Contents Listing - Articles & Features in this issue
THE NEW STUBBIN BRANCH - By Adrian Booth
Station Survey - WIGSTON
RILEY WRITES - By R.C.Riley
War Report
MANSFIELD 1950
WATERLOO - ITS INS AND OUTS - By DM Winkworth
Fourum
Thirties File - KING'S CROSS SIGNAL BOX - By Geoff Goslin
ONE HUNDRED UP - Standard Class 5MT 4-6-0s - By Phil Atkins
A Reader Writes
A Life of Steam
Cover photograph. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, beloved of Stewarts Lane, eases off the coaler and under the viaduct. It was in these delicate moments that disaster could strike, in the shape of a shower of dust off the coaler. Photograph right. The coddled pair, WILLIAM and IRON DUKE at the shed the same day in 1953.
Article Snippets
Welcome to British Railways Illustrated, Volume 5 No. 2.
Readers may feel this issue has been hijacked by the advertising department, but we have endeavoured to sugar the pill with our first 'free gift'. Be warned - a 'whiz-bang' in the ancient Beez.er tradition was actually under consideration at one time but, perhaps fortunately for the credibility of BRILL, the technology seems to have died out. Which is a suitably nostalgic note upon which to welcome all readers to this strange new beast, Railway BYLINES. It's a bit of a Leap in the Dark and a triumph, probably, of the heart over the business head, but we see it as a sort of regular supplement to BRILL, bringing to light the vast underlying weird and wonderful, the grit, grime - filth even - of foundry and mine, as well as the twittering remoteness of country lines, branches and narrow gauge, marked more by skylarks than Stephenson. Bear with us through the ads and plugs - we believe in it, heart over head, and commend BYLINES - its first issue appears next month - to a discerning readership.
That's enough pleading; the menu this month is as follows: Station Survey makes a sort of return with Wigstoo - a case really of three stations for the price of one. Sited at the comers of a triangle. The area covered is really too great for a dear old traditional British railway (and British Railways) 40 foot survey so we've resorted in this instance to that traditional standby, the OS plan. Only in Britain, maybe, could the outskirts of a provincial city merit such a generous railway provision; as usual Paul Anderson (our personal Pevsner) has made an account which emphasises the architectural glories of the stations. Trust him to quote Professor W.G. Hoskins, 'The sight of South Wigston on a wet and foggy Sunday afternoon in November is an experience one is glad to have had. It reached the rock bottom of English provincial life; and there is something profoundly moving about it.'
New Stubbin we will gloss over, given that it is a fearless device to spread the BYLINES word farther and wider but in truth we welcome Adrian Booth as regular 'Industrial Correspondent'. One advantage of covering all this new ground, in the case of Industrial railways particularly, is just that - new ground and the joy of the unfamiliar.Thus, the New Stubbin Branch. One of the odd delights of such non-BR lines is the fact that the names do not (always) immediately convey exactly where they were. Where would a guess place this particular bit of railway? South London; the Forest of Dean ?
Waterloo is still one of our great terminus stations and Its Ins and Outs is an account of the endless, and endlessly complicated, doings of its empty stock pilots - a posse of locomotives kept at Nine Elms for the purpose. For long these M7 0-4-4Ts, but the last years saw an evolution in through other types, ending with BR Standard tanks. A sprinkling of other locomotives could also regularly be found, however, bringing in stock from some of the outlying yards and sidings - a G16 4-8-0T even turned up on one occasion, in error, for it was banned from the confines of the terminus...
The accident at Mansfield in 1950 was potentially disastrous though, insofar as any such incident can be so described, it had a happy(ish) ending. Nobody was injured, the adjacent colliery path was unused, because the accident took place after a shift change, and neither crew. shed staff nor PW men bore the blame, for the accident, it was deemed, came about through an unhappy, chance combination of factors.
Our regular accident feature is accompanied by another returnee, Thirties File. That King's Cross scene so familiar to us from so many pictures of A4s and other Pacifics, dates from the resignalling of the early 1930s, when the great signal box, placed so centrally in that great amphitheatre, was built. At the time it was an advanced, modern project, not without operating upsets - lest we begin to believe that teething troubles are an affliction only of the modern railway. This being a a tidy-minded magazine, it is satisfying to that sense of balance, so forcibly (and painfully) inculcated these past five years, to see the Euston Signalling (BRILL 4.11) of the 1950s matched by one a little further along the Euston Road, in Kings Cross Signalbox.
Readers may feel this issue has been hijacked by the advertising department, but we have endeavoured to sugar the pill with our first 'free gift'. Be warned - a 'whiz-bang' in the ancient Beez.er tradition was actually under consideration at one time but, perhaps fortunately for the credibility of BRILL, the technology seems to have died out. Which is a suitably nostalgic note upon which to welcome all readers to this strange new beast, Railway BYLINES. It's a bit of a Leap in the Dark and a triumph, probably, of the heart over the business head, but we see it as a sort of regular supplement to BRILL, bringing to light the vast underlying weird and wonderful, the grit, grime - filth even - of foundry and mine, as well as the twittering remoteness of country lines, branches and narrow gauge, marked more by skylarks than Stephenson. Bear with us through the ads and plugs - we believe in it, heart over head, and commend BYLINES - its first issue appears next month - to a discerning readership.
That's enough pleading; the menu this month is as follows: Station Survey makes a sort of return with Wigstoo - a case really of three stations for the price of one. Sited at the comers of a triangle. The area covered is really too great for a dear old traditional British railway (and British Railways) 40 foot survey so we've resorted in this instance to that traditional standby, the OS plan. Only in Britain, maybe, could the outskirts of a provincial city merit such a generous railway provision; as usual Paul Anderson (our personal Pevsner) has made an account which emphasises the architectural glories of the stations. Trust him to quote Professor W.G. Hoskins, 'The sight of South Wigston on a wet and foggy Sunday afternoon in November is an experience one is glad to have had. It reached the rock bottom of English provincial life; and there is something profoundly moving about it.'
New Stubbin we will gloss over, given that it is a fearless device to spread the BYLINES word farther and wider but in truth we welcome Adrian Booth as regular 'Industrial Correspondent'. One advantage of covering all this new ground, in the case of Industrial railways particularly, is just that - new ground and the joy of the unfamiliar.
Waterloo is still one of our great terminus stations and Its Ins and Outs is an account of the endless, and endlessly complicated, doings of its empty stock pilots - a posse of locomotives kept at Nine Elms for the purpose. For long these M7 0-4-4Ts, but the last years saw an evolution in through other types, ending with BR Standard tanks. A sprinkling of other locomotives could also regularly be found, however, bringing in stock from some of the outlying yards and sidings - a G16 4-8-0T even turned up on one occasion, in error, for it was banned from the confines of the terminus...
The accident at Mansfield in 1950 was potentially disastrous though, insofar as any such incident can be so described, it had a happy(ish) ending. Nobody was injured, the adjacent colliery path was unused, because the accident took place after a shift change, and neither crew. shed staff nor PW men bore the blame, for the accident, it was deemed, came about through an unhappy, chance combination of factors.
Our regular accident feature is accompanied by another returnee, Thirties File. That King's Cross scene so familiar to us from so many pictures of A4s and other Pacifics, dates from the resignalling of the early 1930s, when the great signal box, placed so centrally in that great amphitheatre, was built. At the time it was an advanced, modern project, not without operating upsets - lest we begin to believe that teething troubles are an affliction only of the modern railway. This being a a tidy-minded magazine, it is satisfying to that sense of balance, so forcibly (and painfully) inculcated these past five years, to see the Euston Signalling (BRILL 4.11) of the 1950s matched by one a little further along the Euston Road, in Kings Cross Signalbox.
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