Innehållsförteckning för February 2026 från Steam Days

Running along the western side of Southampton Water, the nine-mile Southern Railway branch line from Totton to Fawley has rarely attracted much attention from railway historians, but there is much of interest. Although only built in 1925, it has both a rich prehistory and a resilience that has seen it reach 101 years of service, albeit its passenger operations cover only about four decades of that. Situated on England’s south coast, Hampshire is an attractive, seaside county containing much delightful woodland and estuarial scenery. In pre-Grouping days, it was a London & South Western Railway stronghold, railway development in and around Southampton having started in the 1830s when the London & Southampton Railway was promoted to construct the London-Southampton line, which was completed on May 11, 1840, by which time…

Castlethorpe sits mid-way between London and Birmingham in the Buckinghamshire countryside on the West Coast main line just north of Wolverton. It witnessed the very beginnings of the railway age as the London & Birmingham Railway (L&BR) was completed in September 1838 and ran through the village, which then had a population of just over 300, although it did not have a station until 1882 – that was provided by the 1846 successor to the L&BR, the London & North Western Railway (LNWR). Castlethorpe was typical of many villages on British main lines whereby many trains passed through at speed and the few that stopped were usually part of an often sparse local service or a daily pick-up freight that might shunt a few wagons in and out of a…

The life and times of John Farquharson McIntosh, the Chief Locomotive, Carriage & Wagon Superintendent of the Caledonian Railway at St Rollox Works, Glasgow from 1895-1914 has been well documented. His locomotive designs for the company were held in the highest esteem for their robust construction, low maintenance costs and in time their longevity. During McIntosh’s period of office, a total of 574 engines of his design were constructed, as well as, amongst other things, the rebuilding of George Brittain’s Oban Bogie 4-4-0s of 1882. After a period of 19 years in charge at St Rollox, McIntosh was elected as President of the Association of Locomotive Engineers, while in the autumn of 1913 he was created as a member of the Royal Victorian Order by His Majesty King George V,…

I believe I accompanied my mother on two separate visits to see her sister who lived in Saltford, east of Bristol, and in May 1954, on the second visit, as I always started my rail journeys from the former Great Western Railway station at Saltford, it seemed logical to take a few photographs there. The railway through Saltford was part of the original GWR main line linking London Paddington and Bristol, and thence to the West of England, which was built in stages, the section from Bristol to Bath being opened on August 31, 1840. However, some railway history of note for Saltford predates that, as engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel bought a 1744-built three-storey house in the High Street in April 1836 and then conveyed it to the GWR in…

It may be axiomatic to suppose that after the Nationalisation of the railways in 1948, wherever main line trains ran they did so on British Railways’ tracks, as opposed to the position prior to that when a long rail journey might run over two or three separate undertakings. However, thanks to an anomalous situation brought about by the events of 1948 there remained one main line, the trains of which operated on completely foreign metals for something like 35 miles. The route in question was the Great Central main line, which historically had covered the last 40 miles from Quainton Road into London over the Metropolitan & Great Central Joint Railway, only the last few miles from Neasden to the terminus at Marylebone being purely Great Central. The arrangement worked…