BRILL - YARDS IN FRONT:
Welcome to the final number of our third volume. British Railways Illustrated 3.12, and the close of a first year at monthly schedules. May you live in interesting times, it has been said, and the last (black and white) year has certainly been that - many thanks to all readers for your continuing support.
Shades of deja uu as a pair of two-part articles, which first manifested themselves in BRILL 3.10 back in that glorious July are concluded - for once on schedule (ours, not theirs. 1 hasten io add). Paul Anderson and W.A.C. Smith complete their circumnavigation of (he Fife Coast in steam days - two men and a camera observing Leuchars to Thornton the long way, demonstrating in their passage the transition from fishing village and holiday beaches to pit and winding wheel - an unexpected combination of coal and rural idyll.
Secondly, the redoubtable I.C. Coleford concludes a detailed look at the Sentinel Steam Railcars a subject on which most of the dust, it was generally agreed, had long since settled. The author has nevertheless managed to unearth a good few further snippets to present us with a readable and a workmanlike foray into a type of vehicle long vanished, not only in terms of engineering and mode of working but even its very concept. A living link, however, remains between these eccentrically named cars. NETTLE. FLOWER OF YARROW and the rest and our own good W.B. Yeadon, irascible correspondent, orchestrator of the ever popular Dry Side sequence in BRILL and holder of the office of Registrar Yeadon 's Register of LNER Locomotives is now heading for double figures, and the latest, the GER B12 4-6-0s, is coming soon. He actually travelled regularly to work on one of (he steam cars, hence his yielding to few men in the matter of LNER steam running experiences...
Enough of Yeadon, (hough (his issue has all the hallmarks of a special old lags number, for two more familiar BRILL personages turn up. Allan Baker regales us with tales of yet another ancient BR institution, the Crewe Works Train, a fascinating and amusing account not only for the vivid memory of a way of working now long lost, but for the incidental indication of just how active and bustling were so many swathes of Britain. It is indeed astonishing and sobering to remember just how much industry there was more than that, how wondrously varied it was in its activities - and packed (taken wholly for granted of course) into so many corners of Britain.
D.W. Winkworth, famous for his ‘obviously mad’ BRILL debut also writes again, this time on the Devon Belle, a train remarkable not only for its composition -Pullmans, observation car and so on, but also for its ephemeral quality a working life which came to well under a decade of summer seasons in the west. This magazine has brought one or bold articles concerned with that most difficult of subjects, the railway yard. They were vast in extent but relatively little visited by photographers - worse, they usually presented a poor subject for (he amateur camera, another factor in the general scarcity of material. Yet Britain’s yards were vital, if unsung, pieces in the great railway panoply and are proving, now they are long gone, an enduring subject of revitalised interest. These pages have^ilready seen Toton and March, two of the most venerable and memorable and now they are joined by a Western example, the most up Io date in European its time and victim, probably, of its own modernity. Margam opened as late as 1960, designed lor diesels but surrounded by steam, and seived in its first years by an ancient and creaking steam