Índex per Volume 39 No 6 - June 2025 a Backtrack

It wasn't until a family summer holiday high in the mountains above Talsarnau that I discovered the delights of the Cambrian Coast lines radiating from Machynlleth. Unfortunately, by 1962 the last of the ex-Great Western Railway ‘Earl’ or ‘Dukedog’ Class 4-4-0s had been withdrawn and scrapped apart from No.9017, but there were still the ‘Manors’, ‘43XX/63XX’ and ‘2251’ Classes as well as the Standard ‘75000’, ‘78000’ and ‘82000’ Classes hard at work soon to be followed by the ‘80000s’. After withdrawal No.9017 had been stored at Oswestry courtesy of Oliver Veltom, the Oswestry District Traffic Superintendent, while a public appeal fronted by Peter Summers and Tom Gomm set about raising the £1,549 to buy the 4-4-0 with a home waiting on the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. With the news that…

Introduction The Midland Railway's West Riding scheme of 1898 was probably the last major railway scheme within West Yorkshire and represented the culmination of many previous schemes to cross the area in a north– south direction. It was designed to tunnel across Bradford, under the existing Market Place station and so place the city on a fast, direct route to London southwards and the Midland's Settle–Carlisle to the north, thus making a new Anglo-Scottish route avoiding Leeds. Costing nearly £300 million in today's prices, it also included a branch to Halifax via Huddersfield linking the two towns on a short direct line for the first time. This article considers how “a magnificent piece of work, the finest bit of railway ever constructed either in England or anywhere else, designed for…

This interesting sepia photograph was taken by ‘Lanternist & Photographer’ B. Brough of Sheffield Road, Chesterfield, and features Woodhouse station on the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (MSLR) line just to the east of Sheffield. The image is unfortunately undated and without any further details but analysis of, in particular, the female clothing styles indicates a quite specific date of around 1890. At this time the station was only around fifteen years old, having been constructed in the typical ‘double pavilion’ style in 1875 to replace an earlier facility at Woodhouse Junction, on an inconvenient site just 700 yards to the east. The Junction station had opened in 1850 at a point where the branch to Beighton and beyond left the original MSLR 1849 main route to Retford and Gainsborough.…

Britain was once a major supplier of steam locomotives to the world and was fortunate to have a ready market for its products in what was then its empire. Australia in particular seems to have had a long association with British locomotive manufacturers. In this, the first of two articles about British-built locomotives working in Australia, we describe those used on the colliery railways operated by J. & A. Brown in New South Wales, the accompanying photographs being taken on a visit there in September 1968. This had its origin in a line built in 1856 connecting a colliery at Minmi with the port facilities on the Hunter River at Hexham, a distance of around six miles (Hexham is the most northerly suburb of Newcastle, New South Wales, and lies…

The weather turns Over the second weekend of February 1900 there was a four days’ blizzard across the north of England and Wales. Unfortunately, that was the weekend that some volunteer companies had to leave their headquarters for embarkation and so there could be no cancellations of special trains. The Westmorland and Cumberland Yeomanry contingent was ordered by the district headquarters, in Chester, that it had to leave Penrith by a special train on Sunday morning, 11th February, at 4.35, arriving at the Canada Dock, Liverpool, at 9.30. The train would convey five officers, 116 men and 36 horses. “On Sunday morning, before the men assemble, the horses will be taken to the station and boxed. The troopers’ horses will be placed in cattle trucks and the officers’ horses in…

So many large railway stations are noted for their great architecture or roof constructions, yet most of our stations are much smaller and homelier, often not more than lineside halts. Nevertheless, in their day (and sometimes still) they have been important to their users… just not as many of them.…

In Part One of this article I looked at the background to the Bishop's Waltham branch, the various abortive schemes to connect the town to the railway network, the coming of the Bishop's Waltham Railway (BWR) and its initial, somewhat shaky, period of operation. I will now take the story through to its rather sad but rather inevitable ending. London & South Western Railway ownership The London & South Western Railway speedily activated enhancements, the first of which was the introduction of an extra mid-morning return service in 1883 and an additional mid-afternoon return service in 1884. While the goods timetable was also improved, the new owners stubbornly declined to restore the Sunday train service. The signalling system on the line was modernised with a new signal box installed at…

When Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared in 1949, its vision of a grey, post-nuclear world of lies made many fear for the future. Away from the world of politics, though, the real-life ‘84 presented a world where change had clearly come more slowly than feared – Mini Metros zipped past Vauxhall Vivas and Riley Kestrels, teenagers zipped up skinny jeans while Mum donned her flares and Madonna became a ‘Material Girl’ as new John Lennon and King Crimson albums hit the racks at Our Price. It was the same on the railway, where British Rail Class 58s hauled freights alongside double-headed Class 25s and the High Speed Train network spread as ageing Class 501s electric units went on working out of Broad Street (at least for a little while longer). Practices…

His career in summary Following the adoption of the Staffordshire Knot to adorn its locomotives, rolling stock, staff uniforms and even its letter-headings, the North Staffordshire Railway (NSR) has become immortalised as ‘The Knotty’. Andrew Frederick Rock joined the ‘The Knotty’ as a Junior Clerk at Black Bull on the Biddulph Valley line on 15th November 1871. Some 30 years later, on 1st February 1902, he was appointed as the company's Telegraph Superintendent & Electrical Engineer and held that position until 1923 when the NSR became a constituent company of the London Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS). He retired from the LMS on 31st January 1924 and went to live in North Wales. His death on 29th March 1930 was recorded on the front page of the Staffordshire Evening Sentinel…