Innehållsförteckning för November 2024 från Steam World

COMMENT In a week when a highly sophisticated spacecraft failed to bring its crew back to Earth, I found myself talking to a railway-minded friend about Oliver Bulleid, and in particular his notorious ‘Leader’ 0-6-6-0T. A ready-to-run model of the ‘Leader’ is due to reach the shops shortly. The real thing, of course, never turned a wheel in traffic, the batch-build was cancelled and the completed locomotive and two-part-finished examples, were scrapped. In a quick thought, one could say it’s not unusual in Britain for work to start on novel, advanced ideas, only to be abandoned after a great waste of money – TSR-2, Concorde, Advanced Passenger Train, HS2 and so on. Equally, there have been instances where the best of tried-and-tested technology have been combined to produce something highly…

Apart from the former station house at Colnbrook and the remaining line to the Heathrow fuel pipeline there, there’s little left of the Staines & West Drayton Railway, which opened on August 9 1884. Promoted primarily by misguided Staines-based interests who proposed a north-south main line to the west of London, the S&WDR began construction in 1882 but ran out of money when it reached Colnbrook. Colnbrook was provided with a single platform, a handsome and distinctive yellow brick station, and a matching station house. Financial arrangements on the ‘live now, pay later’ principle were arranged to cover the construction southwards from Colnbrook to Staines and this section opened on November 2 1885. Drastic economies had been necessary in order to complete this Section. Though the right of way allowed…

I have often wondered who first recognised the photographic potential of Shap. An issue of The Railway Magazine from around the turn of the 20th century showed a northbound LNWR train climbing past Shap Wells. Countless other photographs from this wonderful location have been published over the years. Although I began trainspotting in London in 1955 (SW402), I left it quite late before making serious attempts to photograph steam. Initially, I photographed around South Yorkshire, London and the south of England. Later I wandered further north to Westmoreland, and over the border into Scotland. Almost every location provided something of interest, but it was the Westmoreland Fells and Shap that I enjoyed visiting most of all. Inspired by a Derek Cross photo-feature in a summer 1965 issue of Railway World,…

To crew a steel monster of many tons hauling a train, a man had to be top rate in health. It was a job that required a high standard of fitness. It took a lot of stamina to man those engines for many hours in all sorts of weather. A footplateman had also to be reasonably mobile, especially a fireman, who would spend a shift shovelling coal into a hungry, white hot firebox while standing on a floor that was never still. Footplate crews required regular medicals. You had to have good distance vision without the need for glasses (reading glasses were allowed). The test for colour vision was stringent and no allowances were made – you either passed or you were off the footplate for good. This also applied…

My boyhood football club, Preston North End, has been in the Championship since 2015. Luton Town, meanwhile, is back in the Championship having been relegated from the Premier League at the end of the last season. In late November 1959, both teams were in the old First Division with North End in second place behind West Ham on goal difference. Luton was due to face Preston at Kenilworth Road on November 20. We couldn’t miss this important game and so five of us hired a car for the journey south… and it would have been rude not to explore any interesting steam depots en route! Kick off was 2.15pm. It Was a 200 mile journey and there was no M6 in those days. We set off early, down the A49…

The ‘4MT’ 2-6-0 was another BR Standard class that we took for granted in our early spotting days in Surrey. This was a class fitted with 5ft 3in driving wheels designed mainly for goods work. It was a widespread class and could be found at opposite ends of the country, from the Southern Region to the Scottish. The design was an effective copy of the Ivatt ‘4MT’, introduced to the LMS in 1947. Despite issues with its double chimney, this design had become a de facto ‘Standard’; BR authorised construction at both Doncaster and Darlington in place of adopting a proposed Peppercorn design for a ‘light’ 2-6-0. Together with Horwich, new Ivatts were built for Eastern and North Eastern Region metals as well the London Midland Region. The draughting issues…

MV Ulster Monarch was on the overnight run to Belfast. The wind was blowing so strongly that it struggled to pull away from Liverpool’s docks. My friend Mark and I were deck passengers; railway engineering apprentices didn’t have much cash to splash around and we were on a very tight budget. This was late July and it was warn enough on deck. Some passengers soon looked a little green around the gills but we were fine - we’d taken some tablets as a precautionary measure! We had a splendid view of the Isle of Man in the middle of the night and a more distant one of the Mountains of Mourne in the small hours. I must have dozed off because the next thing I can remember was sailing up…

Want to see more? You can see more of Geoff Plumb’s impressive collection at https://plumbloco.smugmug.com/ while his ‘British Railways in the 1960s’ series of books can be found in all good railway bookshops.…

Iconic: sounds like the name of an LNWR ‘Precursor’, doesn’t it? Everything in the 21st Century seems to be iconic. It was used by a friend of mine to describe the return of newly-overhauled Peppercorn A2 Blue Peter to the East Coast Main Line. It made me think of all those other times when the right locomotive on the right line has prompted the thought ‘yes, that’s just right’. When you talk about the East Coast Main Line, surely the ‘iconic’ locomotive is ‘A4’ Sir Nigel Gresley? When you think about which locomotive for which route is ‘iconic’, does this apply for just within living memory or is it for all time? For non-railway enthusiasts, the ‘iconic’ engine for the East Coast Main Line is surely Flying Scotsman, whether we…

Sources My own Ian Allan Abcs and information held at the National Archives, Kew and the National Railway Museum, York. BR Steam Motive Depots: SR by P Bolger A Detailed History of British Railway Standard Steam Locomotives Vol. 2 by RCTS Southern Steam Sunset by J. H. Bird The Book of the BR Standards by R. Derry S&D steam finale by Michael S. Welch Ivo Peters’ series of books on the S&D for the 1950s and 1960s plus An English cross country railway Mendips Engineman by P. W. Smith The last years of the S&D by Colin G. Maggs The S&D in colour by Mike Arlett & David Lockett The S&D line by David Cross No. 76012 became the first ‘4MT’ 2-6-0 to run on the Somerset & Dorset Joint…