Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i Steam Days

Steam Days|May 2023

TRAINS of thought

It is always nice to read the response to some of the articles that appear in Steam Days magazine for ‘Tail Lamp’, unearthing readers’ own memories of places visited by spotters’ from the days that they, and I, were chasing steam in action to the very end. There is so much nostalgia generated, and it is amazing how many of us have kept our records of locomotives and trains seen and photographed inspiring, we hear, fellow railway enthusiasts to dive into their attic to search out our logbooks. Some may wonder why we did we keep those records with lists of locomotive numbers religiously written down, never really expecting to ever refer to them again, but a railway enthusiast is a special type, and even in later years, we still…

3 min

Steam Days|May 2023

STEAM DAYS In Colour 221: Coal by rail for Ham Halls power station

We are today acutely aware of how dependent society is on the supply of electricity, but in the era before the establishment of the national grid in the 1930s the power generation industry was fragmented, reliant on the charity of industry who often constructed their own local plants, or dependent on the forward thinking of local authorities. The City of Birmingham Electric Supply Department opened a coal-fired power station at Nechells on a restricted site next to the existing gasworks during World War I. However, in the post-war years it was clear that further capacity would be required and eyes turned to a location seven miles east of there, where the River Tame ran through an area bounded by the railway junctions at Water Orton, Whitacre and Kingsbury, providing good…

7 min

Steam Days|May 2023

Tail Lamp

Readers’ Letters Broadstone Junction Sir: Many thanks to Roger Smith for his interesting article on Broadstone station (Steam Days, January 2023), the village being my home through my primary school years (1951-58). The school playground extended to the rear of the Broadstone Railway Hotel, which allowed a somewhat restricted view of the trains, but often enabled the collection of engine numbers. I inherited by first ABC (Southern) around 1955, but was bemused that many of the engines seen began with a 4 or even a 5 … revealing my ignorance of the Somerset & Dorset at that time! I also remember going shopping with my mother and younger brother (in his pram) to Poole regularly in ancient push-and-pull stock, with all the prams and babies crammed into the guard’s compartment…

4 min

Steam Days|May 2023

A whirlwind Scottish shed bash: 1965

This trip was intended to be a last major shed bash before the end of steam in Scotland, although I did subsequently visit Ferryhill and Alloa in June 1966 as part of the Warwickshire Railway Society’s mammoth 48-hour railtour from London (Waterloo), steam-hauled throughout; Aberdeen’s Ferryhill shed at that time was in the latter days of the ‘A4s’. Immediately after the Easter weekend in 1965 I travelled from Canterbury (West) to Charing Cross on an electric-multiple-unit, arriving at the London terminus three minutes early on Tuesday, 20 April 1965. Taking a Northern Line tube train, I then repaired to Euston station for the 19.40 overnight service to Perth. Although consisting of only six cars (including sleepers) plus two vans, this was hauled to Rugby by a brace of English Electric…

28 min

Steam Days|May 2023

Recalling Bitton in the 1950s – a photographic appreciation

Although well known for its busy terminus operations at Bath (Green Park), where trains to and from the South Coast reversed, it was not that station where I found myself visiting to photograph on one sunny day in the early 1950s but instead the intermediate stopping place of nearby Bitton. According to the public timetable, it is 6¼ miles from Bath and 3¾ miles from Mangotsfield, and had been one of five intermediate stops on the ten mile line. In truth I was unable to actually visit Bath due to time restrictions on the day of my visit. I was staying with my aunt in Saltford, but by then the nearby Midland station at Kelston had already closed (from 1 January 1949), so I decided to concentrate on taking photographs…

14 min

Steam Days|May 2023

Push-pull locomotives of the LNER and its British Railways’ successors

Our article ‘Push-pull operation by the LNER and its British Railways’ successors’ (Steam Days, March 2023) primarily dealt with the routes and coaching stock, so we now consider the motive power, which amounted to more than 100 locomotives. Naturally, the movement of these tended to follow where push-pull services operated, but that did not mean that they did not operate conventional trains at times, especially where a pool of fitted locomotives was available. This account covers a dozen different classes of London & North Eastern Railway or LNER ‘group’ origin – Great Central, Great Eastern, Great Northern, North British, and North Eastern Railway, but it also considers locomotive types that saw use on the three British Railways’ regions with LNER heritage: Eastern, North Eastern and Scottish. Within the latter account…

38 min

Steam Days|May 2023

West of England Rail Rover 1960 Devon branches and home via Bodmin and Padstow!

Through a series of instalments over the last 13 months (see ‘further reading’ for the full list), Steam Days has offered an insight into the sort of holiday that many of us would have chosen circa 1960, with a Rail Rover ticket for the lines of the West Country, both Southern and Western region, and while BR dieselisation of the area was yet to spread much beyond Western Region main line work, and not all of that. With Leslie R Freeman joined by his friend Jim Harrold for the week-long adventure, there were initially two overnight stays in Truro before setting up a base in Plymouth from where many early starts were possible to maximise the opportunities of travelling on as many lines as possible. Each armed with a camera,…

39 min