Indice dei contenuti per Volume 37 No 3 - March 2023 in Backtrack

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Back Track Introduction The small town of Shirebrook is situated in the farthest north east corner of Derbyshire. Its narrow terraced streets lie in the postindustrial shadow of spoil heaps now being reclaimed by nature. It presents a somewhat bleak prospect today dominated by the cavernous warehouses of Sports Direct. In the early 1970s it was a busy but unassuming place, home to just under 9,000 people. Most of its working population was employed by the National Coal Board (NCB) in its local pits. The largest of these was Shirebrook where about 1,100 men worked underground and 350 on the surface. It was one of the NCB's select few ‘big hitters’ so called because it regularly got more than one million tons of coal a year. It was one of…

Back Track The long summer holiday from school, devoid of any looming worries about having to earn a living, was something to be treasured more than we realised at the time, I suspect. School itself didn't worry me, despite certain aspects that I had an unreasonable (or so it seems now) capacity to hate. In my early teens I must have subconsciously developed the knack of larking about and having plenty of fun without evidence of it appearing on school reports any more damningly than an expressed lack of concentration. So, with average or better marks mostly, mum and dad weren't worried either. Boyish pursuits and activities abounded in the holidays and especially with the trainspotting hobby we were never bored, even if it meant seeing the same engines time…

Back Track When one wanders around a Model Railway Exhibition and sees prominently displayed on the shelf of a second-hand bookstall a copy of the 1985 reprint edition of the July 1922 Bradshaw, just begging to be purchased, what does one do? Well, one makes an instant impulse decision to buy and goes on to implement that decision even when subsequently surprised that although in very good condition the volume was somewhat overpriced, but nevertheless, as Edith Piaf often sang so powerfully. “Je ne regrette rien”. So, having made the purchase, it would be folly to consign the book to dust gathering on my own railway bookshelves. But how to use effectively its 1224 pages, of which 871 were timetables of British railway companies? An analysis of the timetables comprising…

BackTrack This is the story of two towns and the ‘Gingerbread Line’ connecting them. The sobriquet ‘Gingerbread’ alludes to the putative making of gingerbread in the Shropshire town of Market Drayton, an industry dating back to the eighteenth century. During the 1850s Market Drayton was isolated from the growing railway network, despite the town's importance as an agricultural centre. A sense of isolation affected many towns in England and Wales during the expansion of railways and Jack Simmons sums up the situation as follows: “The early trunk railways were planned primarily to serve large towns and industrial districts. They ran directly, except where the configuration of the country imposed deviations, and that meant that some smaller towns, which might have claimed from their trade or industry, a place on the…

BackTrack Whilst collecting stock for the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway stand at the 2021 Leiston Works Railway model railway exhibition, I stumbled across a 1952 edition of Trains Illustrated. This included a short article on the then recent closure of the Mid-Suffolk. Also among the 30 odd pages of this magazine was a short article by John Bourne commencing with the intriguing statement that “Strong local opposition has been a roused by the Railway Executive's proposal to withdraw the passenger train service from the Burry Port & Gwendraeth Valley Railway.” Noting that this line was not far from the area of South Wales which was the home of the maternal side of my wife's family (the men being coal face ‘hewers’ descended from Cornish and Irish miners), I wondered what happened…

Back Track It was whilst reading through some of the notes I had inherited from the late Geoffrey Webb that I came across this small entry which he had copied from a Railway Gazette (RG). I wondered if he had condensed it, since he wrote everything down in long hand. Later, I was able to obtain a photocopy of the piece which proved that Geoffrey had indeed copied it in toto. Thanks to the Editor of the Railway Gazette I am able to reproduce it for this article. It raised so many questions that it allowed my imagination to construct a likely scenario for the evening in question. The day in July 1933 had passed off at Wellingborough Midland Road station without anything untoward happening. It had been a fine…

Back Track Much of East Anglia east of Cambridge and Peterborough was monopolised by the Great Eastern Railway. However, in the south the GE faced competition from the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway and in the north from the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway or ‘M&GN’. The origins of the M&GN What became the M&GN system grew out of local schemes to link towns either side of King's Lynn. To the west, the ambitiouslynamed Norwich & Spalding Railway opened its line from Spalding to Holbeach for goods on 9th August and passengers on 15th November 1858, going on to Sutton Bridge on 1st July 1862. This was complemented by the Lynn & Sutton Bridge Railway opened in November 1864 for freight, passenger traffic following from 1st March 1866, and…

Following a tradition of taking on a proven locomotive design and adapting it for modern purposes, the Great Western Railway in 1932 produced an 0-4-2 tank for branch line work based on the ‘517’ Class which had originated back in 1868. These became the familiar ‘14XX’ Class of which there were 75 fitted for push-pull working, along with twenty engines not so equipped which formed the ‘58XX’ Class.…

BackTrack…

Back Track Many large cities have suburban rail services, indeed many could not function satisfactorily without them as can be seen when industrial action closes them down temporarily. Some used to have such services but now no longer have them as a result of bus competition which can be rather more easily diverted to wherever there is a perceived need. Some places like Manchester have managed to salvage their remaining suburban services and incorporate them into tram systems while others now wish their rail systems had not been decimated. Bristol falls into that category and there are, somewhat slow moving, plans to reinstate some of them as a Metro. One city where its suburban services were withdrawn at a stroke before World War II as a result of their inability…