Contents Listing - Articles & Features in this issue
THE BUSIEST BRANCH? - By Ron Fareham CAVALCADE NIGHT WORK - The Forty Sevens - By Kevin Pile Fourum SOUTHWELL, 1948 THE NINETY NINES - By Richard D.Foster HIGHLAND CLEARANCE OF'46 - By Keith Miles REFINED TRAFFIC - By Reginald Draper A Reader Writes A Life of Steam
Article Snippets
Nothing if not aware of the broad sweep of history, the brutalities visited upon the Scottish rebels by Cumberland and Hawley after Culloden are called to mind in the Highland Clearance of '46, an article which details an obscure movement of locos away from their native Highland system, enforced by the LMS in 1946, two hundred years after Bonnie Prince Charlie's bloody failure. That the replacement engines were just as old, or older, seemed not to matter a bit. The Busiest Branch is more or less guaranteed to set the blood racing. Here, in a remote corner of Yorkshire, there were processions of steam locomotives blasting, crawling, gasping their way, often at walking pace, heaving endless loads of coal to the west. Here was a steam stage to rival any work of the Rockies, the Andes or South Africa, yet it was little known, and the names Wentworth or Worsborough hardly ring with its British contemporaries, Shap, Beattock, the Lickey or Dainton. And it had the Garratt... All disappeared early on, with the d.c. electrification, but years after the awesome series of 2-8-Os and the Garratt (with their own private coaling plant) had faded and gone, R.C. Riley, in the cab of an EM2 Co-Co, could have the Wentworth colliery branch pointed out to him as 'the Garratt's Colliery'. The legend of the dragon's appetite lived on... Totton to Fawley is a unregarded little line - both light railway and country branch, and later an industrial feeder. It has been all of these in its time and coming late in the day, moreover, was almost a 'kit-built' line, furnished with the varied output of the concrete works at Exmouth Junction. Refined Traffic reflects the raison d'etre of its mature years. Though there was a wondrous variety to Britain's railways in the 1950s, behind the almost stupefying range of locomotive types, the even more bewildering kaleidoscope of stock and the lines threading into every corner of the land, was concealed an ever-increasing standardisation. Apart from pockets of 4-4-Os in say, Kent and the south west of Scotland, and the activities of 'unusual' types such as Schools and V2s, main line passenger work was, effectively, handled by either 4-6-Os or Pacifies. The debut of the 9Fs on passenger work was greeted sometimes with incredulity, but the GWR had been at it for years, with the curious 4700 series of just nine 2-8-Os, charging up and down from London to the west in the 1950s and 1960s amidst a horde of.... 4-6-Os and Pacifies. In a sense, this was only their 'day job', as Night Work makes clear. All this, with one or two regulars - Fourum, as ever, as well as a lovely day at Southwell Shed - ushers in Volume 5. Our best wishes to all readers; our heartfelt thanks for the support of this year past and our hopes for more of it in 1996.
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