Table of contents for Volume 39 No 4 - April 2025 in Backtrack

Next month we are back on Shap for the magnificent spectacle of raw steam power at Shap where steam-hauled passenger and freight trains battled their way to the famous summit in the Westmorland fells. A colour feature depicting Shap through the seasons will open the May issue, so to whet your appetite… Towards the end of steam the bulk of the 'Britannias' congregated at Carlisle Kingmoor shed for working freight and van trains along the West Coast Main Line and in the summer months they were out in force on holiday extras. On 21st April 1965 No.70048 The Territorial Army 1908-1958 heads a heavy northbound freight near Scout Green with a 2-6-4T pushing heartily at the rear. No.70048 was a nomadic locomotive, spending time allocated to Holyhead, Newton Heath and…

Hostilities in South Africa between Great Britain and the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State began on the 11th October 1899; this became known as the Boer War. In Britain, reservists began to be called back to their regiments for active service, and on 3rd November the first volunteer St. John Ambulance men sailed for South Africa. The British Army suffered early reverses with heavy casualties, so more battalions of the Regular Army were sent out, and as there was no conscription in Britain, it was decided to organise volunteer detachments for foreign service. The Imperial Yeomanry (a volunteer mounted force, mostly organised into companies from individual counties) and companies of Militia and Rifle Volunteers were to see active service. These units, with equipment and horses,…

For a short time, mainly between 1837-1846, before the railway network was complete coach proprietors and the Post Office loaded their stage and mail carriages, including, on occasions, their travellers, on to railway trucks for parts of their journeys. This occurred where the rail route had partially but not completely encroached on the road route. These hybrid journeys, part road and part rail, are a little known feature of the early years of the railway network. While some journeys involved moving passenger and luggage from the coach to the railway carriage others (and the focus of this article) actually involved the hoisting of the entire assemblage on to the carriage truck. In some other cases, rather sensibly, stagecoach passengers were advised to ride in the railway coaches and abandon their…

Perusal of an early nineteenth century map of Cheshire will show the dominance of Crewe as a focus of six company lines. The Grand Junction Railway opened a passenger station on 4th July 1837. William H. Chaloner, noted in his book, The Social and Economic Development of Crewe, that the choice of location for the works possessed few advantages: “The Crewe district had no appreciable waterpower, no iron ore deposits, [and] no coal mines. The decision to remove the locomotive, coach and wagon departments of the Grand Junction Railway from Edgehill [Liverpool] to the deep rural surroundings of Crewe must have been dictated by its central position on a railway network”. On opening, Crewe station comprised “a very neat house for the clerk of the station, together with an engine-house,…

Freight The Hooton to West Kirby branch line passed through a very rural area and as you would expect freight with a local origin included livestock and milk from the many farms along the route. There was also fish from Parkgate and coal from the colliery at Little Neston. In the twentieth century, there was through traffic in the form of coal from distant collieries bound for Birkenhead and in the 1950s traffic for the new Cadbury's factory at Moreton. Coalmining at Little Neston had ceased in 1855 but was restarted in 1874 and connected by rail to sidings at Parkgate station. The Neston Colliery Company went into liquidation in 1885 and its assets were taken over by a new company, the Wirral Colliery Co., which itself went into liquidation…

With the birth of a nationwide railway system in 1948, as well as the need to restore stations after wartime neglect, the time was ripe for a comprehensive signing policy. The design work was headed by A. J. White, formerly Advertising Manager for the London & North Eastern Railway, and that company's Gill Sans lettering was included in a comprehensive 'Sign Standards' manual issued in April 1948. Attention was also paid to Regional identity within a corporate framework, in the form of six distinctive Regional colours used for station paint, signs, printed material and uniform badges. Most noticeable were station name signs in a new shape, inspired by the London Transport 'bullseye' signs from the 1920s. This first corporate branding lasted until a new identity was adopted, 'the changing face…

The conveyance of passengers as a sole purpose of operating trains strikes back to 1830, when the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened. The carrying of passengers as a paying concern really took off in the 1840s, the carrying of freight falling a close second in importance. The Liverpool & Manchester Railway went into the excursion business in 1830 by taking a party of 150 to Liverpool and running special trips to race meetings. On another occasion, the Leeds Institute arranged a visit of its members to Hull. Forty carriages carried 1,250 passengers. In another trip from Leeds to Hull in 1844, 6,600 passengers were conveyed in 240 carriages, not in a single train but in a succession hauled by nine engines. Such trains earned the sobriquet 'monster trains'. The Great…

The launch and a sinking On 13th September 1977 Peter Parker, Chairman of the British Railways Board, stood alongside a conference train in Marylebone station. It was stabled there at the start of a three-month tour of the industrial centres of the UK and had been designed to promote a new-look freight service under the brand name of Speedlink supported by the slogan “Speedlink: the freight name for reliability”. In typically optimistic terms Mr. Parker expressed the belief that Speedlink would become an established household name in much the same way as Inter City had. He looked forward to his salesmen getting their order books into new traffic which would be attracted to rail. He also claimed that even at this early stage Speedlink in its previously emerging form of…

The London & South Western Railway was to become the largest of the companies which formed the Southern Railway at the grouping in 1923. Its territory included the main lines from London to Southampton, Bournemouth and Portsmouth, an important route west to Exeter and a network of secondary lines and branches in Devon and Cornwall. In 1892 it bought the Southampton Docks, while a number of minor byways also came within its portfolio – many of these reflected in this picture selection.…

During World War I the Admiralty provided the funding for large amounts of infrastructure to serve the Royal Navy's land bases (or stone frigates as they were sometimes known), particularly railways, where these were located near an existing main line railway; this included airfields for the Royal Naval Air Service for both fixed wing aircraft and dirigibles. Of necessity these tended to be located near the East Coast from where German warships could be easily spotted and attacked. One such location was Royal Naval Air Station (RNAS) Longside in Aberdeenshire for which the nearest railway was the Great North of Scotland Railway's (GNS) Maud Junction to Peterhead line. The air station was just over three miles south of Longside village and close to a hamlet known as Lenabo – the…