Contents Listing - Articles & Features in this issue
ON THE DRY SIDE - By W.B. Yeadon
VERY MUCH DIESEL DAWN - by D.Townsley
Station Survey: CARDIFF GENERAL - By I.C. Coleford
Spanning Sixty Years
WIGAN GOTTERDAMMERUNG
SHOEBURY MESS
COWLAIRS - By James Stevenson
Article Snippets
Welcome to British Railways Illustrated, Volume 3 No. 11. Station Survey returns in fine style this month with the tale of developments at Cardiff General. It was only one amongst the many mighty works wrought by the GWR in the 1930s and but part of an enormous national railway building episode funded by special government loans. The call for railway nationalisation had been made since at least before the First World War and it was a prospect that filled its management with horror. It is strange to see now that 1948 was but the logical outcome of things - public funding was the only way that improvements could be got under way in the 'thirties and from 1939 the government had taken absolute day to day control in any event. Given the state of the railways after the War and experience since 1929, one way of looking at nationalisation, whatever the politics, is that it represents only the culmination of a process, underway for several decades. Wrenching these notes (last issue's promise not to drone firmly'in mind) back to the relevant, we can still celebrate one outcome, Cardiff General's glorious architectural mish-mash - Pantheon meets Town 'All corporate brutalism. On the Dry Side refers not (as some people think) to the author but to the various Shangri-Las dotting the east coast of Britain, which the LNER was anxious to bring before the burgeoning holidaymakers of the 1930s. This is the fourth in the series examining the named trains on the LNER across the length and breadth of an slice of country which, though it may have warranted the description "dry side" strictly in meteorological terms the tag owed more to the sort of descriptive skills honed in an estate agents' office. Diesel Dawn returns after a long absence (still too soon for some) with some of the very first rays of light in that dawn. The unlikely place was Castle Bromwich, where the latest product of the Hunslet Engine Co. caused a considerable stir in 1932. The action soon moves to the Leeds works of Hunslet, where Don Townsley's account of these antediluvian yet solidly successful progenitors of our vast army of diesel shunters is largely set. Very Much Diesel Dawn vividly brings into sharp relief an ill-recorded but entirely fascinating (if unprepossessing - Sir Henry Fowler more or less tossed some small change in the general direction of the diesel experiment) episode in our railway story. There is no facet of the steam loco, it seems, that does fascinate us in some measure at least and as the breed was steadily eliminated, the hitherto unregarded phenomenon of scrapyards became a focus for enthusiasts, often to the consternation of the staff, more ready to set the dogs on visitors than the average shed foreman. "Long as ya don't feeve no copper was the form of permission I once obtained from one such stalwart, a figure only marginally less ferocious than his accompanying Alsation. (Dog that is.) See Wigan Gotterdamerrung. Queen Street and the Cowlairs Incline takes us to a very well known if little recorded jewel in our Lost Empire of steam - as far from any pottering branch line. puffing away amidst the fields as you'll likely to find. Just about rounding off this issue comes a photographic look across more than half a century at Waterloo, some nicely if distantly linked photographs - Spanning Sixty Years - notable, if nothing else, for one of the rarest images around....
Adverts and Links based on this content
Advertisement