Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i Steam Days

Following on from thefront coverand contents listingeachmonth, itseems to me that the turn of the page to Trains of Thought finds the welcome to step into each new issue, and of late Ihavetendedtotalkabout oneortwo features, but always thestrengthisthe sum of parts. This time around I wonder if every single article is related by one common thread – Railway 200. It has a feature of its own and it includes perhaps a first for Steam Days in that one photograph was taken less than a week before going to press–our news tends to be of 1968 and earlier –and that is the locomotive line-up at Hopetown Darlington that provides ‘early doors’ to the unfolding year of events to celebrate all that is the creation of the modern railway by recognising the…

The memory of the speeding City of Edinburgh will live with me forever! It was my great good fortune that Uncle Bill was headmaster of Beattock Primary School. William Wallace Laurie –what a fine Scottish name!–graduated from Glasgow University in the 1930s with a MA(Hons) degree in mathematics. During the Second WorldWar he served in Egyptinthe Royal Air Force in the rank of Flight Lieutenant (as a navigator, and his mathematical skills were employed). Teaching mathematics in secondary schools in Dumfries shire, it was in the early 1950s when head of mathematics at Dumfries High School that he succeeded with an application for the headmaster’s post at Beattock Primary, a small school with, if I remember correctly, a complement of three teachers. As well as his management and administrative role,…

As wehave already seen in our preceding two articles –LMS/LMR pull &push services: an introduction (SteamDays, December 2024), and Pull &push: the LMS inheritance(SteamDays, February2025) –there are many facets to such operations within the London, Midland &Scottish Railway story. Such can betraced back to1906 with the Midland Railway, and soon after and very widely, bythe London &North Western Railway, and then the Lancashire&Yorkshire Railway was inthe midst of introducing motor trains just as the Grouping was authorised and it was absorbed by the L&NWR. Inanutshell, these three companies all contributed toLMS motor train variety at 1923 and over time that inheritance was evolved and, of course, streamlined through the natural attrition ofolder locomotives and stock. The majority of pull &push trains on the LMS, and byits natural British Railways successor…

My interest in London, Brighton & South Coast Railway locomotives was first aroused while trainspotting at Canterbury (West) station in the mid-1950s. At the time this was the Cinderella of the two Canterbury stations, a position totally reversed today. However, it did provide interest to the spotter because the line was used to run-in locos ex-works at Ashford. In addition to Maunsell Moguls from Devon and Somerset, by this period the works increasingly overhauled ex-LB&SCR locomotives, mainly of classes C2X 0‑6‑0, E4 0‑6‑2T and K2‑6‑0. Brighton Works was being run down prior to closure and was also concentrating onfinishing its large order of Class 4British Railways Standard 2‑6‑4 tanks. The favourite working for ex-works locos was the afternoon Ashford-Sturry pick-up goods, onwhich the locos were usually inpristine paintwork. Isoon learned…

Early in 1956, while employed in the Timetable Section of the Operating Superintendent’s Office at Paddington, I was offered a place in a team undertaking research into freight traffic. We were to record wagon movements on parts of the Western Region(WR) with a view to the rationalisation of a number of goods sidings and yards into new marshalling yards. Two of these were authorised in the British Transport Commission Act of 1960, having been first proposed by the WR in 1955, and these were to be in the vicinity of Shrewsbury and Gloucester to cover both Western Region and inter-regional requirements. The first was to be located at Walcot, about six miles east of Shrewsbury on the line to Wellington –it would serve the north end of the Western Region…