Innehållsförteckning för October 2021 från Steam World

I’ve always been fascinated by bridges. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a town with a bridge that was notorious. Staines bridge carried the A30 main road over the River Thames. Even as early as the 1950s, on summer Saturdays, with holidaymakers heading for the West of England, its traffic jams were legendary. It had been a crossing place since Roman times, when it was called Pontes, meaning bridges. When I was a kid, there was a war-time Bailey bridge in addition to the road and rail crossings of the river. There was, however, nothing spectacular about the bridges at Staines. ‘Spectacular’ meant the Forth rail bridge and Brunel’s Royal Albert bridge at Saltash. I saw both and made a point of travelling over the Saltash bridge in the…

As my steam spotting days drift further and further away – well over 50 years – it is difficult to recall where I first saw each individual engine underlined in my Ian Allan Combined Volume from summer 1961. Unlike some people I did not see thousands upon thousands of steam locomotives and therefore few complete classes, and all of those were on the Southern Region, save for the WR ‘King’ 4-6-0s which were cleared on a cold winter’s day in in 1963 – the last one was No. 6018 King Henry VI and I wasn’t even looking for it! The 50 ‘U’ class 2-6-0s were one of the SR classes fully underlined in the ‘CV’, though a bit different from the ‘Kings’: in fact, a world apart. Whereas they worked…

Steam World principally features the British Railways steam era from 194868 but sometimes that 20-year timeframe can seem a bit restrictive. We do, however, feature pre-Grouping locomotives which did survive into the BR era, most recently the SECR ‘H’ class 0-4-4Ts in Steam World, September. I am an enthusiast of the locomotives which I saw when I was growing up and those were primarily Great Western and Southern types. However, it is impossible to spend a lifetime in railway journalism and not be attracted to at least some locomotives from further afield. It was a holiday at Fort Augustus and research into the Invergarry & Fort Augustus Railway that introduced me to the ‘Skye bogies’, a class of Highland Railway 4-4-0s designed by David Jones and built at Lochgorm Works…

One of the most common pieces of advice for anyone who wants to build a model railway is to plan your landscape and scenery first. Railways were built through the landscape and not on it. Mountains were skirted, hills were tunnelled through and rivers bridged. Fall into the trap of building your baseboards first, laying track and then building your tunnels and bridges, and you’ll be left with an unrealistic flat landscape that bears more resemblance to a snooker table than the real world. Except that there was one location where the railway came first and the river came second…and where the landscape really is as flat as a snooker table! Outsiders always view the Fens -the southern tip of Lincolnshire, the very top corner of Norfolk and the right…

Crofton: a correction I was very interested to read your piece in ‘Call Attention’ (September) on the Crofton Beam Engines. Despite visiting a few times, I had never noticed that the boilers were made by Swindon Works. I would, however, just like to correct a small detail – the article mentions that the engines lift water to a reservoir. In fact, the engines lift the water from a reservoir. Wilton Water is on the opposite side of the canal to the pumping station. There is a pipe under both the canal and the railway from Wilton Water into the pumping station. The engines then lift the water into a ‘leat’ which is a feeder to the canal. This leat flows a short distance into the top pound of the K&A…

I entered the footplate scene some time during 1948. This was the year when Britain’s railway system became nationalised, and when the LMS, LNER, GWR and SR came under the single banner of British Railways. There followed a concerted recruiting drive by BR, inviting keen youngsters (as I was then) to join the ranks; although I have to admit that, unlike a majority of 17-year-olds, I held no burning ambition to become an engine driver. In fact, I was simply a lad looking to earn a reasonable wage, and a jump from £2 per week as an apprentice learning to make kitchen equipment, to around £5 as a railway engine cleaner, was a chance too great to miss. Along with one or two other hopeful lads, I presented myself for…

All readers of Steam World know what happened in August 1968 – it’s a year with ‘1066’ status to us. This was the month and year in which British Railways steam traction came to a grubby and actually rather ignominious end, in many ways. The last handful of battered locomotives, allocated to the Motive Power Depots at Carnforth (10A), Preston’s Lostock Hall (10D) and Burnley’s Rose Grove (10F), were generally filthy, weary and neglected. As the end neared, it was no surprise – and actually common sense and good management of public funds – not to waste money on engines which would be going for razor blades in a few short weeks and months. If they couldn’t limp on thanks to parts stripped from already withdrawn engines in the scrap…

I wonder if today’s teenagers enjoy anything like the same freedoms that I, and countless of my generation, did in the early 1960s? Looking back, it seems that what my brother and I did in terms of travelling to places by train, unaccompanied, at the ages of 15 and 12 would never be allowed today. Our parents always erred on the side of caution, yet they allowed it. Or did we, perhaps, not always reveal the extent of our travels?! At this distance in time, I really can’t remember. Initially, it was all about trainspotting, and that had begun in our back garden, right beside the Southern Region line between Staines Central and Egham, on what was known as ‘the Reading line’. Though all the passenger services were electric multiple…

In the summer of 1962 I was living at Shenfield, Essex, and at the tender age of 15 had only seriously started photographing steam, after buying my first ‘decent’ camera, a Kodak 66 folding camera. It had a reasonable f4.5 lens, six shutter speeds to 1/200th sec and took 6cm by 6cm negatives, 12 on 120 roll film. I was developing, printing and enlarging black and white photographs by this time, buying the equipment and learning how to do it in the Photographic Club at my school, the Royal Liberty Grammar School in Gidea Park, Essex. My interest in steam had started very young. I was born in Cambridge and my parents regularly took me to the best vantage points, Mill Road bridge north of the station, the cattle market…

It was interesting to read about my home-town station in recent issues of Steam World as it tends to be forgotten, along with Hull and Scarborough. Back in the 1960s when Iwas trainspotting, Bridlington had six platforms plus two excursion platforms, a three road engine shed with its own allocation of engines, two turntables, a large goods yard, coal drops separate from the goods yard, two signal gantries with upper and lower quadrant signals, two signal cabins and extensive carriage sidings for the summer trip trains. We now have been promised, in October this year, a single through platform and a bay platform, but what is more important, we are to loose all the semaphore signals to be replaced with multiple aspect colour lights. I was lucky enough, recently, to…