Table of contents for Vol 35 No 11 - November 2021 in Backtrack

BRITISH RAIL AND BEYOND IN GWYNEDD BY MALCOLM COWTAN (Author) Unlike many other rural counties in England and Wales, the Welsh Unitary Authority of Gwynedd is fortunate to have retained a good number of railway stations. Most important by far is Bangor, the only station in Gwynedd on the North Wales Coast line, and the busiest station west of Chester. Bangor is the railhead for a large hinterland, including much of Anglesey. The Conwy Valley line bursts into Gwynedd on its climb up from Llandudno Junction, when it emerges from the tunnel at Blaenau Ffestiniog. Most of the line and all the other stations are now within the unitary authority of Conwy County Borough Council (CBC). The Cambrian Coast Line, however, runs for its entire length within Gwynedd, once it…

‘JUBILEE’ TIME-AGAIN The London Midland & Scottish Railway’s three-cylinder 5XP ‘Jubilee’ 4-6-0 middle-of-the-range express locomotives have a firm following, not least for their pleasing style and a host of stirring names, the first marking the Silver Jubilee of King George V, then embracing constituent parts of the British Empire, admirals of the Royal Navy, warships of the line which ensured Britannia ruled the waves and naval battles at which it did so. 192 members of the class entered service between 1934 and 1936 and could be found at work all over the LMS main line system. The last of the class, based at Leeds Holbeck depot and having by then acquired celebrity status, were withdrawn during autumn 1967. (Colour-Rail.com 300073) (Colour-Rail.com 301407) (Colour-Rail.com 301163) (A. E. R. Cope/Colour-Rail.com BRM231) (J.…

‘ABERDARES’ AND ‘RODS’ Some of the lesser-known Great Western Railway freight motive power from the JOHN EDGINGTON Collection,…

CLASS 56s AT WORK In 1976 a new class of 3,250hp Co-Co diesel locomotives was introduced to meet British Rail’s need for heavy freight motive power – the Class 56. Due to a lack of home manufacturing capacity the first 30 were built in Romania of all places, but these suffered from poor workmanship and had to be extensively rebuilt. The remainder of a total of 135 were assembled at Doncaster and Crewe Works, proving strong and effective performers though expensive to operate. In 1995 the entire class passed to English, Welsh & Scottish (EWS) when it purchased Loadhaul, Mainline and Transrail companies from British Rail. By 2004 EWS had withdrawn the whole class. Subsequently some were reinstated by small freight companies and a number served on construction traffic with…

IPSWICH A HUB FOR SUFFOLK RAILWAYS PART ONE BY BRUCE LAWS Photographs from the author’s collection As long ago as 1836 railway pioneers set out to construct a railway line runnning north east from London to the county town of East Suffolk. Over the next 50 years Ipswich became the operational centre for a series of tracks striking out in many directions to towns in Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and further afield. By 1885 Ipswich engine shed presented a range of routes for its enginemen. This article outlines the history of the railway network these men worked. The story is complex but as far as possible I will lay it out in the chronological order of building. The railway comes to Ipswich: The Eastern Counties Railway and the Eastern Union…

FRUSTRATIONS OF FUEL EFFICIENCY: FEED-WATER HEATERS PART THREE TWENTIETH CENTURY BY MILES MACNAIR (Pendragon Collection) In 1915 one British locomotive Chief Mechanical Engineer was faced with a particular problem and so he tried to make a success of F. H. Trevithick’s Phase D heat exchanger version by adding a waste gas heater to a simple exhauststeam heat exchanger. Peter Drummond’s 6ft 4-4-0s known as the ‘Big Bens’ were a class of six engines built for the Highland Railway in 1908/9. The wheels, cylinders and frames were the same as the successful ‘Small Bens’, but the ‘Big Bens’ were fitted with a much larger boiler and firebox, while retaining the same small grate area. This mismatch resulted in very high fuel consumption, particularly when war broke out and quality coals were…

FOUR-COUPLED ON THE LNER The London & North Eastern Railway inherited a considerable stock of locomotives with the 4-4-0 wheel arrangement from all its constituent companies: 920 in total from no fewer than 49 classes at the grouping in 1923. Time and necessity inevitably thinned out the numbers, though the LNER did add one new class of its own, but it still finished with 507 of twenty different types to hand over to British Railways in 1948. (J. M. Chamney/Colour-Rail.com 363841) (Colour-Rail.com BRE716) (Colour-Rail.com 362021) (Colour-Rail.com 363835) (A. Drake/Colour-Rail.com 315835) (Colour-Rail.com SC618) (G. Warnes/Colour-Rail.com BRE717) (Colour-Rail.com 363834) (J. Robertson/Colour-Rail.com SC640) (John Clarke/Great Central Railway Collection)…

THE PACIFIC TANKS OF THE BRIGHTON LINE PRESENTED BY DAVID P. WILLIAMS Tank engines with the 4-6-2 wheel arrangement have always been something of a rarity on the railways of Britain. Exactly why is something of an enigma, as the wheel arrangement would seem to be ideal for medium-distance express passenger workings of 50-60 miles. The concept was not lost on Douglas Earle Marsh of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway who had produced a workmanlike 4-4-2T, the I3 Class, in 1907 for similar shorter distance duties and it proved to be a very successful design. The ever-increasing train loadings across the country spelt the slow decline of four-coupled express propulsion and in 1910, shortly before his retirement on health grounds, Marsh intoduced his Pacific tank engine, No.325 Abergavenny.…

ASPECTS OF THE MANCHESTER & LEEDS RAILWAY PART ONE JEFFREY WELLS charts the progress towards the opening of the pioneer trans-Pennine railway between Rochdale and Sowerby Bridge through the celebrated Summit Tunnel. Photographs from the author’s collection unless otherwise specified. “Scarcely any railway in England equals the Manchester and Leeds, in the vast number and agreeable variety of views possessed by nearly every locality almost throughout its entire extent.” We owe this comment to Edwin Butterworth who, being inspired by what he observed, put pen to paper and furnished a descriptive history to accompany A. F. Tait’s Views on the Manchester and Leeds Railway, published in 1845. Butterworth’s comment was certainly true of the section of line between Rochdale and Sowerby Bridge, in a locality in which the railway traversed…

CROSSING WITH THE ‘MAID OF KENT’ The crossing of the English Channel was for years in the hands of the railway companies on both sides, with some prestigious vessels being built for this important service. In November 1958 a new ship for British Railways was launched at the Clyde yard of Wm. Denny & Bros. in Dumbarton, the TSS Maid of Kent, entering service on 27th May the following year on sailings from Folkestone and Dover. She was the third with that name which had previously been carried by a London, Chatham & Dover Railway paddle steamer and a Southern Railway vessel lost at Dieppe in 1940. (All Pendragon Collection)…