Innehållsförteckning för October 2024 från Steam World

COMMENT Here’s my current favourite photograph, which I bought because it features one of my favourite railway locations. It’s alsoa place which can still be enjoyed, even though it has changeda lot and the changes are not, in my view, any great improvement. Beeching’s report called it King’s Sutton, with an apostrophe. There’s no apostrophe on the station name plate which hangs on my wall. Apparently Beeching was correct but I prefer to spell it as it appeared on the station. To get back to the subject, I first went to Kings Sutton as a spotter in a belated– and largely fruitless– quest for more steam cops, in June 1965. By that time, most of the Western Region steam action that was accessible to me was north and west of…

I was a 16-year-old school leaver when I joined Ian Allan Ltd as a junior editorial assistant in the autumn of 1963. As I discussed in SW437/438, I was a very minor ‘state school kid’ in an organisation of senior people from public school backgrounds. I learned my job from my immediate colleagues, Alan Williams, the Editor of Model Railway Constructor and David Percival, the Assistant Editor. Through the winter of 1963-64, I commuted by Greenline coach to Craven House at Hampton Court but, early in 1964, the whole company moved to a new, purpose-built office at Shepperton. It was around this time, with Geoffrey Freeman Allen as Editor of Trains Illustrated, that big changes took place. Beeching’s report had been published in March 1963, lines were already closing and…

The West Highland Railway, which, courtesy of the Glasgow, Dumbarton and Helensburgh Railway, linked Glasgow with Fort William and, from 1901, Mallaig, has been one of Britain’s most scenic railway journeys long before it was made popular by a schoolboy wizard and a flying Ford 105E. However, the Harry Potter phenomenon has probably secured the line’s future as fans flock to the area, not only riding on West Coast Railway Company’s ‘Jacobite’ steam-hauled specials but also on regular service trains too. The regular influx of visitors provides an important foundation for Mallaig’s economy. Turn the clock back to the 1960s and things were very different. The Mallaig Extension, originally designed to boost the local economy, was actually deemed uneconomic and thus required government subsidy to get it built. The finances…

We tend to think that each region’s locomotives usually stuck to their own patch, unless it was for some unusual reason. But that was not the case. Trains that crossed BR’s regional boundaries were commonplace. It’s why it wasn’t unusual to see, for example, GWR 4-6-0s at Leicester. Or Southern and Eastern Region motive power at Oxford. These BR services owed their origins to long-standing arrangements, many of which pre-dated even the ‘Big Four’ era. We also tend to think even of the ‘Big Four’ as competing organisations but, actually, there was a great deal of co-operation between them and this dates from the latter part of the 19th century. This was to be expected where demand existed, the benefits were mutually profitable and where the railway companies were not…

It’s July 20 1967 and Peter and I are standing just a short distance from Shap summit, at Shap Wells. We had spied this goods train climbing very slowly for about 15 minutes before it reached us with ‘9F’ 2-10-0 No. 92212 struggling at the head while ‘4MT’ 4-6-0 No. 75026 was doing a noble job of banking. The whole train was bathed in sunlight but a cloudbank was approaching fast. The gods were with us – it didn’t cover the sun until five minutes after the train had passed. I managed to get telephoto and standard lens shots in colour and black and white. I even had time to run down the field and took side-shots of the banker. Peter was close to the action by the track. No.…

Dugald Drummond is a celebrated locomotive engineer but he produced several less-thanmemorable locomotive designs for the London & South Western Railway. His successes, however, undoubtedly included the ‘T9’ 4-4-0, known universally as ‘Greyhounds’ due to their speed and reliability. The 66 ‘T9s’ were built in three batches between 1899 and 1901. Dubs built 31 (LSWR Nos. 702-732, 773) and Nine Elms Works, which continued to build new locomotives until 1909, turned out 35 (LSWR Nos. 113-122, 280-289, 300-305, 307, 310-314, 336-338). All 66 survived to be inherited by British Railways but withdrawals began with a vengeance in 1951, when 20 were taken out of service. Thereafter, losses were more gradual, with none at all succumbing between March 1954 and September 1956. By mid-1955, the 36 survivors were spread out across…

For the last few months, I’ve been scanning and captioning (helped by mutual friend Peter Eastham) the fascinating BR steam photographic collection, created in the 1950s and 1960s, by Lancastrian Ken Roberts. It’s a slow job, made easier by 21st century scanning and online file transfer services, which would have seemed like science fiction to Ken at the time he took the pictures! This 21st century ‘tech’ enables me to produce and send the scans easily to Peter, who took them in batches to Ken’s home, to glean and record whatever we could about the images. Ken, like many photographers, sadly did not keep detailed contemporary photographic records. This was a slow job, too, but we plodded on. Ken loved talking about his pictures and, at 95 years old, he…

Ironing out that Consett ’9F’ location I write regarding your request as to the location of the ‘9F’-hauled iron ore train (Great Shot!, SW447) somewhere on the Tyne Dock to Consett line. I can confirm that the train is heading west between the towns of Stanley and Annfield Plain. The route of the railway is now part of the C2C cycle track across the north of England. Phil Dovaston by e-mail I think the location of the photographer is close to Kyo Lane over bridge, west of Stanley, County Durham. This fits with the map of the current Sustrans cycle route which uses the former trackbed. Also, the churches of St Andrew – with the larger tower – and St Joseph in Stanley form the centre backdrop, below the black…

Dr John A. Dew was a Cambridge undergraduate and medical student during the Second World War. His early logs focussed on LNER metals between London King’s Cross and Liverpool Street and Cambridge. He subsequently became a GP in Horsham where he was also a keen cricketer and governor of the local grammar school. His interest in railways never diminished and here are four different logs from four different journeys on each of the ‘Big Four’. 3.30pm Cambridge-King’s Cross Two journeys take place during wartime and two are post-war, in that often overlooked period between the end of the war and Nationalisation. The latter two are of interest, given that one is a famous named train and the other uses what was then a new design of locomotive. We start on…