Innehållsförteckning för January 2024 från Steam Days

Shrewsbury’s busy London & North Western Railway/LMS and Great Western Railway locomotive depots stood side-by-side on the same site alongside the companies’ joint main line from Shrewsbury to Hereford. The Shrewsbury area became part of the Western Region upon nationalisation and soon afterwards the two sheds were combined as a single depot with its motive power continuing to reflect the mixed company origins – the January 1960 allocation of 90 locomotives comprised 50 ex-GWR, 24 ex-LMS and 16 BR Standard engines. In early British Railways days the combined depot had five sub-sheds, all of ex-L&NWR origin and situated either alongside or on diverging routes from the former L&NWR & GWR joint main line heading south from Shrewsbury towards Hereford. Two of these, Ludlow (closed 1951) and Clee Hill (closed 1960),…

When dawn broke in Parkstone, Dorset, on Tuesday, 20 August 1963 I was already awake and eager to embark on the trainspotting trip of a lifetime. What was it that triggered my interest in railways historically, and has done ever since? As a five-year-old I lived in Broadstone and attended the local primary school. Broadstone station was adjacent to the end of the school playground from where we used to watch the many trains that passed through in those early 1950s days, the vast majority calling at the station. Broadstone was a major junction then, with four platforms and was on the route of the original London to Dorchester and Weymouth line – the ‘Castleman’s Corkscrew’, known for its proliferation of curves – between Brockenhurst and Hamworthy Junction, that avoided…

At the turn of 1957 the Scottish Region’s Gresley 2-6-2T fleet was busily going about its everyday business of hauling medium distance stopping passenger services in the central belt of Scotland. As already covered in our ‘Scotland’s Gresley 2-6-2Ts – the prime years’ article (Steam Days, April 2023), the local fleet was built with such work in mind and the spread of the allocation was from Stirling and Dunfermline in the north, to Haymarket and St Margaret’s in Edinburgh, Hawick to the south, and Kipps, Eastfield and Parkhead were the main sheds for Glasgow, but with Balloch and Helensburgh enjoying a ‘V1’ and ‘V3’ presence as sub-sheds at west end termini of the core commuter service. It is not the intention to overly depict the long-established work in photographic form…

With just one exception, the years 1951-64 saw the Stephenson Locomotive Society’s Midlands Area group involved in the organisation of at least one railtour from Birmingham to Swindon Works and back. Generally speaking, a singular annual trip ran for the membership, but two additional trips were run for the wider public when City of Truro was first returned to the main line and, as we will see, another railtour ran as a British Railways operation when the ‘King’ class 4-6-0s bowed out of use on the Birmingham main line, the format of this trip being a variation of that established by the SLS Midlands Area and was adopted with the society’s blessing. Despite the destination remaining the same, each visit was one of contrasts at Swindon, with locomotives of outgoing…