Tabla de contenidos para Vol 36 No 8 - August 2022 en Backtrack

Origins A ‘Brobdingnagian Absurdity’ the waspish Victorian critic and architect Augustus Welby Pugin called it when new and it has been praised or neglected ever since. But except for the Forth Bridge the ‘Euston Arch’, the ceremonial portal to the world’s first great railway, is perhaps the best-known railway structure in Great Britain, long after its demolition. In this article we shall see that the old station lay under sentence of death for over half a century and that decisions made in the 1830s led directly to events in 1960. We shall also find that the demolition was a cultural watershed, still with resonance today. The classic perfection of the great structure, gleaming against the sky, flanked by decorative railings and attendant lodges, was the image in the minds of…

Please note the convention used in this article: telegram codes are rendered in the upper case as they always were, and their interpretations in italics – for example, ACK means Acknowledge receipt by wire. This avoids a proliferation of quotation marks! The origins of the telegraph Cumbersome efforts to send messages by electro-static discharges along wires started in the mid-eighteenth century. The voltaic pile – the first battery, invented by Alessandro Volta in 1799 – provided a continuous current of low voltage electricity. Hans Christian 0ersted discovered in 1820 that an electric current produces a magnetic field that will deflect a compass needle and other inventors developed the use of a coil of wire to enhance the electro-magnetic effect. In the 1820s and ‘30s numerous experimental systems using suspended needles…

It was in January 1923 that Edinburgh’s Waverley passed into the ownership of the London & North Eastern Railway, becoming the company’s biggest station. Six months later, the London Midland & Scottish Railway took over the Princes Street terminus from the Caledonian Railway, once the latter had seen its compensation claim end in failure in front of the arbitration panel set up under the grouping legislation of 1921. Princes Street, known locally as ‘The Caley’, had received some of the first wounded to return from the Western Front in 1914 – with their families locked outside in the street – and saw the arrival of war hero and poet Siegried Sassoon on his way to hospital at Craiglockhart three years later. It was a favourite of the Royal Family, preferred…

Ambulance train to Redhill Terry Penfold rode the Reading to Tonbridge line in the 1970s. Ffty years ago I started work in the Productivity Section of the Central Division Manager’s Office in Croydon. The work was mainly one-off projects but we did have some recurring tasks, including bonus payment calculation for various work study schemes and census work. In those days there was a number of rail lines on the Southern Region which attracted a social grant. To justify the grant, passenger counts had to be undertaken on a biannual basis. One week was chosen in the winter and one in the summer. Counts were carried out on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Too many passengers meant the grant could be cut and too few meant it was the service…

The three of us – Bob, Chris and me, trainspotters extraordinaire, caught our usual train for an afternoon’s spotting at Witham on the main London line departing Braintree at 2.17pm, arriving Witham 2.34pm having called at the tiny intermediate stations of Cressing and White Notley, both, to the delight of John Betjeman, being examples of his beloved poetical ‘oil-lit halts’. It became a habit for at least one of us to lean out of the compartment carriage window to deter any further passengers entering; sometimes it worked, sometimes not, but the ‘2.17’ was never very busy and rarely collected any passengers en route. It’s not that we didn’t welcome fellow travellers but an empty compartment on the ancient (c1907) dirty brown carriages allowed us free reign to move from one…

At 11.00pm on Tuesday 4th August 1914, following August Bank Holiday, the British Government, having received no response to its ultimatum from the Imperial Government of Germany, declared that a state of war existed between the two countries. So began the Great War, an ‘emergency’ lasting for over four years and bringing significant changes to the economic, social and political landscape. Gelligaer Parish and its immediate surroundings was not immune from this but provides a microcosm of the stresses and strains affecting the railways in the UK. To date little has been written about the effects of the ‘war to end all wars’ on the railway system in this or any other area in South Wales. A partial explanation might be, that being of strategic significance, reporting of railway operations…

The Manchester, Sheffield & L:incolnshire Railway had reached Birkenhead by 1871 as a member of the Cheshire Lines Committee along with the Great Northern Railway and the Midland Railway. The CLC had opened a goods depot at Shore Road on the south side of Morpeth Dock in that year and followed this with the development of a second depot at East and West Float on the Wallasey side of the docks in 1892. An engine shed was provided at Shore Road by the CLC in 1888. The MSLR and its successors had the responsibility for provision of shunting engines at both depots. The MSLR constructed the engine shed at Bidston in 1897. The shed was concerned mainly with freight activity and the provision of motive power for local passenger services…

The author’s introduction to a new coal-moving procedure My career as an illustrator has taken me into a variety of industries with railway associations; from underground mining locomotives to the ‘APT’, I would frequently be found creating artist’s impressions of proposed new rolling stock or preparing instruction manuals for a complete breakdown of a Class 58. Having become a lapsed rail enthusiast following the demise of steam power, my introduction to the ‘Merry-go-Round’ (MGR) train did not occur until 1985 when my company was awarded the contract to produce an interpretation poster, its publication to coincide with the commissioning of the second phase of Drax Power Station, planned for the following year. Apart from preparing individual cutaway illustrations of one of the nine boilers, supplied by Babcock Power, also the…