Innehållsförteckning för Volume 39 No 1 - January 2025 från Backtrack

The use of 'Mixed Trains' was likely to have been an attractive proposition to any railway where traffic was sparse and economies could be achieved by running combined passenger and goods trains on many, mostly branch lines. By mid-Victorian times, for operating convenience on lightly-used lines, it had become general practice to marshal the goods wagons between the engine and the passenger coaches. This way the engine could be readily detached so as to be free to shunt wagons at intermediate stations on the way without having to run round the train to handle wagons at the rear. The Board of Trade's Railway (BoT) Inspectorate, however, was under no illusions that this exposed passengers to unnecessary risk. As well as advocating the adoption of the equally important absolute block system…

The normally traditional Great Western Railway took a considerable advance, for the time, in 1934 when it put into service the first of an eventual 38 diesel railcars following a prototype the previous year. The first eighteen were given an attractive streamlined outline, reflecting the fashion of the time, though further wartime production in 1940/1 took on a more utilitarian appearance. The last four cars took the form of two twin-car units, while two cars were built specifically for parcels traffic in the London area. The internal layout varied in terms of seating, luggage accommodation and other facilities. The first three were designed for express services between Birmingham and Cardiff and contained a buffet counter! Others were aimed at local and branch line work.…

In Part One of this article last month I examined the background, context, construction and opening of the railway lines from Andover to Kimbridge Junction and Hurstbourne to Fullerton. In Part Two I will look at the traffic and operation of the lines, the effects of grouping and nationalisation, the decline and closure of the lines, locomotives and rolling stock, the origins of the nicknames and what remains. Traffic and operation From the opening of the Andover to Kimbridge line in 1865 there were four trains both ways daily, one of which was mixed passenger and goods. There was an extra train from Southampton to Romsey. There was one passenger train either way on Sundays. The trains took 90 minutes to traverse the 28-mile route calling at all stations. Mixed…

Introduction As the British Transport Commission (BTC) embarked upon modernising the railways in 1955, it was able to call on four main suppliers when purchasing equipment for main line electric locomotives and multiple units. These were General Electric Company Ltd. (GEC), English Electric Co.Ltd. usually just known as English Electric, Metropolitan-Vickers (Metrovick) and British Thomson Houston (BTH). The last two were the two halves of Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) but operated separately for many years, often competing against each other for the same contracts. In this article we will look at the history of these companies and their inter-relationship with this country's railways along with the people, personalities and events which meant that by the time the Modernisation Plan was completed in 1968 they had become one single entity, by…

A lot of readers, upon looking at the title of this article, may well ask, “Railways and where?” So, by way of explanation initially: Edinburghshire is the official title which was used for many centuries to describe the Scottish county which included the city of Edinburgh. It was alternatively called Midlothian, a name which, according to the National Library of Scotland's map website, can be found on maps as far back as the 1640s. Eventually, the alternative came to prevail and, in 1921, the name of the county council was officially changed from Edinburghshire to Midlothian. Thus, throughout the pre-grouping era, more or less, Edinburghshire it was. That classic Ian Allan title of the 1960s, the Pre-Grouping Atlas and Gazetteer, for example, labels the county as Edinburghshire, with ne'er a…

Now 70 years distant, the early 1950s witnessed virtually the end of commercial steam locomotive manufacture worldwide. Boosted by the arrears resulting from the Second World War, despite the almost unaccustomed luxury of full order books, it was nevertheless a very difficult period for the traditional locomotive manufacturers. This was even before several were further obliged to diversify for the first time into the production of the alternative forms of railway traction, such as rapidly came to dominate motive power requirements after, say, 1954. This high demand also coincided with long prevailing severe steel shortages, as Europe sought to rebuild itself during the immediate post-war years. In two extreme instances matters were further compounded by a major international dispute in the Middle East, which delayed some later deliveries of a…

FROM THE PENDRAGON ARCHIVES…

Although six-coupled locomotives – Moguls and 'Jeeps' on the Northern Counties, Woolwich Moguls on the Midland Great Western and a selection of 4-6-0s on the Great Southern & Western/Great Southern culminating in the mighty, mythical 'Queens' – were used in express service on Irish railways, it would be fair to say that the 'regular' 4-4-0 ruled the roost. Indeed the Great Northern (Ireland) never saw any need to use anything larger than a 4-4-0 and locomotives of this wheel arrangement, both compound and simple, handled all its crack international trains. This selection of images from the COLOUR-RAIL Collection has a GN(I) bias with a couple of other companies represented by way of contrast. Caption details are by DAVID MOSLEY.…