Table of contents for Volume 37 No 10 - October 2023 in Backtrack

RECORDING THE HISTORY OF BRITAIN’S RAILWAYS Vol. 37. No. 10 No. 390 OCTOBER 2023…

STEPHEN ROBERTS traces a short – and short-lived – Hampshire branch which provided the London & South Western Railway with access to Christchurch and Bournemouth until superseded by a new direct main line from Brockenhurst to Christchurch in 1888. For most people interested in Britain’s railways, talk of closures immediately brings 1960s bogeyman Dr. Richard Beeching to mind with his controversial report recommending the closure of some 6,000 miles of track, getting on for 2,500 stations and the decimation of routes which followed. I have an interest, however, in a quaint rural line that ran metres from my house in Christchurch, Dorset, which fell victim to redundancy as long ago as 1935. As railway closures go this had to be amongst the earliest. The line in question, coming down from…

The Oxfordshire market town of Banbury had the privilege of a station on the Great Western Railway’s Birmingham main line from Paddington, serving also the older route via Oxford and Reading, while to the north an important Great Central Railway branch from its London main line brought in cross-country trains from the North to the South Coast. Here is some of the motive power to be seen there.…

Trackwork signifies the presence of a railway and all its many activities – junctions, sidings, depots and connections between all the lines serving them. Reductions in the extent of the operational railway over the years have seen many of these layouts disappear or at least be ‘simplified’. However, they were frequently complex permanent way engineering masterpieces, so here is an assortment from past times – and not a weed to be seen!…

The 4-4-0 designs of the South Eastern & Chatham Railway were long-lasting locomotives, even into the early 1960s on secondary duties. Not surprisingly they attracted the attention of that ace cameraman DICK RILEY…

Photographs on the London & South Western main line between Waterloo and Basingstoke by ROGER CRUSE…

Standing adjacent to one another, separated by the River Irwell and once joined by what was Britain’s longest railway platform, were Manchester’s Victoria and Exchange stations. The Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway’s Victoria dates back to 1844; the London & North Western Railway opened its Exchange station (actually in Salford) in 1884 to alleviate congestion at Victoria where it had shared accommodation with the LYR. Exchange closed in 1969 but Victoria survives, though radically rebuilt in recent years. These photographs of them were taken by GAVIN MORRISON…

Frantic promotion of railway construction projects that peaked in 1844-47 led to intensive company competition, amalgamation into larger groupings and responsive moves to protect trading by established lines. One was the St. Helens and Runcorn Gap coal-carrying line that won an Act four months before the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opening day in 1830. Promoted by “Liverpool merchants, salt boilers and coal owners”, the project sought to meet demand to improve transit of coal south from St. Helens collieries to the Mersey. That function had produced the first canal ‘cut’ in 1757, the Sankey Brook Navigation. A system had evolved whereby coal was loaded into shallow draught flats at canal wharves, or wagonways down slopes, then sailed eight miles descending seven locks to the river, whence downstream to Liverpool or…

I have previously described in Backtrack’s pages how railwaymen who have been involved in incidents have found themselves, as a result of their actions or inaction, on trial in court. In many of these cases the jury found that actions, or lack of them, by the railway company management and/or board of directors were to blame and acquitted the men so arraigned. Other accidents have been caused by railwaymen ignoring the rules and regulations and sometimes these have been exacerbated by other employees being less than diligent in the performance of their duties. Others yet again have been caused by a combination of all three circumstances. The tale you are about to read is one such occasion where the civil authorities chose to prosecute a driver yet did nothing in…

PART ONE A FABIAN ALTERNATIVE NIALL DEVITT considers the political, economic and organisational issues to be encountered on the road to creating what we came to know as ‘London Transport’. Returned to Parliament as MP for the marginal seat of Hackney South for the second time in the recent General Election, Herbert Morrison was appointed as Minister of Transport by Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald in May 1929. Later that year trickle-down socialist Beatrice Webb would observe in her diary on 23rd October 1929 that “The only outstanding minister is Morrison, with his transport schemes and he is outside the cabinet and goes ‘on his own’, without guidance from the cabinet.” Morrison was one of the select few invited to dine with the notoriously snobbish Webbs at their famous Hampstead political…

Interlude Before discussing the final flowering of pulverised fuel firing, it is of some interest to look back at three other parallel innovations affecting the fuel efficiency of locomotive design, namely the Brotan boiler and two ‘flash’ steam generators. By the start of the twentieth century, steam boilers for many power plants and marine installations were of the high-pressure water-tube type. They avoided the problems of clogging up with scale by using pure water, recirculated exhaust steam that had been passed through cooling towers and condensers. And they were very fuel efficient, but also very large. Locomotive engineers looked with envy at this way of producing safe, high-pressure steam with the added promise of low maintenance costs, but were defeated by the problems of fitting everything on to a drive…