'New to this Country' - LSW POWER SIGNALLING AT GRATELEY - A CENTURY AGO - By Kevin Robertson - An early, turn of the century application of power operated mechanical signalling, the 'low pressure pneumatic' type which was destined to play a major part in a number of LSWR expansion and rebuilding schemes from 1901. It was not native (contradicting the comments above) but originated in America. Senior LSW officers went to the New World to see for themselves and came back convinced of The Way Ahead...
DIESEL DAWN - The Old and the New - It was not long before classes, courses and special training trips - even special locos - were organised to train men for the rising tide of electrics and diesels but in the very dawn of dieselisation, when the 0-6-0 shunters first began to arrive, the locos just 'turned up'. It may seem extraordinary, but in the early part of the 1950s the fitters would simply gather round and find out by 'touching and feeling' the important bits - where the water went and where the fuel went. And where did the fuel come from? In many instances, the Foreman called in on a local trader and got him to send a lorry round! It rapidly got better of course but arrangements remained basic for some time. The great Modernization Plan did not envisage this son of refuelling facility - an ancient LNWR tender!
FOURUM - More engine-picking.
PAPER CHASE - By P. Kemmett - A tale of dusty, ancient documents, rescued by chance and saved for posterity. No, not the BRILL back numbers department but a fascinating variety of Great Western water columns, lengthened and heightened as locomotives grew in size.
MANCHESTER LONDON ROAD AND THE STANIER PACIFICS - By E.M. Johnson - Memorable sightings of 'big 'uns'.
SOME LEFT-OVER CRAB - More obsessional detail, and further insight (see the great fold-out issue, June 1998) into the deeper, more meaningful aspects of life - 'BR' pattern slide bar foot irons, electrification flashes, AWS and more.
A READER WRITES, A Life of Steam and Competition Results
TALES FROM THE GUILD - Shed Visit With A Difference - with Alan Robinson
IN AND OUT - A comer of Swindon Works, where bedraggled locomotives 'coming in" met bright spick and span jewels "going out'.
SPITALFIELDS FOR COAL - Notes br Kevin Pile - As readers know. it's "BRILL for freight" and goods in all its limitless variety, and all the various methods contrived to handle it are something of a specialism in these pages. The otherwise fairly impecunious Great Eastern had a commercial lifeline with its London connection. Here was the country's greatest market for any manner of goods - all that was known to man, in fact, and the GE gladly brought it in, from hens to herrings, from its East Anglian hinterland. As well as all this, there was coal, for the canny 'Swedy', without any mineral wealth on its own patch, nevertheless contrived a lucrative connection to Doncaster and the great Yorkshire coalfield. The company's goods and mineral trade grew and grew - in the 1860s there were less than 8,000 wagons on the Great Eastern, and in 1911 26,514. Even then, according to the company, this was 'hardly sufficient to cope with the requirements'. In all this, only the GE could build its principal coal depot high up on a pier, thrusting out above the huddled suffering roofs of Bethnal Green.
GREENWOOD & BATLEY BATTERIES - By Adrian Booth - The Times in 1908 described Greenwood & Batley Ltd as 'the most famous of the Leeds firms... they make such a bewildering variety of different things.' Indeed, Britain then made everything; every part of the railway was British, from the rails to the stock to the locomotives to the signalling, to the chocolate machine on the platform. It would seem preposterous to anyone then that it could ever be otherwise. One of the myriad items was the humble battery 'trolley-truck. And here they are, in docks, stations and breweries.
THIRTIES FILE - A Life on the Beer
SAVE THAT NEGATIVE! - HEIRON'S HORIZONS - More of 'the Bristol school' of railway photography.