Backtrack -julkaisun Volume 38 No 4 - April 2024 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

FROM THE PENDRAGON ARCHIVES…

Out of the 1950s Modernisation Plan came a desire by British Railways to update the image of Pullman travel, based around ‘traditional’ Pullman cars of the 1920s/’30s, and the result was five sets of 2,000hp diesel-electric units built by Metropolitan-Cammell to a stylish modern design. Two six-car sets went to the London Midland Region to run between Manchester Central and London St. Pancras via the Midland route, the other three of eight cars were to be used by the Western Region on services from Birmingham and Bristol to Paddington. Their attractive Nanking blue and white livery was an eye-catching departure from the long-standing Pullman colours of old, while their interiors were also of a pleasing design with airconditioning – modern but still with ‘class’! They provided a fillip to travel…

Mention Stockton in a railway context and thoughts immediately spring back some 200 years to the Stockton & Darlington Railway. But today’s Stockton station is not that served by the S&D, whose passengers joined and alighted much closer to the town centre at St. John’s Crossing which was near to the staithes where coal traffic from the line was discharged. Today’s station is to the north west and some distance away from the historical centre of the town, the High Street, to which it is linked by Bishopton Road and which passes under the railway south of the station. Being rather an interloper amongst the august contributors to Backtrack I’ll not attempt to give a detailed back history to the current station, but a brief summary should provide a background…

The overwhelming majority of the diesel locomotives at work in Australia today were built either in Australia or in the USA, but when Australia’s railways began the transition from steam to diesel after World War II they purchased many of their new locomotives from British builders. The purpose of this article, which concentrates mainly on diesels bought by the various government-owned railway systems, is to shed some light on why they were bought, how they performed and why, after just a few years, the orders stopped. Two factors – politics and economics – had a lot to do with the arrival of Britishbuilt diesels in Australia. In the years immediately after the war it was recognised in Australia that British industry had been badly battered by six years of fighting…

The triangular junction at Shipley linking the Leeds, Bradford and Skipton routes was the subject of a colour feature in the February issue. This month we take the story forward to the establishment of platforms on all three sides of the layout, electrification and the coming of modern signalling. Once again GAVIN MORRISON is our photographer.…

In a previous article (Backtrack Vol.38 No.2) we saw how an original portion of the East Coast Main Line had become so run down that there could be no justification for its retention for either the minimal passenger or goods traffic which it carried and it was closed from 9th January 1956. This then left the small Fife towns of Tayport and Newport-on-Tay served by what was now a steeply graded single track suburban branch line leading to the city of Dundee. It was considered locally to be indispensable, for the only alternative way of crossing the River Tay was the Newport to Dundee ferry service operated by Dundee Harbour Trust. A portent of doom came to light, however, when the construction of the Tay Road Bridge (TRB) was announced…

Princetown is a village of about 1,500 souls in the county of Devon. Set 1,400ft above sea level in the centre of the Dartmoor National Park, it was founded in 1785 by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt who was at the time Secretary to the Prince of Wales (Duke of Cornwall), after whom the village is named. It is the highest settlement on the moor and one of the highest in the United Kingdom. Princetown is the site of Dartmoor Prison which houses a further 650 people. The Princetown Railway was a 10¼-mile single track railway linking the village to Yelverton on the Plymouth to Tavistock line. Background The ever active, philanthropic and entrepreneurial Tyrwhitt, an extensive landowner in the counties of Devon and Cornwall, one time Member of Parliament for Okehampton…

I wonder how many Backtrack readers regularly perusing the plethora of railway photographs published in the magazine’s pages each month pause to look not only at the infrastructure, the locomotives and the trains, but also at the people frequently depicted. Sometimes, of course, people are the very subject of the picture, maybe a mug-shot of a company’s chief mechanical engineer or a formal line-up of officials, but on occasions totally anonymous and unidentified people happen, quite unwittingly, to have been caught by the photographer. Alternatively, a bystander may have spotted the photographer and posed deliberately to be within shot. Both possibilities are clearly illustrated by three of my favourite Metropolitan Railway photographs. On 22nd June 1935 the well-known railway photographer Henry Casserley was standing, camera in hand, on the down…

Opened in 1894 the Manchester Ship Canal was one of the great engineering achievements of the Victorian age and, in addition to the 36-milelong waterway linking Manchester with the sea, the Manchester Ship Canal Company also operated its own extensive railway which had initially developed to assist in the building of the canal. By 1923 this had become the largest industrial rail system in the country, with the MSC Co. employing more than 70 steam locomotives and operating over 230 miles of track. In addition to the yards and sidings which served Salford and Pomona Docks, the Manchester Ship Canal Co. also had its own continuous through railway line which ran alongside the north bank of the canal all the way from Salford, via Partington North, as far as Latchford,…