Innehållsförteckning för Volume 38 No 6 - June 2024 från Backtrack

How does a railway enthusiast evince a dedicated fascination with a railway station long-vanished from the face of the earth? How does the lure of a denuded wasteland exert such a strong pull over someone who was not even alive during a former railway station’s busiest days? It is an obsession that makes you want to be at said hallowed location every so often, even for just a short time, and imagine how it was a hundred years earlier and wish someone would finally crack the fourth dimension with a time machine to carry you back to when the trains called and filled the site with steamy busy activity, to when it was a place of employment, to a platform where you could start an exciting journey to another station…

Having experienced something of a disappointment with his ‘Sir Sam Fay’ express 4-6-0s for the Great Central Railway, Chief Mechanical Engineer J. G. Robinson reverted to the 4-4-0 type and produced a design which was every bit the success that the 4-6-0s weren’t: the ‘Directors’ (which became LNER Class D10), built at Gorton in 1913. After the war a further batch was ordered encompassing various design modifications – GCR Class 11F, LNER D11, the ‘Improved Directors’. So well regarded were these that after the grouping Nigel Gresley on the London & North Eastern Railway selected the class when needing powerful new locomotives for the North British Section in Scotland. Both versions served with distinction until their demise in 1962.…

Partington Although the eastern end of the Manchester Ship Canal’s railway system witnessed the greatest decline in traffic there were also cutbacks elsewhere on the company’s rail estate including at Partington, some nine miles west of Manchester. An important centre for the MSC system during the early 1960s, Partington shed still had an allocation of ten locomotives, but thereafter railfreight in the area slowly dwindled away. Partington South Side Wagon Tips closed in December 1966 when the coal exports they had handled were transferred to the North Side Tips, while the following May the MSC’s through line from Partington North Side out to Latchford was also taken out of use. However, this had only a limited impact as none of the MSC’s four rail customers at Latchford – the British…

A search on a railway atlas is probably unlikely to reveal the precise location of Brentingby Junction, because the suffix ‘junction’ merely indicated the point at which goods loops converged with the main running lines east of Melton Mowbray on the route towards Oakham. This unremarkable cross-country route probably attracted few photographers but on summer Saturdays it really came to life conveying holidaymakers from the Midlands to East Anglian resorts. All the photographs in this feature were taken on 4th August 1962 at a time when most Britons took their annual holiday at a traditional seaside resort, before cheap Continental vacations became popular.…

New opportunities The Planning/Commercial Sub-Committee(P/ CSC), now combined and under London Midland Region chairmanship, gathered for a two-day meeting in late September 1970. Its deliberations focussed on two new major opportunities to further develop the North East/ South West train plan in time for the 1972/73 timetable. The first of these had been presented by the LM’s decision to withdraw the Euston/ Birmingham/Manchester/Liverpool timetable and replace it with an all-day half-hourly service between Euston and Birmingham/ Wolverhampton. The forward pattern to the North West was to be a train to Manchester or Liverpool at alternate hours formed by either a starting train from New Street or the projection of a train from the South West or South Wales, both of which would connect out of the terminating service from Euston.…

A short distance downstream from the magnificent Larpool Viaduct on the outskirts of Whitby lies a ruinous stone building dating from the earliest days of public railways. Today, the little building is obscured by fencing and shrubbery and so understandably will be unnoticed by most rail travellers and walkers on the adjacent railway and path. The smattering of history known about the building provides a useful insight into the evolution of early turnpike rail–roads into the railways we know today. Building the Weighing Machine House The building is the Whitby Weighing Machine (or Toll) House.1 It was built for the horse-drawn single track Whitby & Pickering Railway (WPR), the House being completed in 1835 for the first (Whitby–Grosmont) completed section of the railway. The Weighing Machine House had a short…

That title may sound slightly intriguing and indeed it is intended to do so; you may therefore wonder what it needed to be protected from and the answer is very simple – water. Firstly, though, perhaps I should try to define ‘The Tube’. Is it, as is often assumed, the whole of London’s Underground railway network or is it simply the deep level lines? For the purposes of this article I intend to refer to all those deep level lines which pass beneath the River Thames in the central area, although the part of the District Line which lies in close proximity to the river is also very relevant, as is what used to be known as the East London section of the Metropolitan Line to the south of Whitechapel…

In 1930 Henry Fowler introduced on the London Midland & Scottish Railway a new 2-6-2T of Class 3 power rating but if it was expected these would be a smaller version of his already highly regarded Class 4 2-6-4T of 1927, then disappointment loomed. Wheras the larger Class 4 tanks had been provided with a modern long lap, long travel valve gear, the Class 3 tanks reverted to an outdated Midland practice of shorttravel valve gear and were under-boilered for what was expected of them. As Messrs. Essery and Jenkinson declared, they never really “looked right”! Nonetheless 70 of them were built and they disappeared, unmissed, in 1962.…

Regular readers of Backtrack might remember an article in the November 2022 issue describing an outing to Woodford & Hinton in which our friend Geoffrey Webb was able to participate. This is an account of another tour which Geoffrey had suggested and for which I was able to drive him around, so enabling him to be able to visit places he would have found it difficult to reach. 20th July 1974 saw me meet Geoff off the train at Kettering. His first request was to visit Storefield in order to photograph the signal box. However, when we got there the box had gone – the box having closed a year previouly. All was not lost because a local person had got one of the window frames from the box and…

Authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1865 and thus the first narrow gauge railway designed for steam from its inception, the Talyllyn Railway Company became another notable ‘first’ 86 years later when it became the World’s First Preserved Railway. Still in operation by the original Talyllyn Railway Company and supported by the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society, the original two Fletcher Jenningsbuilt locomotives and small fleet of fourwheeled carriages (bolstered by additional locomotives and rolling stock from other lines or newly built) continue to make their way on the 2ft 3in gauge line from Tywyn, on the Cambrian coast, along the Fathew valley up to Abergynolwyn, the original passenger terminus. Since 1976 the passenger service has gone beyond on the ‘mineral extension’ to Nant Gwernol from where the first of…