Innehållsförteckning för Volume 37 No 9 - September 2023 från Backtrack

Back Track PART TWO British Rail (BR) ceased handling milk on a regular basis in 1980 when the ‘Western Agreement’ contract with the Milk Marketing Board (MMB) expired; the MMB had made the decision to concentrate all of its distribution needs on road transport. Forwarding points for rail-borne traffic still active as of 1978 consisted of Carmarthen, Chard Junction, Lostwithiel, Marshfield, St. Erth, Swindon (see below), Totnes and Torrington, although traffic from the last mentioned would end in October 1978. Interestingly, for a while during the late 1970s, Swindon started sending milk by rail to Carlisle (believed to be in connection with cheese production). The loaded train was electric-hauled from Bescot, as were the return empties from Carlisle as far as Bescot, thus rekindling earlier memories of the Shrewsbury to…

Moretonhampstead, in the county of Devon is, in the words of its Town Council, “a busy and picturesque town nestled in Dartmoor National Park, fifteen miles west of Exeter”. Today the commonest association with the name ‘Moretonhampstead’, or ‘Moreton’ as it is usually called, is the moor – Dartmoor – which rises to a height of 2,000ft within sight of the town. The River Teign rises in two locations on Dartmoor National Park's north moor. It flows down to Chagford and then enters the Teign Gorge below the National Trust's Castle Drogo. It cuts through Fingle Woods to the village of Dunsford. From there, it arcs into the Teign Valley which is defined as the stretch of river between Dunsford and the Chudleigh area. From there, the River Teign flows…

How many readers of this magazine have the good fortune to live in a house which directly looks on to a railway line? Back in 1911 and 1912 a number of residents of the town of Oban had probably considered themselves fortunate in that their properties looked over the Callander & Oban Railway's (C&O) line into the town and a further parcel of land belonging to the company which, they fondly believed, could not have anything built on it. Although the owning company is referred to here as the C&O, to all intents and purposes it was the Caledonian Railway (CR) which actually operated the line. All its own houses and lands were under restrictions as to what could be built there, ie residential properties only, and such restrictions had…

General Pasley, for the Board of Trade, when he inspected the Dundee & Newtyle on behalf of the Railway Department in 1842, in his report commented disparagingly on the tight ‘S'-bend near Baldovan. It was present, he wrote, because “the projector of this Railway had a favourite plan of making the wheels of Locomotive Engines travel round the outside rails of curves on their rims”. This strange comment appears to have arisen out of a misunderstanding of what was probably an early example of superelevation. The existence of the bend had come about out of a desire to save money, the contractor's temporary line having been made permanent. It was the case, however, that the early Newtyle locomotives did have to negotiate some extreme curvature, which is perhaps why they…

Sadly, whole swathes of architectural gems are barely noticed by the average member of the travelling public. As for London Underground, invariably, having been jammed into trains, most people are far more concerned with getting to work on time. Then as evening approaches, hurrying home after a hard day at the office, they are far too exhausted to notice or even care about the beauty that may well surround them. The same invariably applies to shoppers heading ‘up west’ for their fix of retail therapy, or returning football fans. Fortunately all is not lost, for Transport for London, as guardians of many of these treasures, despite strict financial constraints, performs a brilliant job in restoring and maintaining them. West London Underground Stations – a somewhat hidden yet rich source of…

This article takes a brief photographic look at some of the different designs of signal boxes once found on the former Great Central Railway and its predecessor – the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. The Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire and Great Central Railway boxes in this article are described according to the classification developed by The Signalling Study Group n ‘The Signal Box – A Pictorial History & Guide to Designs: OPC 1986. The Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (MSL) was rather slow in adopting signalling, with no block working until 1869 and no interlocking until 1873. However, an extension of block signalling over the system got under way in 1870 and from 1874 interlocked signal boxes were being built in connection with new installations. In Lincolnshire nothing was done…

The author has a vague recollection of his student days when the following title of a fellow student's dissertation included the words, ‘Oldham – the Town on a Hill’. This student had realised that Oldham was not only seven miles to the north east of Manchester but that the town stands on the western slopes of the Pennine Hills,and was indeed a town on a hill. A journey by road or rail to the centre of Oldham involved an ascent. St. Mary's Parish church stands 705.8ft above sea level. Oldham was noted for its importance as a cotton spinning town: in 1900, to take just one year, there existed a forest of mill chimneys, from which plumes of smoke rose into the air or drifted downwards into the streets below.…

On the London & North Western Railway F. W. Webb's first new locomotive was a basic 0-6-0 goods engine in 1873 and over the years to 1892 no fewer than 499 were built. They earned themselves the name ‘Coal Engines’, that slow-moving commodity constituting a large part of their loads. The writer E. L. Ahrons described them as “probably the simplest and cheapest locomotives ever made in this country…” In 1881 what was in effect an 0-6-2 tank variant appeared, the ‘Coal Tanks’, the first of 300 versatile engines which also earned quite a reputation on local passenger work. FROM THE PENDRAGON ARCHIVES…

I came across some images amongst others which looked interesting, as they featured some Morris Minor vehicles, for sale on the Ebay auction site in March 2022. I put in my bid and waited several ays for the auction to end with the usual suspense as the final minutes ticked away and fortunately I was the winner. The seller had included no information about negatives I had bought and all I knew was that they must have been taken somewhere in the Oxford area as the vendor at the time was selling others at named locations in the county. Once the negatives arrived it was evident that there was no information about the subject matter whatsoever. The starting point was the numbers and name of the locomotives involved in the…