Índice para Volume 39 No 10 - October 2025 em Backtrack

The Great Western Railway Company was incorporated on 31st August 1835, following many name changes. The main impetus for the project stemmed from merchants and businessmen who were closely associated with Bristol. If the rival port of Liverpool had its rail connection with Manchester, and moves were afoot linking London with Birmingham, then it was imperative that the great city of Bristol should have its direct connection with the metropolis. The project lapsed for a period of seven years; but the idea never collapsed entirely. The GWR Company comprised two committees of twelve members: the London Committee and the Bristol Committee. An engineer was required; the man for the job was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, aged 27, known for his involvement with the Thames Tunnel, for his design of the Clifton…

Steam locomotive champion André Chapelon (1892-1978) probably doesn’t need any further introduction. This brilliant French engineer revolutionised steam locomotive design by systematically applying state-of-the-art thermodynamics and mechanical engineering to steam locomotives of conventional layout, ie fitted with normal locomotive boilers and direct coupled reciprocating machinery. His first rebuilt Pacific locomotive (1929) almost doubled the power output of the original, with greatly improved efficiency. Later locomotives (all reconstructions of older designs) had still more spectacular power to weight ratios.1 In 1938 he published his masterpiece La Locomotive à Vapeur, containing both a contemporary steam locomotive catalogue (expanded in the final 1952 edition and translated into English2) and a hitherto untranslated but rather more interesting and in fact unique technical and thermodynamical treatise on steam locomotives. Among an incomparable wealth of data…

The end of the war finally came on 31st May 1902 with the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging, although British troops remained in South Africa as a garrison for several years – over 16,000 were still there in 1907 and the author’s grandfather served there for two years, 1912-14. Post-war deaths and a 'resurrection' “Trooper O’Hara, of Driscoll’s Scouts, whose home is New Orleans, U.S.A., landed at Southampton on Saturday, and was being conveyed in a troop train the same day to Shorncliffe camp [near Folkestone]. In the evening, after passing Tonbridge, the man got out on the footboards, and when below Pluckley climbed on to the top of the carriage and was knocked off and killed in passing under Chart Leacon bridge, two miles above Ashford. At the…

My formative years were spent in the Far Cotton area of Northampton, not far from the London & North Western Railway Bridge Street station, and in those days a journey to and from the town centre was always made by a Northampton Corporation Transport ‘red bus’, so named to differentiate from the more rural services of United Counties whose vehicles were ‘Tillings’green. Close to the above-mentioned station was a very infrequently used stop known locally as ‘Midland Goods’ situated in the shadow of a very tall brick warehouse. Remarkably some 60 years later, and despite a recent wholesale redevelopment of the area, that warehouse is still there as one of the very few reminders of the Midland Railway company in Northampton. Northampton has always been considered as London & North…

It is widely known that Queen Victoria’s first railway journey was on the Great Western Railway broad gauge. However, her first carriage on standard gauge is perhaps the most mysterious of Queen Victoria’s royal carriages and was built by Joseph Wright and the London & Birmingham Railway in 1843. One image in particular of this carriage from the Illustrated London News (ILN), has travelled through history, being used as a source for other drawings, and has thrown a veil over what the carriage really looked like. The drawing has deceived the London & North Western Railway at the end of the nineteenth century, The Times newspaper and the LMS in the 1930s. The veil can now be lifted. The error can now be traced back to the original written description…

This is the latest in a series of county articles I’ve tackled for Backtrack, everything from Somerset and Shropshire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire, to Herefordshire and now Hampshire. Living in neighbouring Dorset I have an affinity with Hampshire which still has a reasonable network, albeit with gaps which we’ll fill in. Hampshire has lost around a quarter of the network it had back in the 1950s with its operational passenger stations reduced from 110 to 64 between 1950 and 2005, the latter figure excluding those in preservation. For a summary of extant lines we could start in the container and cruise centre of Southampton which has a number of important lines radiating through Southampton Central. There’s the South West main line (SWML) between Waterloo and Weymouth which enters the county between…

The railway map of Britain changed dramatically following the publication of the Beeching Report in 1963. Branch lines, in particular, were heavily hit, few anywhere in Britain surviving beyond the end of the 1960s. One of those that did escape Beeching’s axe was the Lymington branch in Hampshire, a feat it seems to have managed primarily because it connected passengers travelling to and from the Isle of Wight via the Yarmouth–Lymington crossing with main line services to London etc. Measured from the interchange station at Brockenhurst on the main line, the branch is just 5½ miles long, though the branch proper begins at Lymington Junction, a mile or so to the south west of Brockenhurst. There was one intermediate station at Lymington Town. Though never listed as such in railway…

The city of Gloucester used to have two stations, reflecting the presence of both the Great Western and the Midland Railways. The GWR arrived from Swindon in 1845 and what became Gloucester Central station opened with the South Wales line. The MR’s audacious acquisition of the Birmingham–Bristol route saw its own station established, the second of which became Gloucester Eastgate. Midland route Bristol trains were able to call at Eastgate but following its closure from 1st December 1975 such trains now have to run into Central station and reverse or, more usually, omit the city altogether by using the direct avoiding line. These photographs by PETER BERRY were taken shortly before Eastgate closed.…

Railway companies have never been regarded as particularly generous organisations, especially not so far as the mainstream press have been concerned. Indeed some companies and their directors were described during the Victorian era as ‘grasping’. It might come as something of a surprise therefore to learn that at least one such company used to voluntarily pay a local tax in order to “prevent interruption to their trade and inconvenience to their customers” and that such apparent generosity had been in operation for some years by the time that the ‘War of the Petty Customs’ flared up. That at least is how it was represented in the Dundee, Perth & Cupar Advertiser (DP&C Ad) for 3rd June 1859. The levying of Petty Customs was one of the ways in which Town…