Table of contents for Volume 39 No 12 - December 2025 in Backtrack

As well as being what Brian Haresnape describes as an able and professional engineer, William Stroudley was very much also an artist. I don't doubt those who have seen any of his locomotives pictured or, better still, in preservation, even those enthusiasts who have little interest in the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway or any railway south of the Thames, would disagree with that. The minute A Class ‘Terriers’ and the ground-breaking B, the ‘Gladstones’, are the best-known of all the engines he introduced to the Brighton. But I would suggest the D Class 0-4-2T of 1873 epitomised his approach to locomotive design, for they were exactly suited to the work for which they were designed, tough, durable and in some cases of remarkable longevity. Born at Sandford-upon-Thames in…

Introduction The substantive part of this article concerns the involvement of the Metropolitan Vickers Company in the early stages of the main line dieselisation policy of the British Transport Commission. The article explains how the traction policy of the Commission was revised during the 1950s, the bases upon which the revisions were made and the factors influencing the choice of contractors to build and equip new diesel locomotives. The article includes operational details for the one full year of operation on the Midland Division of British Railways, London Midland Region. Policy developments During the first half of the 1950s the traction policy for the main lines of British Railways was subjected to radical change. From the time of nationalisation (1948) up to 1953 the policy was established around a continuation…

The Ayrshire coalfield was the second largest in Scotland and Kilmarnock, with fifteen collieries in the locality, was very much in the thick of it. Inevitably, this gave much local work to Hurlford shed, but in addition there was considerable work undertaken servicing the South Ayrshire coalfield around Auchinleck and New Cumnock and its extension into North Dumfriesshire where there were collieries at Kirkconnel and Sanquhar. Locomotives involved in the coal trade tended not to have straightforward journeys from colliery to harbour or other destination; considerable shunting at colliery level was required of them. In the Kilmarnock area, most of the coal wagons went in the first instance to Barleith Mineral Sidings, situated alongside Hurlford shed and The Blocks, whose ten lengthy sidings had a wagon capacity of around 600…

The summer of 1968 was not a particularly good time to be a steam enthusiast in the United Kingdom. Southern Region steam had finished – in fine style – in July 1967 and steam traction was coming to an end in the North West of England, to finish completely in August of that year. Enthusiasts flocked to witness steam's last gasp but, for those of us who remembered the days in the 1950s and early 1960s when well-kept steam locomotives were the primary motive power throughout the British Railways network, to see unkempt, dirty locomotives eking out their days, primarily on freight and engineering trains plus a few special passenger trains, was pretty disheartening. So after a couple of visits to see steam in Lancashire when a colleague suggested a…

Occasionally railway publications have carried articles relating to a railwayman's career; mostly these have been about a driver or a fireman's experiences over the years and, less frequently, a signalman's experiences. I cannot, however, recall seeing anything about somebody who spent the whole of his working life on the track but have come across a series of articles which were published in The Weekly News Railway Supplement during the late 1890s. This included the reminiscences of a platelayer (or surfaceman as he would have been known in later years). In those days lines were not normally closed for any length of time, work on the track was simply fitted in where it could be accommodated. There certainly was no question of providing the dreaded rail replacement bus for passengers. Likewise…

This dry-sounding name was employed for what today might be called a Meeting of Motive Power Chiefs, this event taking place at regular intervals from 1948 onwards following the formation of British Railways, where it was soon recognised that the Regions needed to talk to each other for two primary reasons, those being to introduce standardisation across motive power issues and operation and secondly to share problems and solutions to those problems. In a series of articles we will find out just what these champions of the motive power department had to deal with from the initial procedural and standardisation issues through to the turmoil of the steam to diesel transition of the late fifties and early sixties. The records are contained in a series of casebound books, generally being…