Table of contents for Volume 38 No 9 - September 2024 in Backtrack

It's a county largely devoid of railways today. The Midland main line from London St. Pancras to Sheffield heads through Market Harborough (shortly after entering the county from Northamptonshire), Leicester and Loughborough before arrowing between Derby and Nottingham. The Leicester–Birmingham line attains Narborough and Hinckley before disappearing into Warwickshire. Heading t'other way out of Leicester, the line to Peterborough reaches the pork pie mecca of Melton Mowbray before exiting the county. That, amazingly, is the extent of Leicestshire's presence on the national rail network today, but it had much more in the past. The city of Leicester was once served by five stations, reduced to one today, whilst Loughborough has also been pared to just one, having once had three. Apart from these two surviving stations, which still receive express…

In the July 2023 issue of Backtrack, Vol.37 No.7, a selection of mill town stations, along with goods facilities, were described in detail. In this sequel (not intended to be Part Two of the July 2023 article) several mill towns have been selected to illustrate their common characteristics and their differences. The author has come to the conclusion that the long-held belief that the spinning of raw cotton was south east Lancashire, whilst the weaving of cotton into yarn was carried out in north east Lancashire is suspect. During the 1950s, as the cotton industry began to decline in the face of competition from countries such as India and Japan, the well-defined geographical separation between spinning and weaving was espoused, with some overlap of activities at the invisible boundary. The…

This is an account of a quiet and simple life led by a family living in a remote Dales cottage. It also tells us how that quiet existence was suddenly changed. Nancy Dawson had lived at number 1 Blea Moor Cottages since she was eighteen months old. Along with Nancy lived her mother, father and two older sisters. The family's reason for being in such a remote spot was her father's occupation: the maintenance of the railway track. Blea Moor Cottages was about one and a half miles north of Ribblehead Station, on the Settle to Carlisle line. There was no electricity, gas or running water in the house. Lighting was done with candles and a Tilley lamp. Warmth was achieved by paraffin heaters and coal fires. Water was brought…

Located immediately south of the station, on the up side, ie to the east, of the main line, between the St. Mary's Street Bridge (leading to Lockerbie Road) and the Annan Road bridge, Dumfries shed, built in red sandstone and opened fully by the Glasgow & South Western Railway in 1878 to a drawing of 1877, the design of Andrew Galloway, Engineer of the company from 1875 to 1885, was a dead-end six-roaded shed, divided into two three-roaded sections, the centre road on each side being initially without an inspection pit, though this omission was rectified in 1908. These pits were each 235 feet in length, contained within an overall shed length of 262ft 6in. The shed was 98ft 3in. wide with a total height of 32ft, while the height…

Holderness is the low-lying area of land to the east of Hull, with very few features that could be classed as hills. However, in the area of Keyingham and Burstwick, two existed, although one is now much diminished from its former state. Kelsey Hill was a glacial moraine of sand, gravel and many varied rocks from all over northern Britain, even including Shap granite. These materials were deposited there at the end of the last Ice Age, roughly ten thousand years ago. Exploitation of the aggregate in the area was evident in 1828, when John Phillips visited the area and noted a pit “about a mile south of Ridgmont”. This would have been Pit F on the Lewis F. Penny's map. By 1861 Prestwich noted several other pits in the…

The construction of most railways in the UK has been in accordance with an Act of Parliament although there have been exceptions, one of which was when a Certificate was issued by the Board of Trade. Another set of railways was authorised by Light Railway Order issued in accordance with the provisions of the Light Railways Act 1896. There was also a third category when no prior authority was needed and this was when the railway in question was built entirely on private land, not encroaching or crossing any public land or highway. Many of the early tramways or tramroads originated in this fashion as did one quite well known line, the Wotton (or Brill) Tramway which was originally constructed by the 3rd Duke of Buckingham to serve his house…

The Isle of Man, a self-governing Crown Dependency in the middle of the Irish Sea, measures just 32 miles long and, at its maximum, fourteen miles wide. Yet despite its small size it could once boast a generous and varied network of railways and tramways, mostly narrow gauge and employing a variety of traction methods – steam, horse, electric and cable – which served all the island's principal towns: Douglas (the capital), Castletown, Port Erin, Peel and Ramsey. The most extensive operation was that of the steam-worked 3ft gauge Isle of Man Railway Company, which had all the appearance of a main line system with routes running out of an impressive four-platform terminus at Douglas to Peel (opened in 1873) and Port Erin (1874). On the Peel line there was…

PART ONE At 5.35am on Monday 14th June 1954, without ceremony, a green two-car diesel train slipped out of Bradford Exchange station bound for Leeds Central, thus inaugurating British Railways’ first service to be worked by diesel multiple-units (DMUs). Eight units operated half-hourly trains, finishing with the 23.06 from Leeds to Bradford; some trains were extended to and from Harrogate, or Knaresborough on Sundays. Within seven years the national DMU fleet grew from sixteen vehicles to 3,770 – averaging ten new vehicles delivered every week. They took over nearly all the suburban, medium-distance inter-urban, local and branch line services on five Regions of British Railways, except those electrified or earmarked for closure even before Dr. Beeching's 1963 Reshaping Report. Exceptionally, the Southern Region carried out a similar exercise but using…

In the very early days of the steam railway locomotive there were various ways of describing it but quite early on, or so I always assumed, the Whyte designation was adopted. So I sat down to research the English 4-4-0 and reflect on those members I have encountered and and then, lo and behold, before I had barely got sorted I got side-tracked and was hauled across the Atlantic. This was not principally on discovering that the world's first 4-4-0, anywhere, was designed by Henry R. Campbell on the Philadelphia, Germanstown & Norriston Railroad in 1836, but that there was no such thing as a 4-4-0 until Frederick Methuen Whyte invented the term in 1900. So how were locomotives defined before then? Whyte, who was a senior engineer on the…