Innehållsförteckning för Vol 36 No 7 - July 2022 från Backtrack

Declining years In the remainder of this article the narrative uses the first person singular when describing the writer’s personal experiences. I lived in Lubenham in 1954-55 and then in Market Harborough, so knew the line well in its last years. At Lubenham, virtually the only passenger traffic by then was workers to Rugby, mainly about twenty Polish refugees housed in a local wartime camp who cycled to the station to catch their train. Workers to Rugby also travelled from Market Harborough, whose residents made occasional day trips to Rugby or Peterborough, or used the line was as part of long-distance journeys via Rugby, Birmingham or Peterborough. Economies had already begun to be made and stations closed at Orton Waterville from 5th October 1942, Ashley & Weston 18th June 1951…

In 1935 the Great Western Railway was due to celebrate its centenary and the directors were casting around for ways in which some sort of a publicity ‘splash’ could be made. Streamlining was in vogue on the Continent and had already been used to a limited degree by the London & North Eastern Railway on Gresley’s ‘Hush Hush’ and the Mikado Cock o’ the North. Thus it was in late 1934 that C. B. Collett received instruction from the board to apply streamlining to Great Western locomotives to mark the centenary year. Who it was that decided just two would be modified, an example each of a ‘Castle’ and a ‘King’, has not been revealed but it is likely to have been Collett himself. Believing that the ‘pros’ were heavily…

On 9th July 2020 it was 53 years since the last steam locomotives on the Southern Region worked in regular revenue-earning service, a full electric service being in operation to accelerated timings from the following morning. These had worked from eight locomotive sheds and on pre-planned tasks known in the jargon as Duties, some of which had no regular tasks established to allow a few locomotives to be available for short notice jobs. This article will look at some of those Duties which applied during the period of the 1963/64 timetable but first a little history of the service patterns which applied then is required. The replacement of steam with third rail electric trains was a long drawn-out process after the London & South Western Railway’s services from Waterloo to…

The Liverpool & Manchester Railway was the first modern main line railway, both in concept and operation. It was colloquially known as the ‘Grand Experimental Railway’ and to a point this was true – no-one had attempted to run a main line railway to a timetable between two urban centres, with mechanical traction before. Earlier railways had tended to be uni-directional in terms of traffic flow, from pit head or quarry to staithes or landsale wharf, and used a mix of mechanical (locomotive and stationary engines) and animal (usually horse) traction. As the present writer has described, 1 that the L&M got so much right operationally from day one – in fact it had to – is a testament to the organisational flare of men like Henry Booth, the line’s…

“Some trains are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” (Malvolio, with apologies). In the last days of steam on the South Eastern main line, one train at least may, in the eyes of many enthusiasts, have achieved some measure of greatness. The 7.24am London Bridge to Ramsgate via Dover originated as empty stock at Holborn Viaduct at 6.56am. This was significant, as railway followers of the time knew well, because Blackfriars Bridge over the Thames could only take a D1 or E1 4-4-0 (or of course a C Class 0-6-0 or smaller engine), but not a ‘Schools’ or Woolwich Mogul. Many were the enthusiasts who travelled on this train to record its performance, or turned out to photograph its passing at suitable locations such…

This article does not intend to furnish a company or line history: there is already adequate reading material which describes the 53 miles 39 chains of railway between Plymouth and Truro, and the 11 miles 27 chains Falmouth branch. Such reading matter is in the form of E. T. MacDermot’s History of the Great Western Railway, Volume 2, and R. J. Woodfin’s book The Cornwall Railway. The main purpose is to describe six serious accidents that befell the Cornwall Railway Company and the Great Western Railway, which absorbed the Cornish company after 1889. This is accomplished by reference to contemporary press reports. The following paragraphs serve as background to the set of circumstances to each incident. Initial proposals for the Cornwall Railway were made in 1835, but nothing materialised until…

Introduction Prior to the First World War, unless the customer was the possessor of privately owned wagons, the railway company accepting merchandise, but not necessarily minerals, for conveyance was expected to provide the wagon within which to carry the load. In the event of it being unable to do so, either due to a shortage of suitable wagon stock, especially if a special vehicle was required, it might arrange with a neighbouring company to hire appropriate wagons. Were the destination to be off the forwarding company’s system, then, once unloaded, the receiving company was expected to return the wagon expeditiously (five days) to its owner, failing which it would be charged a fee (demurrage) by the Railway Clearing House (RCH). Only if the second had a return load for a…