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Contents Listing - Articles & Features in this issue
THE CAULDRON - By Paul Andersbn and Roger Hockney Thirties File STATE OF THE NATION: 1948 Snapshot - By Patrick Spens The Whitwpod Goods Branch - By Peter Cookson RALEIGH TO LONDON! - By Hugh Ramsey Fourum SPELLS AT CREWE - By Allan C. Baker A Reader Writes A Life of Steam - By H.N. Marshall Cover: The 5.30am Paddington - Penzance leaves Bristol Temple Meads with a Grange 4-6-0 and passes another, 6814 ENBORNE GRANGE with a train from Weston-S-Mare.
Article Snippets
Welcome to British Railway Illustrated Volume 6 No.2. First, A Prostration. Readers of the feature Garratts on the Go in the September issue, 5.12 might well have been concerned to find parts of the captions lurching into something approaching a mix of Hindi and Serbo-Croat. This was the sad outcome of placing an 'untreated' computer file (when in doubt blame the computer). We apologise to readers, who showed the customary tolerance and indulgence, finding such lapses reassuringly human, and to the author, Kevin Pile, who has now gained an unwarranted reputation for speaking in tongues..... On to better things: State of the Nation derives from one of the first 'review' documents to emerge from the new British Transport Executive and is a highly useful historical 'snapshot' of the railway at a vital moment, its re-casting, as a nationalised industry, after the exhausting struggles of the Second World War. Its very brevity is a minor miracle, in retrospect. A similar document today would be a series of glossy books, with endless appendices. The author of the article grew so despondent with the austerity and drabness of the time (and, more tellingly, the difficulty of finding suitable illustrations) that the decision was taken to enliven it with the railway event of 1948, the Great Exchanges. A wonderful excuse for some marvellous photographs. The new main line diesel, 10000, features briefly in an otherwise all-steam piece. It was of hardly any relevance then, but its ilk would eclipse steam in little more than a decade. Looking at it, it is hard to escape the image of the small hairy nimble animal, ultimately better equipped to survive, creeping on the forest floor, patiently waiting its time as the (doomed) dinosaurs raged supreme. Hugh D. Ramsey carried his father's pre-War folding Kodak camera to Kings Cross station on Saturday 18th May 1957, to capture the scene as no less than seven special trains arrived at the London terminus, carrying Nottingham-based Raleigh Industries employees (presumably spouses and offspring were included) on a much-deserved free day out in London. As a jolting reminder of how utterly different the industrial and employment situation was then, in Raleigh to London! just one firm brought something like 10,000 people to the capital that day, in ten trains (three went to St Pancras). To do that today would mean nigh on 200 coaches down the M1.... The Raleigh Specials originated at Nottingham and quite by chance, we find Paul Anderson and Roger Hockney there, though by 1964 a sad decline has set in. The intrepid pair spend an afternoon at Nottingham Victoria in August 1964 - the last two weeks of that month were ones of heat and dust and the great smoky bowl of this vast station was a parched and blistered place. Entirely enclosed by retaining walls and sheer sandstone cliffs, it hung with stagnant air and smoke. Even towards the end of steam it was. very much. The Cauldron - Lad making good Allan Baker continues his occasional fond look back at the beginnings of a career on the London Midland Region. Spells at Crewe describes in lively fashion the training of a Motive Power apprentice, or that part at least designed to acquaint him with 'Main Works' and those aspects of locomotive repair not undertaken at the running sheds. His unabashed awe at the scale of the place is apparent - even in 1962 nearly 8,000 men worked there, and the place covered something like 136 acres. The site, long and comparatively narrow, from Crewe North Junction to the extreme north end of the Machine Shop South, measured over two miles. It took almost two hours to walk there and back!
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