Innehållsförteckning för July 2021 från Steam World

Before leaving school, trips away from my spotting base at Wimbledon, seven miles from Waterloo, were limited by pocket money and special monetary treats from my grandfather. However, being so close to Waterloo, funds stretched to regular visits to London termini and locomotive sheds. I was able to build up a decent number of ‘cops’ from other regions beside my home ground on the Southern. It was the visits to London’s stations that started my love affair with Gresley’s sublime ‘A4’ class ‘Pacifics’. King’s Cross, Euston, St Pancras and Paddington were the usual stations I visited, and if there was enough time, Liverpool Street. King’s Cross was first on the list though - early enough to see what had brought in some of the overnight sleeper trains from the north.…

Having recently moved from Sussex to Nottinghamshire, I was looking forward to a journey which I had to make to London, as I could travel by train to St Pancras. It was a real disappointment. I was looking out for various junctions, depots and goods yards but all I saw was a diesel stabling point at Leicester, a Thameslink depot at Bedford and a large depot at Cricklewood on the site of the old MPD(14A). While I knew the railways had changed a lot since the days when I would often travel to many parts of Britain by train, I hadn’t realised just how enormous the changes had been. My journey set me thinking of the times when one could find steam locomotives all over Britain in numerous situations’ without…

Woodford Halse intrigued. It was 40 miles from Oxford. A fellow enthusiastic geography undergraduate, Mike Hattersley, had a car. He was a transport enthusiast, and an aficionado of buses and lorries as well as railways. Six months later, he and I conspired to do our own field trip to Woodford. In the middle of pastoral nowhere but located where a low watershed divide made it advantageous to split heavy mineral trains from the North down-gradient either to London or to industrial South Wales, the Great Central established extensive marshalling yards and a large engine shed. Employment of upwards of 250 drivers and firemen, fitters and maintenance workers saw the superimposition of turn-of-the-century railwaymen’s terraced housing upon a Northamptonshire village. A strategic railway creation at the scale of the national economy,…

Memories of management at Fareham’s nine stations I’ve much enjoyed the article about the Eastleigh-Portsmouth route in the May issue (SW 407). I was Station Manager at Fareham in 1968, in charge of Portchester, Gosport (Goods), Knowle Junction, Botley, Swanwick, Bursledon, Hamble Halt and Netley. The London & Southampton Railway ran from north-east to south-west so, where there were two signalboxes at a station, the one nearest to London was the East ‘box and the one furthest from London was the West ‘box. It carried on doing this when it built the branch to Gosport, completely forgetting the railway had turned a corner at Eastleigh! This meant the signalbox at the western end of Fareham station was the East ‘box and the box at the eastern end was the West…

It’s probably safe to say that there has been an element of bipartisanship amongst the railway fraternity in Gloucester ever since the ‘Battle of the Gauges’ in the 1840s, when Brunel’s broad gauge Bristol & Gloucester Railway met the standard gauge which came down from Birmingham. Through running on the standard-gauge was made possible by 1854 with the opening of the Tuffley loop, and the route between Birmingham and Bristol became one of the main limbs of the Midland Railway. Soon, only the Cheltenham & Great Western Union branch from Swindon, taken over by the Great Western Railway, remained broad gauge. Even so, the differences remained after the end of the broad gauge locally in 1872, beyond the formation of the ‘Big Four’ in 1923 and nationalisation into the 1950s.…

My interest in steam railways started in around 1962. I was brought up in Hucknall. We were lucky and once had three railways and stations in the town. The Great Northern through Hucknall Town station had long closed. Then there was the Midland Railway line from Nottingham to Worksop, now the Robin Hood Line through Hucknall Byron. Finally came the Great Central Railway from Nottingham to Sheffield. This latter station, Hucknall Central, was only a short bike ride from home and so most of my early spotting was done from here – sitting on the wooden fence next to the ticket office overlooking the station. As a young boy I attended the County High School Arnold Grammar. It was here that I met up with a couple of older school…

To see as many trains as possible in the West of England on Summer Saturdays in the 1950s, you needed to go to one of the main stations - Exeter St David’s where you got Western and Southern trains, Newton Abbot where some trains changed locomotives on Torbay-bound trains and almost all of those to/from Plymouth and Cornwall attached or detached an assistant locomotive, or Plymouth North Road where most trains into and out of Cornwall changed locomotives. However, on a lovely sunny afternoon, the Dawlish sea wall offered a wonderful place to watch trains. There were maybe fewer of them, but it was - and is - a stunning location. You could sit on the wall right outside Dawlish station, but there were better places to watch trains further…

Designed by Nigel Gresley for LNER mixed traffic duties, the ‘V2’ 2-6-2s were capable of handling everything from prestige main line expresses to humble freight workings with great success – especially when newly – introduced. The first engine of this celebrated class, No. 4771 Green Arrow, entered service from Doncaster works in June 1936 followed by a further four that year. An additional 20 ‘V2’s were built at Darlington Works in 1937 and the remainder of the class was also built at Darlington between January 1938 and July 1944, bringing the class total to 184 locomotives. Five ‘V2’s received military names and two were named after famous schools in North East England. The first ‘V2’ to be allocated to the Scottish area was No. 4775 (British Railways No. 60804) which…

When you see the letters ‘LNER’, do they conjure up an image of a clean lined Gresley ‘Pacific’ on a rake of teak stock, or a candy striped ‘Azuma’ humming north under the wires? How about LNWR, the self-styled ‘Premier Line’? Blackberry black locomotives capable of astonishing feats of haulage, speed and mechanical longevity, or an air-conditioned Electric Multiple Unit at speed through Tamworth? Or how about a Great Western Railway ‘Castle class’? A copper capped taper boilered speed machine complete with cast nameplate and numberplate and in gleaming green, or a recycled ‘short set’ High Speed Train, also gleaming in green? Truly we live in strange times, and one feels that as far as railway history is concerned they may prove very confusing to historians of the future. Which…