Table of contents for Vol 37 No 1 - January 2023 in Backtrack

PART THREE Livio Dante Porta himself believed at this time that the future for steam should lie in a simple, but super-efficient, design for developing countries capable of burning a wide range of locally sourced fuels such as bagasse, the residue from sugar-cane pulping. In a paper he presented in Buenos Aires in 1963 was a drawing of a two-cylinder compound 0-8-0, which he suggested could be built at modest cost to any gauge.1 Among several points of interest are inside cylinders - in spite of the need for a crank axle - for better lateral balance, with exposed outside valve gear placed ahead of the smokebox for ease of maintenance. A screw mechanism would deliver fuel to a version of his cyclonic Gas Producer Combustion System firebox. Boiler pressure…

The three-cylinder V2 2-6-2s, “of the general utility type” as the London & North Eastern Railway described them, were one of that company’s finest designs. The description quoted above hardly does them justice, for they were intended to take on a wide range of traffic including passenger trains and above all express freights, including fast non-passenger workings such as fish and parcels. The first of the class entered service in 1935 and a total of 184 was constructed up to 1944, all at Doncaster and Darlington Works. The V2s were allocated throughout the LNER’s Southern, North Eastern and Scottish Areas and the last was not withdrawn until the end of 1966. As is well known, they have been described as ‘the engines than won the war’ due to their haulage…

At least one author has penned an excellent and detailed account of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Company’s locomotive works at Horwich, near Bolton, Lancashire. Reference is made to M. D. Smith’s Horwich Locomotive Works, a product of Wyre Publishing, 1996. Smith’s book is a wellillustrated account of the rise and fall of the Works from its opening in 1886 until closure in December 1983. The book includes a bibliography of books related to the Horwich Works, some well-known authors among them: John Marshall, O.S. Nock, G.E. Holt, Alan Earnshaw and Eric Mason. To repeat what has been already written would be trying the patience of readers, and is not the purpose of this article. Instead, the development of Horwich as a railway town is seen through the eyes by…

When I consider Devon I think railways, routes west and holidays. This is the way it was before the advent of the car, then later the belief you can only have a holiday if you fly somewhere. There are curios. Take Exeter St. David’s. Here, we have the odd sight of trains for London heading north and south. It’s a legacy of old railway turf wars when Exeter was home to both the Great Western Railway (trains to London Paddington), and London & South Western Railway or LSWR (trains to London Waterloo). Those rivals created today’s two easterly routes into Exeter, which may be regarded as the Devonian railway hub. The Paddington line approaches Exeter via Tiverton Parkway. The Waterloo line enters the county shortly before Axminster, continuing through delightfully-named…

PARY ONE Flollowing the railway camping coach provision of the London & North Eastern Railway, first in 1933, and the Great Western and the London Midland & Scottish in 1934, the Southern Railway was slow to catch on, slipping almost apologetically into the new concept in April 1935 with a modest batch of twelve converted six-wheel coaches which were distributed over eight sites in Devon and Cornwall, with one site in Hampshire, Hurn, on the Ringwood-Christchurch line, which housed a camping coach for its one and only season as the line was closed later that year. If the eventual provision of 24 coaches appears a rather cautious and half-hearted attempt to slot into the new holiday bandwagon, one possible factor in its low number of vehicles might be that with…

The Great Western Railway’s locomotive depot at Croes Newydd, Wrexham, was situated between the junction of the ChesterShrewsbury main line and the Minera branch. It moved to London Midland Region control in 1963 but became the last shed to have an allocation of GWR motive power.…

The output from British coalmines had risen from eight million tons in 1850 to 270 million tons just 50 years later, by which time the coal industry had become one of this country’s most important economic activities -and continued to be so until well into the twentieth century. Not only was coal needed to power industry and for domestic use but it was also a major export commodity with huge quantities produced by over 1,200 British pits shipped to destinations all over the world. Seaports on the eastern side of the Country at the mouths of the Tyne, Tees and Humber dominated the export side of the industry and it fell to the North Eastern Railway and the Great Central Railway to carry out much of the pit to port…

The first stirrings of the railways which were make Inverness the hub of railway communication in the Scottish Highlands and the centre of operations for the Highland Railway was the Inverness & Nairn Railway, opened on Monday 5th November 1855 connecting Inverness with Nairn, which lies to the east of Inverness in Morayshire. The next activity was the passing of the Act to construct the Inverness & Aberdeen Junction Railway on 21st July 1856, which would make an end-on junction with the Inverness & Nairn to extend the length of railway further eastwards as far as Keith, where it would make another end-on junction, this time with the Great North of Scotland Railway, which was pushing north westwards from Aberdeen, completion of which would at last give the good people…

In the article on my visit to Engine Shed Junction signal box (ESJ) at Kentish Town (Backtrack, June 2017), I made reference to the box at Mortimer Street. This article sets out how I reached the box and what I found when I got there. After leaving ESJ, I walked through one of the three short tunnels in order to reach Carlton Road signal box. My photography here complete, I asked the signalman if anything was likely to be about and whether there would be any problem if I went to Mortimer Street by walking through No.1 North Curve Tunnel. No problem he assured me, so I did! (Health & Safety would have had a field day.) Interestingly, an 1927 official map gives the length of the tunnel as being…

FROM THE PENDRAGON ARCHIVES The Central Wales line, running from Craven Arms (on the Shrewsbury-Hereford main line) via Llandrindod Wells, Llandovery and Llandeilo to Swansea Victoria, gave the London & North Western Railway a direct route into South Wales, but a difficult and mountainous one - though scenic! It is a remarkable survivor and seemed unlikely to escape the closure proposals of the 1960s; however, it is reckoned that its passage through some marginal Parliamentary constituencies at general election time played a part in its reprieve! Though much reduced in status and now terminating in Llanelli, it is still on the railway map and certainly worth travelling, as JOHN SPENCER GILKS did.…

Background By the late 1850s the boom in railway construction was well and truly over. If your town or rural community had been bypassed, or had otherwise missed out on the railway, you were doomed to struggle along with poor communications, isolated from profitable market places and losing out to those fortunate enough to have rail connections. A typical scenario in the second half of the nineteenth century saw the promotion of branch lines to serve towns that had missed out and their (usually) rural hinterlands. This was the case in Suffolk where branch lines were built to serve the towns of Eye, Hadleigh, Framlingham and Leiston. Most new branch lines terminated in the sponsoring town. However, a few, such as the Eastern Union & Hadleigh Junction Railway (EU&HJR) which…