Innehållsförteckning för September 2024 från Steam Days

Welcome to your September issue ofSteam Days. A significant moment for railway preservation in Britain will be when new-build ‘Brighton Atlantic’ Beachy Head steams for the first time in public at the Bluebell Railway’s late summer gala. How this graceful express locomotive was allowed to slip away first time around is lamented by Andrew Britton in his ‘Putting a wrong, right’ article. The passing of the last of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway Marsh ‘H2’ Atlantics in 1958 came just too early for enthusiasts to intervene. The steam preservation movement’s opening salvos had commenced with the narrow gauge Talyllyn Railway in 1951, the first preserved railway in the world. It was some nine years later before the first standard gauge preserved railway in the world opened … the…

One of the eye-catching elements of the 1955 Modernisation Plan was the news that the West Coast main line into Euston was to be electrified, both from Manchester and Liverpool, firstly as far as Crewe and then onwards through the Trent Valley, as well as via Birmingham. To date, successful and long-lived main line electrification schemes in the UK had used DC supply, at relatively low voltage and often with supply from a third rail, but the new railway was to use the 50-cycle AC system at 25,000 volts (25kV) and pick-up from overhead contact wire. Inspired by success the SNCF in France, but with the Lancaster to Heysham and Morecambe scheme used as a UK test bed since 1953 when upgraded from 6,600 volts AC to 22kV, even the…

Alnwick in 1964 I was interested in the article about Alnwick in its final years, and in particular the photograph on page 40 showing the Ilderton-Alnwick goods/parcels behind ‘D20’ class No 62387. Having lived at Wooperton station as a young lad, I can more or less precisely locate where this photo was taken. The train is passing over Hedgeley Moor, and Wooperton station with its overbridge that carried the B6346 road can be seen in the far background. It is passing the site of the Battle of Hedgeley Moor of 1464, one of the War of the Roses conflicts where the Lancastrians were defeated by House of York. One of the victims was Sir Ralph Percy who died of his wounds near this spot. The Percys were. and still are.…

The late R H N ‘Dick’ Hardy, former shedmaster of Stewarts Lane motive power depot, and driver Bert Hooker of Nine Elms shed often lamented that when the last ‘Brighton Atlantic’ was cut up at Eastleigh a great wrong was done, as No 32424 Beachy Head was a very worthy candidate for preservation. As we go to press, this great wrong is being put right by the Bluebell Railway Atlantic Group. Several years ago, a former Great Northern Railway Atlantic boiler came up for sale and was purchased with the intention of using it to build a replica London, Brighton & South Coast Railway 4-4-2 at the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. The boiler was discovered in Essex by Nick Pigott and Steve Dymond at a joinery business owned by Boulton…

Since September 1955 I had been in the employ of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority at Capenhurst, the plant served by a station five miles north of Chester on the former joint GWR/LMS main line to Birkenhead, a stay of a few months in the UKAEA hostel being followed by lodging in Saltney, 2¼ miles west of Chester, from February 1956. Including an outward engine change at Chester (General), and train change on the way home, Saltney-Capenhurst commuting was included within my article ‘North Wales and Chester memories: from childhood beach visits to post-graduate commuter’ in the June 2024 issue ofSteam Days, and I now continue the story of my time in Chester, with everyday observations and outings of note, a few of them predating my employment. In August…

In 1923, at Grouping, all of the individual railway companies except the mighty Great Western Railway lost their identities, the Highland Railway becoming part of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway. At that point in time the Highland Railway possessed 173 locomotives, but only 150 were taken over by the LMS. The first new arrival on former Highland territory was ex-Glasgow & South Western Railway (G&SWR) Smellie class ‘218’ 0-4-0ST No 658 (LMS No 16040), still in that company’s livery; it was brought in to work the Inverness Harbour branch. For that branch, the Canal Basin and shunting around Inverness and its motive power depot, several ‘Pug’ engines, mostly ex-Caledonian Railway, made their appearance over the years, among them Drummond ‘264’ class 0-4-0ST No 16011 from the Dawsholm sub-shed at…

Long ago, well before the term ‘heritage railway’ was coined, railway enthusiasts delighted in the light railways of England with their charming and often sublime appeal. The first statutory use of the term ‘light railways’ came in the Regulation of Railways Act 1868, which permitted the building of such a railway subject to constraints and restrictions to be imposed by the Board of Trade (BoT), including an eight ton maximum axle loading and a speed limit of 25mph. The Act, and the subsequent Light Railways Act of 1896, was projected to enable the provision of better transport links into often remote agricultural areas by decreasing the costs of construction and thus permitting new railways to be built quickly. The intention was to unlock the potential for small independent railway companies…