Innehållsförteckning för Vol 35 No 12 - December 2021 från Backtrack

DAY RETURN TO 1950 – WHEN HCC VISITED RAVENGLASS Notes by DAVID MOSLEY The years 1949-1953 marked the end of an era for the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway. In 1949 the railway became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Keswick Granite Company. In the same year the Granite Company oversaw a major blasting operation at the Beckfoot Quarry which produced some 50,000 tons of granite. This amount of rock took four years to process – after which time a decline of the railway began until its eventual preservation in 1960. On Thursday 14th September 1950 the noted railway photographer Henry Casserley visited Ravenglass. Casserley found a fifteen inch gauge line stretching almost seven miles from Ravenglass to its Eskdale terminus at Dalegarth. Passenger trains, sometimes steam-hauled, ran the full length of…

BRUTON IN SCOTLAND A selection of the photographs presented to Backtrack by that fine cameraman ERIC BRUTON recording his ventures north of the Border in the 1950s. FROM THE PENDRAGON ARCHIVES…

THE SOUTHERN ‘KING ARTHURS’ BY DAVID P. WILLIAMS (Coloured monochrome by David. P. Williams) The Urie legacy It’s an ill wind that blows no good and this was never truer than in 1912 for the London & South Western Railway. Its Chief Mechanical Engineer, the fiery and obstinate Scot, Dugald Drummond, had embarked upon an ill-fated project to supply the LSWR with four-cylinder 4-6-0s for handling the increasingly heavy trains which were becoming the norm throughout the railways of Britain in the early 1900s. Drummond’s brilliance at producing small 4-4-0s first for the North British Railway and now for his new masters in the form of T9 ‘Greyhounds’ was in stark contrast to the dismal reputation acquired by his six-coupled creations which arrived on the scene between 1905 and 1912…

A CAMBRIAN ‘MANOR’ The Great Western Railway’s ‘Manor’ Class 4-6-0s played a prominent role on the former Cambrian Railways ‘main’ line to Aberystwyth and along the coast to Pwllheli. On 30th May 1964 GAVIN MORRISON found No.7803 Barcote Manor working the ‘Cambrian Coast Express’.…

ON THE GREAT NORTHERN SECTION Steam at the southern end of the East Coast Main Line on the Great Northern tracks photographed in the early 1960s by ALAN REEVE. Caption notes are by Michael S. Welch.…

AROUND RUNCORN AND WIDNES Photographed by STEWART JOLLY…

IRISH PACIFIC TANK LOCOMOTIVES BY JIM McBRIDE (Colour-Rail.com NG133) The 4-6-2T or Pacific tank locomotive was used by some railways in Britain but this wheel arrangement was rare in Ireland. There were no steam locomotives of the Pacific tender type to be found on any of the 5ft 3in railways of Ireland. On the narrow gauge lines of Ireland there were eight Pacific tank locomotives to be found on the 3ft gauge railways of Ireland. The curious fact is that these Pacific tank locomotives were all to be found on the same railway, the Londonderry & Lough Swilly Railway (L&LSR). Between 1899 and 1913 the ‘Lough Swilly’, as it was commonly known, ordered eight Pacific tanks in total with two locomotives each, from four different designs, supplied by three different…

ORIGINAL ‘PATRIOTS’ (Colour-Rail.com BRM576) The London Midland & Scottish Railway’s quest for a middle-range express passenger locomotive was pursued after the arrival of the ‘Royal Scot’ and addressed in 1930 by combining the chassis of the latter with the larger boilers of a couple of rebuilt ‘Claughton’ 4-6-0s – and striking gold! In 1932/3 40 more ‘Claughtons’ were similarly ‘rebuilt’ though this was largely an accountancy ploy for retaining the old engine numbers for essentially new locomotives. A further batch in 1934 was classed as new from the outset, making a total of 52 in total of what had became officially designated the ‘Patriot’ Class. The popular but unofficial title ‘Baby Scots’ was disapproved of by the LMS! After 1946 eighteen of them were rebuilt with larger taper boilers in…

A COTSWOLD FAREWELL Photographed by GAVIN MORRISON The cross-country Great Western Railway line between Cheltenham and Banbury (joining the Birmingham main line just south of the latter at King’s Sutton) served mines in the Oxfordshire ironstone field and for some years even hosted a significant through passenger service, the so-called ‘Ports to Ports Express’ between Newcastle, Barry, Cardiff and Swansea. In time the mineral traffic declined and the ‘Ports’ train didn’t reappear on the line after World War II, leaving a rural passenger service which dwindled away as so many did. The Banbury-Chipping Norton end succumbed as early as 1951 and the section from Cheltenham to Kingham (on the Oxford-Worcester main line) was closed in October 1962; the remaining stub between Kingham and Chipping Norton lasted only a couple of…

MEN AT WORK OBSERVED BY JEFFREY WELLS This collection of photographs depicts men in the employ of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Company at their place of work. The presence of an official photographer, possibly an employee of the company, or an amateur photographer, setting up a glass plate camera on a tripod was enough to bring about a temporary halt in the work process. It was not every day that employees were recorded for posterity and it ranked as a special occasion. Whatever men were doing, their natural curiosity filled the moment. 1 Boiler Shop, Horwich Works This is a view of a small section of the boiler shop inside Horwich Works, near Bolton. Riveting was an essential activity in the construction of boilers and fireboxes and was a…

MEMORIES OF A WEST COUNTRY SIGNALMAN AS TOLD TO PAUL JOYCE (Colour-Rail.com 322569) Larry Crossier, a fellow Plymouthian and great friend, was surely born to be a signalman. For nearly seven decades or so, nothing pleased him more than talking about signalling, signalmen and their boxes. With the contraction of semaphores throughout the land during the 1960s, Larry realised that much of their history could well disappear unless steps were taken to preserve it, hence his being one of the founding members of the Signalling Record Society. Before relating Larry’s tales of Plymouth and its railways, such terms as auto-trains, auto workings, sandwich autos, motor trains and so on, were never used by him, nor presumably by his fellow local signalmen, Railcars being their universal collective title. As a young…

THE PORT SUNLIGHT PROBLEM BY ROGER JERMY (Author) Port Sunlight station is located on what is now part of the Merseyrail network in the Wirral Peninsula, formerly in Cheshire. It is surrounded by hamlets and villages with names ending in the Saxon ‘ton’ and ‘ham’ such as Bebington and Eastham. If you use a source book such as Kenneth Cameron’s English Place Names you will not find a reference to Port Sunlight as it only dates back just over 120 years to when a certain W. H. Lever, later to become better known as the first Viscount Leverhulme, decided to found a soap works in Wirral close to the banks of the River Mersey. It was on 3rd March 1888 that William Hesketh Lever, his wife and entourage travelled from…

UFFINGTON SIGNAL BOX – A MIDLAND SURVIVOR VISITED BY PETER BUTLER The spring 1988 edition of The Wyvern contained an article in which the authors had compiled a list of surviving Midland Railway (MR) signal boxes. In summer 1986 there had been 110, but by the end of 1987 the total was 83. These were the boxes still in operation on BR. I have no figures for the end of 2020 but suspect many have gone. One such survivor still exists at Uffington, on the Syston to Peterborough line, just to the east of Stamford. Because it is comparatively close to home, I have had the opportunity to visit it over the years. The box lies in a shallow valley on a minor road that links the two villages of…

ENTWISTLE A LOCAL OUTPOST STEVE LEYLAND recalls observations on a favourite Lancashire line. (Manchester Locomotive Society) Those many of us who bewail the loss of goods traffic in any local sense on railways of the UK will recall former centres of enormous area packed with traffic, track and activity, that have been reduced to no more than plain line, double track at best and a forest of silver birches: Pontypool Road, Normanton and Healey Mills to name but three. On a far smaller scale, but for similar reasons, I thought a look at the decline of a route into the moors from my home town, and one rather special spot on the line in particular, would be worthwhile. The Bolton to Blackburn line was difficult to build, expensive and a…

“FOR GOD’S SAKE BE DONE WITH RAILWAYS AND SHARES” ALISTAIR F. NISBET throws some light on the shady practices indulged in during the early ‘Railway Mania’ in the forming of speculative railway companies. (Wellcome Collection) There was an article in Backtrack 33/6 (June 2019) about fraudulent promotion of shares in the Mersey Railway and it has to be said that this was not a new phenomenon for the earlier ‘Railway Mania’ had produced a fair crop of both fraudulent and incompetent schemes. In 1711 the South Sea Company was formed as a public private partnership with powers for a monopoly of trade between Britain and South America – this was in return for a loan of £7 million to finance an ongoing war with France, the company agreeing to underwrite…