Contents Listing - Articles & Features in this issue
5.40pm FROM CANNON STREET - By Colin Richardson & D.W.Winkworth DIESEL DAWN - By S.GAllsopp YOU CAN'T BEAT TH'OWD CRABS - By Keith Miles THE GARTVERRIE BRANCH - By J.L.Stevenson A YEAR IN BURRYPORT - By Gaynor Renwick HULL INWARD YARD - By Peter Rose A CURIOUS PLACE Cover photograph. With assistance from an '01', 92061 sets away from South Pelaw at the foot of the climb to Annfield, on a Tyne Dock - Consett ore train.
Article Snippets
Welcome to British Railways Illustrated Volume 4 No.8. The chance to insinuate a slice of recent British social history, or at least a whiff of 'class' (in the Wigan Pier sense) into a modest railway article does not come very often but A Year in Burry Port manages a stab at all this, and a bit of name dropping too - a GWR Scout Master of all things, 'Darkle' himself. Uncle Sid, the Boat Show, 'Uncle' Willy lost in the mines and perishing of pneumonia, the Prince of Wales (the Prince 6f Wales?) and more. All this and 16XX pannier tanks! Join us too on a long enduring institution, the 5.40pm from Cannon Street, the last steam-hauled business train from London Cannon Street restored by the Southern after the Second World War. With quickly gathering step, the office was left behind at 5.30pm, for a brisk walk across the City by way ofThrogmorton Street, the newsvendor outside the Royal Exchange to pick up the evening paper (News, Star or Standard) and St Swithin's Lane to Cannon Street if the train was to be caught. There was a couple of minutes to spare to nod to the ticket collector, set off down platform 6 for a seat in one of the two third-class corridors at the front, checking to see whether it was the customary Arthur at the head or a stranger - which be a Pacific. (Home from the office behind a Pacific - imagine it...) This is the story of a business train - a commuter train we'd call it now, for long the preserve of a succession of King Arthur 4-6-Os, the odd Mogul and the occasional Pacific. Its most remarkable aspect, maybe, was the fact that it was the job of the only Hither Green King Arthur, and as the shed's single express loco, inordinate care and attention was lavished upon it. Talk of institutions, Peter Rose is becoming something of one himself in these columns and his latest offering concerns a favourite BRILL subject - yards and the mysteries of their workings. Continuing a long tradition in this magazine, it is another example of the obscure yet vital - the railway behind the railway if you like - a railway we see only too little of. So, more revelations with Hull Inward Yard. Yards and shunting bring us to a rather broad and bold version of Diesel Dawn. When Diesels had Proper Numbers takes us in three parts back to a time when, despite their internal combustion mode of progress, diesel shunters were an accepted adjunct to a still thriving steam railway - they added a bit of variety after all and that rolling gait, rods and cranks loping up and down and ludicrous bubbling growls, allied to a truly heroic layer of filth, endeared them to many of us. If you resented them, they were sort of invisible anyway; there was so much steam after all and they were often lost amid thousands of wagons (themselves long vanished) in (again, vanished) gigantic and inaccessible yards. With some astonishing photo- graphs this first part of a complex article places the machines in a dynastic setting - those EE engined locos which led. in fairly unbroken lineage, from the LMS essays of the mid-1930s to the massed ranks of the 08s. Plenty of vards full to the gunwales with wagons of all tvpes. some unique photographs and unusual insights - all. for good measure, against a backdrop of some gently popping myths. This is great stuff The Gartverrie Branch and its Cut-Down Locos. Waifs and Strays, we've boasted before, are a favourite plank of this magazine - nostalgia crossed with social work. if you like. Long forgotten and unloved, certainly, were a pair of unfortunate J36 0-6-0s, cut down in a particularly bruising way, with dire aesthetic results, for a highly restricted goods branch in the middle of the Scottish Central Lowlands. Not only was the bridge which was the cause of their disfigurement terribly low and dangerously narrow, it had a habit of flooding too...So, south Wales, central Scotland, Kent, Hull and diesel shunters all over the place, plus a few extras. Is this the ultimate balance? Let us know...
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