Table of contents for Volume 37 No 7 - July 2023 in Backtrack

How nice it would be to have your own railway station and to be able to stop any train you wanted to board. Few people have had this luxury granted to them; one was Sir George Grey who lived at Fallodon Hall in Northumberland. The Newcastle & Berwick Railway was being promoted in 1844-5 and it was planned to cross land owned by Grey, the local Whig Member of Parliament, and also that of his relative Earl Grey of Howick Hall. If you were railway director George Hudson, and wanted to ensure the support of these landowners, then a good way to gain this at relatively low outlay would be to provide private stations close to the family home, with the right to stop trains when travelling to or from…

FROM THE PENDRAGON ARCHIVES An article on the North British Railway 4-4-2s in our February issue showed what handsome locomotives they were and prompted readers to wonder whether they or the Great Central Railway’s Atlantics were the best-looking of this wheel arrangement. Judge for yourselves!…

Though only sixteen miles separate these two towns plans for no fewer than six routes between them had been made by 1845. The Great Western countered the Richmond, Staines & Newbury Junction Railway, the nearest to the one existing today, with a London, Staines, Ascot & Reading Junction Railway from Old Oak Common to Reading via Hounslow, Staines and Wokingham. Of the 1845 proposals the Reading, Guildford & Reigate Railway, authorised in 1847, opened between Farnborough and Reading in July 1849, Wokingham station being commissioned shortly afterwards. And the London & South Western Railway planned a branch from Weybridge to Staines via Chertsey and Thorpe, terminating on the south side of the Thames close to Staines bridge: the WeybridgeChertsey section opened in February 1848. The Windsor, Staines & South Western…

SIGNALLING SPOTLIGHT Melton Junction This signal box at Melton Junction, where the Nottingham and Leicester lines diverged, opened in December 1905. The box is of the Midland Type 3 design with tall 5ft high windows in the sides as well as the end. It was originally provided with a 24-lever frame, but after just two years a new 28-lever frame was installed to allow Melton West box on the Leicester line to be closed and replaced by a ground frame. The box declined in importance after the Nottingham line closed as a through route and was taken out of use on 6th May 1973, being replaced by a ground frame to give access to the remaining stub-end of the Nottingham line. Of note are the double telegraph poles, which were…

GAVIN MORRISON’s photographic odyssey along the Somerset & Dorset Joint line concludes with its arrival at the junction with the London & South Western route into Bournemouth, along with the branch across country from Evercreech Junction to Glastonbury and Highbridge.…

The movement of milk by rail was a fascinating aspect of railway operations and a popular one amongst railway enthusiasts and railway modellers alike. However, I’m assuming that for many of a certain demographic reading this, it would be milk trains hauled by steam locomotives that would appeal to most and that’s, perhaps, an understandable assumption. Hopefully, though, this two-part feature looking back mainly at the last decade or so of regular operations will go some way towards redressing this by showing that diesel- and electric-hauled milk trains were not only interesting, but also photogenic and certainly worthy of inclusion in respected railway journals such as this publication and in railway modelling projects, too. Individual forwarding points for milk traffic were once numerous and widespread and included sources in Cheshire,…

At the end of the Cornwall main line is Penzance, terminus of the Great Western Railway’s route from London Paddington – 305 miles. It holds the position of being England’s westernmost railway station – and also its southernmost – though despite its location it isn’t actually the farthest west in the United Kingdom. That geographical distinction goes to Arisaig station on the West Highland Extension line to Mallaig. Nevertheless, it is as far west as you can go by train in England, so here are some view from the Colour-Rail Collection of Penzance in steam days.…

The Loop The North Staffordshire Railway (Potteries Loop Line) Act received the Royal Assent on 5th July 1865, 1 It authorised the construction of a railway from Hanley, which was then the terminus of a branch from the main line of the North Staffordshire Railway (NSR) at Etruria, through the other important pottery towns of Burslem and Tunstall to join with the main line again at Kidsgrove. Initially, progress was virtually non-existent and several attempts were made to obtain powers to abandon the project but Parliament was having none of that! Finally, on 30th March 1870, the NSR directors decided to invite tenders for its construction. That turned out to be a very wise decision. The total length of the Loop was only six miles and three furlongs but in…

In 1854 Manchester was awarded the sobriquet ‘Cottonopolis’. The northern city accommodated early spinning mills in the Ancoats district and had become the administrative centre of the cotton trade, with warehousing and distribution facilities close to the city centre. According to one authority, “Manchester had developed into a centre of international importance, recognised as the world’s first truly industrial city.” (The Textile Mills of Lancashire, Oxford Archaeology North, 2017) The completion of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830 ensured Manchester’s premium position in the cotton textile business, later followed by the Manchester & Leeds Railway, whose first timetable was issued in 1841. Between 1780 and 1820 canals had served the Lancashire cotton industry with a reliable form of transport. By 1845 railways had usurped canals, each town by then…

Of the 300 structures described by Martin Smith in his book - British Railway Bridges & Viaducts (1984), six were iron trestle viaducts and one wooden. Two of them, Belah and Deepdale, were on the trans-Pennine South Durham & Lancashire Union Railway of 1861, later becoming part of the North Eastern Railway. 196ft high, Belah was the country’s second highest after Crumlin in South Wales at 200ft. At both, traces of masonry abutments are all that remain. Likewise, only traces of England’s largest, the Solway Viaduct, 1 mile 190 yards, remain in the form of a short length of embankment and the stumps of some iron columns at Bowness-on-Solway in nothern Cumbria. Belah and Deepdale were designed by Sir Thomas Bouch, who later gained infamy as the builder of the…

The Great Northern Railway N2s, like many other classes in the steam era, have suffered from chronic ‘underexposure’ in the performance columns. In a sense they are akin to the later LMS/Ivatt Class 2s in that they have enjoyed a good reputation in print, but have left a legacy of little or no data on hand to substantiate veracity of these authors’ claims. There are now thankfully 149 logs in the digital Railway Performance Society archive, so we can get at least a hint of what they were like on a daily basis. Not surprisingly, as C. .J. Allen’s brief in his monthly review ‘British Locomotive Practice and Performance’ was to concentrate on the glamour portfolio (the socalled racing pages), these engines therefore came low in the pecking order. Before…