunks and packages of every size and shape. These mostly had a swivelling pair of wheels (although some had but a single wheel), worked by the same long handle by which they were pulled along, most having extremely noisy iron or steel wheels which sounded worse if one or more wheel was less than circular. Mostly these were moved by porters using brute strength to manoeuvre them between and around obstacles and…

FROM THE PENDRAGON ARCHIVES ‘JSG’ IN SOUTH WALES AGAIN It was in October last year when we had a selection from the JOHN SPENCER GILKS Collection of his photographs taken on his travels in South Wales. A second offering was foretold, so here are some more photographs from JSG’s visit in May 1961.…

THE ST. PANCRAS AREA BEFORE ELECTRIFICATION RECORDED BY PETER BUTLER…

RIDING WITH THE ‘GLENS’ The North British Railway had established quite a stock of 4-4-0 locomotives by the time the Class K ‘Superheated Intermediates’ were introduced under W. P. Reid in 1913, with 32 being constructed at Cowlairs Works up to 1920. The majority of the class started out at Eastfield shed in Glasgow and thus began a lasting association with the West Highland line to Fort William and Mallaig, whilst they also worked across to Edinburgh and extensively on the east side of Scotland. The company named them after glens, hence they became known as the ‘Glen’ Class, and later the LNER’s classification was D34. The RCTS Locomotives of the LNER described the ‘Glens’ as “popular, efficient and versatile” and the last of this excellent class remained at work…

BATTLING BEECHING IN THE HIGH PEAK PART ONE THE CAMPAIGN TO RETAIN BUXTON’S RAILWAY SERVICE BY STEPHEN G. ABBOTT (Colour-Rail.com 212985) The report The Reshaping of British Railways by Dr. Richard Beeching was published on 27th March 1963. Many who accepted its basic tenets were surprised by the inclusion in the services scheduled for withdrawal of some well-used commuter or outer suburban routes, serving provincial cities. The sole criterion for their listing appears to have been heavy financial loss, exacerbated by the large ratio of peak to off- peak traffic requiring resources under-used for much of the day. Nevertheless, the loss per passenger may have been relatively modest and no allowance was made for the overall benefit of the service to the conurbations served, a point discussed later in this…

WHEN ‘BRITANNIAS’ RULED THE GREAT EASTERN The first of the British Railways Standard designs was the Class 7 4-6-2 of which No.70000 Britannia appeared from Crewe Works in 1951. The first allocation of the class was to the former Great Eastern main line from Liverpool Street station to Norwich where hitherto the most powerful motive power had been the LNER B17 Class 6 express 4-6-0s, supported by the mixed traffic B1 4-6-0s of Class 5 rating. The new Pacifics were more powerful than anything seen there before and the crews took to them with enthusiasm, such that it was on the GE route that the ‘Britannias’ did some of their finest work. (R. C. Riley) (Dave Cobbe Collection/Rail Photoprints) (Dave Cobbe Collection/Rail Photoprints) (Marcus Eavis/Online Transport Archive) (John McCann/Online Transport…

BR MOTORAIL TRAINS FORMATIONS AND FINANCES PART ONE BY CLIVE CARTER (Gavin Morrison) British Railways designed car-carrying services for passengers accompanying their cars on the journey. Starting in the mid-1950s, they ran for 40 years, developing four styles of operation: Car Sleeper Car Carrier Car Tourist Tail Traffic Trains ran primarily in the summer months and one set was usually sufficient for each service. Discussion of departure times and frequency (per week) has been avoided, except to clarify workings. Timetables and rationale for terminal selections were reviewed by Faulkner (see references). Passengers and cars travelled in the same train except for the Car Tourist service where separate trains were used. The latter type was limited to a decade of operation by the Western Region, only to be resurrected by BR…

WHERE DID THE MONEY COME FROM? THE RAILWAYS’ MAIN SOURCE OF REVENUE DURING GROUPING BY PETER TATLOW (Don Rowland Collection) Whilst it is understandable that we should all be attracted by the glamour of the high speed, sometimes streamlined, passenger train services run during the inter-war period, the truth of the matter is that, unlike today, the railways earned the bulk of their income by carrying freight. With the obvious exception of the Southern Railway, the other three companies derived the vast majority of their revenue by conveying general merchandise, coal, coke and other minerals. Back in the late 1960s steam-driven motive power may have disappeared from British Railways amid a fanfare of special enthusiast trains and a subsequent body of literary works extolling its virtues and regretting its demise,…

THE ‘ROYAL SCOTS’ BRITAIN’S GREATEST MAIN LINE STEAM LOCOMOTIVES ‘Astounding’, ‘astonishing’ and ‘brilliant’. These adjectives describing the performance of the rebuilt London Midland & Scottish Railway ‘Royal Scots’ in the Locomotive Exchange Trials, held by British Railways in 1948, raise the question – why were more of the class not built and treated as a ‘Standard’ design for wider use on the newly nationalised network? A. J. MULLAY considers the matter. (A. E. R. Cope/Colour-Rail.com BRM473) The year 1948 was only eight days old when a memorandum was circulated among the six Regions of the new British Railways. Entitled ‘Interchange of locomotives between regions’, the document advised that the Chairman (Robert Riddles) of the British Railways Mechanical Engineering Committee had decreed that it was “desirable to obtain a preliminary comparison…

MORE GREAT WESTERN SHED VISITS As promised in April’s feature on South Wales locomotive sheds, we present another selection of GAVIN MORRISON’s photographs taken at other Western Region depots.…

THE SAGA OF BARDNEY STATION BY STEWART SQUIRES (Author’s Collection) In 2019 the 25th anniversary occurred of the demolition of Bardney station. A Grade II listed building, it was a prominent and iconic building at the entrance to the village from the west. It has been a sad loss to the railway history of Lincolnshire but its demolition did not happen without careful thought and the best of intentions. A variety of organisations was involved, the main players being the owner at that time, the British Sugar Corporation, the Grimsby-Louth Railway Preservation Society and, subsequently, Railworld at Peterborough. Bardney station opened with the Lincolnshire Loop line from Peterborough (Werrington Junction) to Lincoln, via Spalding and Boston, on 17th October 1848. Ten miles to the south east of Lincoln and 22…

ENGLISH ELECTRIC IN NORTHUMBERLAND…

BACK IN THE SLATE QUARRIES In the August issue our colour spread ‘Up in the Gallery’ looked at some of the narrow gauge locomotives working in the Penrhyn slate quarries in North Wales. We return to the world of slate this month with these photographs take by DAVID SUTCLIFFE on 3rd/4th September 1957 which include some of the engines at the Dinorwic Quarry on the other side of Elidir Fawr to Penrhyn, the 4ft gauge Padarn Railway and the Penrhyn Railway ‘main line’.…