Contents Listing - Articles & Features in this issue
DEEPEST RICKMANSWORTH - By C. Stracher-Trelawney
BURNING THE MIDNIGHT OIL - By R.N.Hardy
NOCTURNE - Off the Rails
SOUTHAMPTON CENTRAL - By Dave Purvis
Station Survey - WESTERHAM
LEICESTER and SWANNINGTON - By Stephen Sunnnerson
BILTON - A Notable Yorkshire Junction - By John Talbot
Fourum
Reviews
A Reader Writes
Article Snippets
Welcome to British Railways Illustrated Volume 4 No.4. With commuters slumblii i<| into central London streets haggard and hollow eyed from Peterborough, Bristol and even further off an everyday, unremarked-upon phenomenon, it is hard now to appreci.de quite how somnolent and distant were some of the country districts around London parts which are now regarded hardly as the outer suburbs even. A trip out to Rickmansworlh <>i Amersham in the 1950s still had something of the adventure about it. Then you were very definitely out in the country - today you are well within the edge of 'The Great Estuary’. Despite being drawn long ago into the commuter system by the Metropolitan Railway’s mission to bring the businessman up to town, a remarkable survival could be found at Rickmansworth even into the dawn of the ‘sixties. Deepest Rickmansworth celebrates the extraordinary electric-steam changeover (one of the quickest anywhere in the country) to be found there, even to the end in 1961.
It is a great pleasure to welcome Richard Hardy to these columns, for he has been a regular and popular conduit (I don’t suppose he's ever been called that before) regularising and popularising the mysteries of the steam locomotive and railway operations ever since Steam in the Blood (Ian Allan) in 1971. This latest account, which might have been subtitled Oil in the Blood, is an illuminating and as usual often amusing account, this time of Fen Tigers (as March enginemen popularly advertised themselves) wrestling with the mysteries of oil firing. The LNER, canny as ever - a quality remarked upon before in these pages - took care to prolong its trials with oil firing, only converting one locomotive. Whilst the company was happy to push ahead with oil fuelling installations, with Government money, it was not to go charging off with a fleet of oil burning locos. So it was that there was less egg on the LNER corporate face than on others when the whole thing collapsed.
Station Survey returns after an absence of a few issues, with the little country terminus at Westerham. Not that it was so much a country terminus - it had all the accoutrements, the look and feel, of deepest Sussex, but it lay (shades of Rickmansworth here) on the very fringes of the Capital and much of its passenger traffic indeed bled away northwards - in buses. It missed the boat with electrification and was effectively doomed. It ended life, weedstrewn before its time, amongst protest and rancour extreme even by the standards of later times, many of its adherents convinced it had been sacrificed on the alter of the M25, then known as the South Orbital. Its east - west trend, it was said darkly, just proved too tempting for a Transport Ministry concerned overmuch with road at the expense of rail.
A beautiful set of photographs by Steven Gradidge recalls one of many pilgrimages to the ancient Leicester and Swannington in the early 1960s, seeking out the last Midland 2F 0-6-0s; then there is the usual sprinkling of regulars - Fourum, Nocturne and a fascinating little effort by Dave Purvis, tracking down the long ago circumstances of a BR 4-6-0, Off the Road at Southampton Central.
Adverts and Links based on this content
Advertisement