Traction November/December 2023

LANCASTER 1992 • MY WORST NIGHTMARE • GRASSINGTON SPECIALS

ISSUE 278 - NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023

A CELEBRATION OF CLASSIC DIESELS & ELECTRICS

www.traction-magazine.co.uk

• ALSTON BRANCH • LIFE OF D6803

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023 | £5.49

REFUSE TERMINALS

• Model Railway: Tamcester • Review: Heljan Class 58 001_traction_fc.indd 1

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Lancaster Station in 1992

By John Dedman

Traction Modelling: Tamcester

TRACT N issue 27IO 9 will be on sale Friday 24th Nov

004_Contents and Welcome.indd 4

Bath Road Part 4

By Roy Kethro

Traction Modelling: News and Reviews

The Grassington Branch Photos by Gavin Morrison

My worst nightmare

By Colin Boocock

The Life and Times of D6803

By J. Crosse

The Line that Came too Late

By Michael Welch

Household refuse terminals

By Paul Shannon

A year after the Big Lift

By Andrew Hoseason

14/09/2023 11:14

Welcome

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LANCASTER 1992 • MY WORST NIGHTMARE • GRASSINGTON SPECIALS

ISSUE 278 - NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023

A CELEBRATION OF CLASSIC DIESELS & ELECTRICS

REFUSE TERMINALS • ALSTON BRANCH • LIFE OF D6803

www.traction-magazine.co.uk

Publisher: Steve Cole E: stevec@warnersgroup.co.uk Editor: Stephen Rabone E: steverabone@hotmail.com

In TRACTION MODELLING... Our featured layout is ‘Tamcester’, an N Gauge layout inspired by the West Coast Main Line.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023 | £5.49

We start this issue of TRACTION with a visit to Lancaster station in 1992. John Dedman spent several hours there recording on film the wide variety of motive power that passed through on passenger, mail and freight services.

Roy Kethro continues the story of his railway career at Bristol Bath Road depot in the late 1970s and early 1980s during a period of great change.

Gavin Morrison takes a look at the Skipton to Grassington line with photos of passenger specials at Grassington before the terminus there closed, as well as more recent trains to the quarry at Rylstone. Another branch line is the subject of Michael Welch’s article about the line from Haltwhistle to Alston.

Colin Boocock recalls one of his more difficult experiences when, as a railway consultant, he had the task of giving recommendations about the introduction of tilting trains.

Paul Shannon continues his series of articles about freight train terminals, this time looking at those dealing with household refuse from some of Britain’s large cities.

Finally, we have two features featuring locomotives. J. Crosse looks at the life of English Electric Type 3 D6803 and the many changes that the locomotive experienced over the years. Andrew Hoseason returns with the continuing story of the attempt to recreate No.10000, the first main line Co-Co diesel built by the LMS.

• Model Railway: Tamcester • Review: Heljan Class 58 001_traction_fc.indd 1

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60052 stands at Roxby with an empty domestic refuse train to Northenden on 29th October 1997. PAUL SHANNON

E-mail: steverabone@hotmail.com Editorial postal address: 120 Churchill Road, Middlesbrough TS6 9NS

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A pair of InterCity swallow liveried locos with 90006 ‘High Sheriff’ leading 87016 ‘Willesden Intercity Depot’ with 1S45 Stockport to Glasgow Central.

Lancaster Station in 1992

Text and photos by John Dedman

A very smart RES liveried 47576 is arriving with a parcels train from the south consisting of 3 BGs. This ran into the platform where the loco ran round and departed south with the same stock.

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Something we miss now are the loco hauled mail and parcels services. 86428 ‘Aldaniti’ is speeding past on the up through line with 5M84 06:30 Edinburgh to Crewe empty NPCCS. 86428 was named after the racehorse which won the Grand National in 1981.

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t was in the late 1980s that my wife and I found the delights of the area around the coast of northern Lancashire. Whilst having short breaks there I always looked for an opportunity for some railway photography. I explored a few locations and found Lancaster station to be within easy reach and it had good views in both directions plus all the required facilities.

I have records from two visits in 1992 on August 21st and October 29th. I got some of the train information from local enthusiasts on the day and the rest I have obtained from the working and public timetables. After checking the timetables for the workings I regret that I didn’t record the HST workings or the local DMUs but maybe I did not have time as it was quite busy. The HST cross country services at the time between Scotland and the West Country and South Coast included the ‘Devon Scot’, ‘Cornish Scot’ and ‘Wessex Scot’.

Virtually all passenger trains called at the platforms whilst most of the freight and van trains passed through on the centre tracks.

On my fi rst visit I arrived at the station not long after 7 a.m. and was greeted by my fi rst Euston bound express with a DVT up front and 87014 ‘Knight of the Thistle’ on the rear. Most of the Euston trains were powered

by Class 87s with a few Class 90s.

The fi rst freight train to pass was a short MOD working hauled by 37055 in Speedlink livery. This was followed by the fi rst of three double headed workings, InterCity swallow liveried pair 90006 and 87016 heading the Stockport to Glasgow Central, 37239 and 37167 with a southbound MGR and 86607 and 86636 on a Glasgow bound Freightliner.

An hour later saw 90137 in InterCity Mainline livery speeding south with a Freightliner from Coatbridge to Felixstowe. The cross country services to Scotland from Birmingham and Liverpool were in the hands of Class 86s, the fi rst of these was 86236 ‘Josiah Wedgewood’ with its attractive light blue nameplate which pulled in at 08:55.

The next working was a bit different

In the days before all nuclear flask trains were double headed and run by Direct Rail Services Coal Sector liveried 31200 is passing with 7M53 14:13 Bridgewater to Sellafield flasks. |||www.traction-magazine.co.uk |||

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86603 and 86608 ‘St. John Ambulance’ are in charge of 4O81 07:00 Coatbridge to Southampton Maritime Freightliner. These pairs of Class 86/6 locos were still used on Freightliner services until a few years ago when they were replaced by displaced Class 90s.

60070 ‘John Loudon McAdam’, in Railfreight Coal Sector livery, is heading north with Tiger POA wagons which I believe were carrying limestone..

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(ABOVE) A pair of split headcode Class 37s, 37040 and 37004, in matching Railfreight Metals livery are approaching the station with a set of iron ore tipplers.

as 47576 arrived from the south with 3 BGs; mail bags were unloaded on platform 3 and loaded into Royal Mail vans at the south end of the platform.

The loco ran around the 3 vans and departed south. (Ed. This was probably a working from Birmingham New Street which returned empty to Crewe South Yard) There were 2 southbound empty van trains during the morning, the fi rst one from Edinburgh, followed about an hour later by one from Glasgow; these were hauled by 86428 and 90016 respectively.

These trains are referred to as NPCCS (Non passenger-carrying coaching stock) in the working timetable and were both destined for Crewe.

90141 sped through at 09:35 with the Crewe to Deanside which was made up of a lengthy train of bogie ferry vans.

At 10:00 the fi rst of three Class 31s appeared with 31144 in Dutch livery on a northbound ballast train; this was followed by Coal Sector’s 31200 heading for Sellafi eld with a FNA fl ask and barrier wagons. Then 31203 which had gone south light engine earlier in the morning came through with a single open wagon, the only freight train to be held in a platform line.

Midday brought a bit more variety with 60070 heading north with a long rake of Tiger POA wagons followed closely by the Railfreight Metals pair of 37040 and 37004 with iron ore tipplers.

A few minutes later in the opposite direction came 37154 with a MOD working consisting of two wagons with red containers and fi ve VEA vans.

This was followed by Dutch liveried 47357 with a southbound mixed freight consisting of engineers department and revenue earning wagons. An hour later sister loco 47353 took a similar working in the opposite direction heading for Workington. This was closely followed by probably the loudest train of the day

with 37688 and 37687 blasting through the station with the Clitheroe to Gunnie Cement.

My second visit was made on October 29th when, as could be expected, a lot of the workings were repeated, usually with the same class of loco. One of the workings on this visit was a triple headed train of iron ore tipplers with 37048, 37255 and 37144 at the helm; a good finale for my two visits in 1992.

Railfreight Distribution’s 37154 ‘Johnson Stevens Agencies’ has charge of an MOD train consisting of two container flats loaded with the red MOD containers followed by five VEA vans. |||www.traction-magazine.co.uk |||

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During my visits class 87s appeared to be the favoured locos for the Euston to Glasgow and Edinburgh InterCity services with a few Class 90s appearing. 87035 ‘Robert Burns’ is arriving with 1S57, the 10:25 Euston to Glasgow Central.

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A pair of Longsight Depot’s 2 car DMUs are forming 1H51, the 12:44 Heysham Port to Stockport. The units are Class 108 LO290 and Class 101 L0242.

(LEFT) 47353, in ‘Dutch’ livery, is passing through with 6C09 Warrington Arpley Yard to Workington. It has a mix of engineers’ department and revenue earning wagons.

(BELOW) The working to take the prize for making the most noise was the 6S83 12:00 Clitheroe to Gunnie Castle Cement train which is seen storming through behind 37688 ‘Great Rocks’ and 37687 both in Railfreight Construction livery.

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Bath Road: Part 4 A pair of Class 37s working empty stone wagons leaving Twerton Tunnel between Bath and Bristol en route from Whatley Quarry to Tytherington. Stone working was not conducive to keeping the bodywork of locos clean. RAIL PHOTOPRINTS

Roy Kethro continues the account of his railway career at Bristol Bath Road depot.

D

uring the first half of 1977 I was tasked with snagging all the plant and machinery within the new HST depot at St Philips Marsh, occasionally being involved with the trains themselves by the Project Manager, the late Peter Sales. Then, out of the blue, I was catapulted up to the Railway Technical Centre in Derby for a spell of design office experience.

I was assigned to the power equipment section for the new tilting train which turned out to be a spectacular failure.

I only played a very minor part in its downfall.

After around three months, a letter arrived telling me to report back to Bath Road depot. I still considered it to be my home depot so there was no need to tell me twice. The reason for my recall was that the senior technical officer (STO) had been seriously injured while involved with a bogie change on a Class 31 loco using the Machinenfabrik Deutschland (MFD) hydraulic jacks which were part of the breakdown train kit. Being a bit of a mouthful, it was normally referred to simply as the ‘German Gear’. My remit

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was to carry out the STO’s duties for an indeterminate time while he recovered.

The specific job title for this post was casualty investigator, following up on reports whereby one of the depot’s locos had caused a delay or cancellation. Often it was a frustrating exercise as the incident could have occurred anywhere on the BR system, and it had been dealt with by a ‘foreign’ depot. Even when the tear out slip from the loco repair book found its way back to our documentation clerk via the internal post, the information it contained was frequently glib and unhelpful. Usually it stated ‘no fault found’ or ‘repaired’ with no technical detail included.

At that time, the depot was experiencing an all time low. There were just 39 main line locos allocated including just six Class 50s, a raft of Class 47s with no train heating so only of use for freight work, and a batch of Class 31s, many of which were electric train heating (ETH) fi tted as Class 31/4s.

Aside from the fleet of DMUs, there was an allocation of Class 08 shunting

locos to cover the diminishing amount of work in the various local yards. A pair of Class 03 diesel-mechanical short wheelbase shunting locos were retained for use on the Avonside Wharf sidings. These were what remained of the largely disused St Philips goods yard complex alongside the site of the former Barrow Road steam shed.

Due to their light weight, those two locomotives always ran with a runner wagon coupled to assist with track circuit operation.

During the early 1970s and into the era when the HSTs were introduced, there was always a sense that the Western Region had an excess of main depot capacity. The depot and loco works at Newton Abbot had already closed with work transferring to Plymouth Laira. Old Oak Common at the London end and Cardiff Canton in the heart of intensive South Wales freight workings looked to have secure futures. Bristol Bath Road in the middle always felt vulnerable. Freight in the Bristol area was gradually in decline.

One of the main traffic flows was wood pulp from Portbury Docks to

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The BRE/Leyland R3 Railbus on road 3 of the Main Shed. To the left is the ‘Berlin Wall’ which separated the maintenance roads from the new Servicing Shed.

RAIL PHOTOPRINTS

Marsh Ponds behind Marsh Junction shed for the nearby St Annes Board Mills where paper and cardboard were manufactured. That ended when the mill closed at the end of that decade.

The only freight traffic which was in the ascendancy was stone from the Mendip quarries at Merehead and Whatley, and Tytherington in South Gloucestershire.

That provided much work for Bath Road depot until the quarry companies opted to buy their own locos from General Motors in a drive towards greater reliability. Initially this was by Foster Yeoman but also by ARC. They later collaborated with each other as Mendip Rail. In the early years, Bath Road staff were contracted to carry out servicing and maintenance on these locos at Merehead.

The emergency services made it known that they had concerns regarding access onto the Bath Road site. With no direct roadway into the yard at that time, the only way to move materials down into the shed areas was to manhandle it down two floors from the forecourt at road level or use the slow electric hoist and goods lift by the front door of the admin block. The inadequacy of the lift was shown up when one of the Heavy Lift Shop gang was injured when a transmission he

was involved with changing dropped onto his arm. With little more than the footprint of a standard wooden pallet, the only way to carry a stretcher in the lift would have been to stand it up on end, so I believe it had to be manhandled up the stairs. Interestingly, at the top of the stairwells at both ends of the admin block, there were concrete stairs leading up to the ceiling. When the building was designed, there had been the intention to add another floor on top, but it was never built or even needed.

My return to Bath Road in 1977 coincided with the depot engineer moving on up the ladder, the successful candidate to replace him being Peter Sales, transferring across from Saint Phillips Marsh. During a heart-to-heart chat where I raised the question of the depot’s long term viability, his words were, ‘We’re under new management now, Watch this space!’ He was true to his word with a number of initiatives turning the depot’s fortunes around, at least in the medium term.

A major investment was to convert the Daily Shed into a three-road DMU maintenance facility. The building itself was extended at the north end to accommodate three-car units without splitting. Although the extension was

a good attempt at blending it in with the original contemporary building, the difference in design was clearly discernible. The servicing of locos was transferred to roads 5 and 6 of the Main Shed furthest away from the admin block. The pipes from the fuel, oil and coolant tanks had to be extensively modified to achieve this. As a noise and fire barrier, a concrete block wall was built along the length of the space between roads 4 and 5. Due to an error on the part of the contractor, it was built in the wrong place with insufficient clearance on one side. It was torn down and rebuilt, the demolished blocks being taken up to the Civil Engineer’s tip in the triangle by Stoke Gifford in departmental Grampus wagons. The dull grey structure became known locally as ‘The Berlin Wall’.

A lack of forethought with the new DMU shed came to light when many of our DMUs were reallocated elsewhere.

Up to that point they had all been typically Class 118/119 types built on 64-foot underframes. We received replacements in the form of MetroCammell class 101 units. With their 59 foot underframes, the fuelling aprons and exhaust hoods in the shed were not well aligned, but it was something which had to be lived with for the time |||www.traction-magazine.co.uk |||

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ETH fitted Class 31 No.31422 is working empty stock from Temple Meads to Malago carriage sidings passing under the Bath Road bridge.

RAIL PHOTOPRINTS

being until the first generation DMUs were replaced with the Sprinter and Pacer type units.

Pacer units were developed from a series of prototype vehicles which emerged around 1980. That year Bath Road hosted one such vehicle in the shape of the single car R3 Railbus which was evaluated on Bristol to Severn Beach services. It arrived with a couple of support engineers from BRE-Metro, the export division of British Rail Engineering Ltd (BREL) and a representative from British Leyland who collaborated in supplying not just the engine and transmission but the two bus body halves which were joined back to back. Despite the very basic bus style seating and limited capacity, passengers and the few Bath Road drivers who were trained to drive it were very positive. Less so the guards as there was no actual guard’s van.

It eventually landed up on Northern Ireland Railways having been regauged.

My main focus as the STO casualty investigator, was supposed to revolve around loco performance, analysing trends, comparing notes with opposite numbers at other depots, feeding information back to HQ loco engineers and managing modification programmes emanating from further up the food chain in Derby. But with many of our experienced staff realising that their future was best served at the new HST depot, Bath Road was left with a skills shortage, in particular with the electricians. Recruitment from outside had mixed fortunes.

One individual, who had been a contracting electrician in the building industry, caused severe damage to a loco due to his lack of knowledge of direct current machinery. He had

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mounted the brush boxes hard down on the commutator of a traction motor, not realising that a gap had to be left.

When an attempt was made to move the loco, the commutator was badly scored, this being associated with an electrical flashover. Several new recruits came with a background in the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy, their knowledge and experience fi tting in well once they had been brought up to speed on railway technology and the way we did things.

Apprentices who were coming through were not receiving relevant guidance from the tradesmen. Much of their practical training was coming as modules from the local technical college which seemed to bear little specific relevance to the work they would be expected to do once they came out of their time. That was something I tried to rectify with a few hours every week in the classroom taking them through schematic diagrams to explain how the control circuitry of a loco worked. For much of my time I filled in the skills gap by carrying out much of the fault finding myself while requesting the newer staff or apprentices to work with me. Our new depot engineer’s philosophy was that we should be doing this type of work ourselves rather than constantly calling in help from the Division or HQ which did nothing to enhance our own knowledge.

Reliability issues with our small allocation of Class 50s persisted, in particular with overheating. Where there were enough locos to go round, we ran them in pairs on Paddington services. In order to understand what was going on, I made a point of studying how the cooling system

worked. The radiator fan was electrically driven rather than through shafts and gearboxes connected to the engine which was a positive.

When a high water temperature was detected, dropping the engine back to idling, it was counterproductive if the fan slowed down as well so keeping it running at high speed electrically assisted with rapid cooling. Fan speed was controlled by a couple of electronic boxes of tricks which sped it up in stages as certain temperatures were reached. Calibration drift was an issue to address. A quick temporary fix I came up with was to tweak the settings to bring the fan speed contactors in a bit sooner, something which horrified the purists.

But there were other factors at play. I considered that ambient temperatures in WR territory during high summer were a few degrees higher than on the West Coast Main Line up to Glasgow.

Regardless of how the radiators themselves were designed, in time the cooling fins became contaminated with oil, grease and general railway dirt drawn in by airflow. Even coolant flow through the radiator panels would be impeded in time due to a build up of scale. These were all basics which needed to be addressed. Thoughts of derating the engine would have been a case of treating the symptoms and not the cause.

Riding up on a pair of locos one morning, the rear one I was monitoring cut out around Reading, then the second one approaching Maidenhead.

Pulling up in the platform, the driver who always wore a cloth cap rather than the uniform peak hat, threw his cap on the ground in frustration. We eventually limped into Paddington somewhat late.

I regularly kept an eye on our Class 31s, particularly the ETH version which had taken over Portsmouth to Cardiff services from the Class 33s. They were generally robust and reliable but their performance up the gradients beyond St Denys with five coaches behind could best be described as perambulatory, Southern Region drivers had nothing good to say about them. When one of our non-ETH ‘31s’ suffered a serious main generator electrical flashover it was deemed beyond rectification using our normal repair procedure. Changing a main generator would traditionally have been a job for a main works but our depot engineer with his can-do attitude said to his higher ups, ‘Get us a generator and we will change it ourselves’.

We did the job using the overhead crane in the Heavy Lift Shop in a fraction of the time the locomotive

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Class 56 No.56031 is passing in front of the depot control box. The loco survives to this day having been re-engineered as a Class 69 by GB Railfreight (GBRf). In the left background is the former Royal Mail sorting office from which mailbags were transported by conveyor bridge direct to the platforms in the heyday of mail going by rail. It was a derelict eyesore for many years following closure. COLOUR RAIL

might have languished outside a works waiting for a berth. Aligning the assembly accurately on the end of the engine crankshaft was critical to avoid flexing and stressing it. That was a procedure I had learnt during my time in Doncaster Works where it was carried out on a power unit cradle with good all round access, not inside the cramped engine room of a loco as we were attempting to do.

A small batch of Class 37s was reallocated to Bath Road from Cardiff Canton to cover Mendip stone traffic focussed around Westbury and also Tytherington in South Gloucestershire.

They were strong and robust locos, equally a match for the ‘Hymeks’ which were now long gone. Checking one newly arrived loco over I discovered that all the wheelslip protection equipment had been disconnected and isolated. This was something which could not be ignored, with a lot of trial and error involved in reinstating it and balancing the monitoring resistors so that it functioned at the right level of sensitivity for protecting wheelsets and traction equipment.

I was called in by the depot engineer one day to be told that we would be receiving an allocation of Class 56 locos, again for stone traffic. With a completely different power unit to the types we were used to and a whole host of electronic control systems, staff training would need to be arranged. I was given the task of putting together a course covering the electrical and electronic aspects of the loco while

a young graduate engineer, working alongside me for depot experience, was given the mechanical systems and power unit. The poor lad had barely seen the inside of a loco but was suddenly thrust in front of seasoned fi tters to explain the workings of the Ruston diesel engine. The electronic systems were very similar to those of the HST power car which made life easy for me. In fact, many of the plugin modules for the auxiliary voltage regulator, load regulator and the battery charger unit were interchangeable.

Those from navy backgrounds had little difficulty in following the technology.

Simultaneously, an electronics standards clean room was set up. Our electronics repair facility in Swindon designed and built the various test rigs and put together the test schedules.

These allowed modules to be calibrated and proven rather than incurring lengthy delays when they were sent away to be checked and returned to the depot stores. It was not just for the Class 56 and HST type of equipment which consisted of plug-in modules mounted in resilient racks to absorb vibration, but also the equipment fi tted to the Class 50s which was bolted on so not as easily removed and refi tted.

On the subject of stores, during my early days at Bath Road materials predominantly came in via the Enparts service from Swindon. Typical vehicles used would be old GWR Siphon bogie vans and long wheelbase fruit vans of indeterminate colour as they never seemed to have been cleaned. Later,

replacements in the form of Mark 1 full brakes downgraded from front line work, appeared in drab olive green livery. Once the diesel-hydraulics had disappeared, materials came predominately via Derby instead of Swindon. The service was upgraded using air braked vans conveyed in Speedlink services. Our deliveries would come down to Gloucester, Severn Tunnel Junction then Bristol Kingsland Road Yard to the east of Temple Meads before being tripped on to the depots at Bath Road and SPM. The weak link was the time taken once south of Gloucester where vans seemed to vanish for days into a time warp we referred to as the ‘Severn Tunnel Triangle’. Delivery by rail was later abandoned in favour of Swift’s, a road haulier providing overnight deliveries from a hub in Darlington.

With Bath Road’s lack of suitable road access, major components such as a power unit for changing in the Heavy Lift Shop would be transported by low loader to Kingsland Road Yard then transferred onto an old Lowmac wagon with a suitable cradle on the load bed before being moved onto the depot. Lifting was carried out using the depot breakdown crane requiring a minimum of six men in the crane gang plus a loco and pair of drivers. It was not a quick or cost effective way of doing things, even when the old labour intensive steam crane was replaced with a new diesel-hydraulic type.

To be continued |||www.traction-magazine.co.uk |||

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On 16th June 1968 R.C.T.S. (West Riding Branch) ran the ‘Dalesman No 2’ rail tour which is seen arriving at Grassington station behind D5113. The tour had started at Leeds behind D7568 which took the train to Stansfield Hall at Todmorden where ‘Britannia’ 70013 ‘Oliver Cromwell’ took over for the journey to Skipton via Copy Pit, Blackburn, Preston, Carnforth, Wennington and Hellifield.

D5113 replaced ‘Oliver Cromwell’ at Skipton heading up the branch to Grassington before returning to Skipton. After running round the Type 2 took the train to Ilkley via Shipley. After another run round at Ilkley the train headed back to Leeds.

The Grassington Branch: Part 1 Special passenger trains After running round its train, D5113 waits to leave Grassington for Skipton with the nine coach 1Z44 ‘Dalesman No 2’. At this time there was still a small amount of freight traffic to Grassington.

T

he freight only branch from Skipton to Rylstone is well known for its heavy limestone trains from the quarry at Rylstone (Swinden). On a typical day three or four loaded trains will leave the branch for destinations such as Leeds Hunslet, Hull Dairycoates, Leyland, Dewsbury

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and Wellingborough.

Originally the line continued further up Wharfedale to Grassington. Regular passenger services fi nished in 1930 but occasional excursion traffi c continued until 1969 after which the line between the quarry at Rylstone and Grassington was lifted. The line to the quarry was

one of the last to feature steam haulage with BR Standard $MT 4-6-0s powering trains until summer 1968.

Gavin Morrison’s photographs show a selection of excursion traffi c on the branch. In the next issue of TRACTION we will look at the growth of heavy freight traffi c on the line.

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D5113 passes Embsay Junction on the journey back to Skipton. The Grassington branch diverged to the left with the line to Ilkley heading off to the right. The Ilkley line had closed to passenger traffic on 22nd March 1965 with through freight services ending on 5th July 1965. The track and signalling remained in place in 1968, as access to Haw Bank quarry sidings at Embsay continued until 1969. A four mile section of the line to Ilkley is now part of the Embsay and Bolton Abbey Steam Railway.

On 27th October 1990 31327 and 31294 pass Sandy Beck on the way from Skipton to Rylstone with the Pathfinder Tours ‘The Rylstone Cowboy’. The tour had started at Swindon and followed a complex route through Bristol, Worcester, Walsall, Stockport, Wakefield Kirkgate to Skipton. The return journey involved a trip to Heysham Harbour before heading back to Birmingham and Bristol. At the rear of the train was 25322 ‘Tamworth Castle’ which had brought the train from Stockport to Skipton. After reversal at Rylstone the Class 25 headed the train back to Skipton and then took the train on to Heysham. Arrival back in Swindon was over two hours late because of various operating problems.

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On 7th September 1997 Aire Valley Railtours ran a series of three return trips from Skipton to Rylstone. ‘The Craven Dalesman’ tour used ‘Super Sprinter’ units 156470 and 156472. The trips were part of the Skipton 150 railway celebrations. The trains heading north out of Skipton station to reverse at Skipton North Junction in order to gain access to the Rylstone branch. Departures from Skipton were at 12:20, 14:35 and 16:20 with the round trip scheduled to take about one and a half hours. The ‘Sprinters’ are seen returning to Skipton as they approach the A59 Embsay bypass bridge. The site of the former Embsay Junction is visible above the rear coach with the stub of the old Ilkley line still in place, as indeed it remains today.

(ABOVE) Possibly the only HST to visit the line was a Hertfordshire Rail Tours ‘Mills and Dales’ special from London St. Pancras on 26th January 1991. The train is seen at the quarry at Rylstone and on the return to Skipton at Sandy Beck. 43064 and 43076 were the power cars.

The ‘Sprinters’ are seen on the branch to Rylstone about a mile north of Embsay. In the background is Embsay Moor.

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The magnificent Grade II listed signal box at Haltwhistle, photographed in April 1976. MICHAEL WELCH

The Line that Came too Late Michael Welch takes a look back at the Haltwhistle to Alston branch.

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uthorised on 22nd May 1829 and commissioned in stages from 1835, the route through the Tyne gap linking Newcastle and Carlisle opened throughout on 18th June 1838, following completion of the last section from Greenhead to Haydon Bridge which included the town of Haltwhistle. The line’s promoters, the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway, were keen to exploit the rich lead workings around Alston and on 26th August 1846 they were granted powers to construct a 16 mile long branch from Haltwhistle to Nenthead, a small village about seven miles south east of Alston.

The town of Alston claims to be the highest market town in England at 1,000 feet above sea level but Nenthead, a lead mining centre, is 400 feet higher and surrounded by inhospitable, barren moorland. The line was projected to descend to Stanhope in Weardale.

Eventually, the promoters realised that the idea of constructing the line to Nenthead was not feasible due to the high cost of bringing the railway to that remote upland village and, on 13th July 1849, an amended bill was passed for a 13 mile long line as far as Alston plus a short one mile long branch to Lambley colliery. The bill also provided for the junction at Haltwhistle to be rearranged to face Carlisle, the county town of Cumberland in which Alston was also situated, rather than Newcastle.

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Contracts for the building of the branch were let in 1850 and in March 1851 the four and a half mile long section from Haltwhistle to Shafthill (later Coanwood) was opened to goods traffi c with a passenger service commencing on 19th July 1851. Work continued, and on 1st January 1852 goods trains started running on the eight and a half mile long stretch from Alston to Lambley, plus the extension to the mine. The last piece in the jigsaw was Lambley viaduct, an impressive structure consisting of nine arches of 58 feet span, standing 110 feet high as it crosses the gorge of the River South Tyne. It is said that its parapets were low to enable passengers to enjoy the spectacular views of the river and surrounding landscape. Completion of the viaduct enabled trains to operate along the full length of the line from 17th November 1852.

The journey from Haltwhistle, where today many of the buildings are Grade II listed, was particularly attractive as the line climbed higher and higher towards Alston, the fi rst notable feature being a sandstone viaduct with four principal arches taking the line across the River South Tyne almost immediately after departure. After leaving Haltwhistle in an easterly direction the line turns round almost 180 degrees and is travelling in a south westerly direction by the time Featherstone Park station,

three miles from Haltwhistle, is reached. The station, latterly offi cially classed as a halt, actually served the hamlet of Rowfoot and boasted a signal box that was staffed to operate the signals governing the level crossing. A mile or so further on was Coanwood, where the main buildings were apparently demolished in the late 1950s and replaced by a rudimentary waiting shelter. Even worse, in the early 1960s it was reported that the station name was not displayed anywhere on the premises. Lambley station, 650 feet above sea level and four and three quarter miles from Haltwhistle, was the chief intermediate station on the line where the former line to Lambley colliery and Brampton converged.

The latter had its origins in the Earl of Carlisle’s wooden wagonway across the desolate moors from Tindale Fell colliery to Brampton which opened around 1798 with single wagons being hauled by horses. The timber track was, however, quickly replaced by cast iron fi sh bellied rails and various mines were served. This fascinating mineral line closed from 28th March 1953 when the collieries were largely exhausted, but in its heyday Lambley is reputed to have handled 50,000 tons of coal, coke and limestone in one year.

There was a signal box there, located on the west side of the line at the north end of the station, and a substantial

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The 1975/1976 Alston branch timetable.

‘Haltwhistle change for Alston’ proclaims the station nameboard at Haltwhistle. Pictured on a rather grey, overcast day, a Carlisle to Newcastle train approaches the station as a small contingent of photographers line up for a photograph on the westbound platform. The Alston branch train waits in the bay platform. Note the platforms are staggered and while both trains are formed of the ubiquitous Metropolitan Cammell DMUs there are considerable design differences – note the cab fronts. MICHAEL WELCH

A train comprising a Metropolitan Cammell DMU crosses Lambley viaduct. MICHAEL WELCH

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stone station house with tall chimneys and a slate roof. It has been suggested that the architect of the Alston branch stations was Benjamin Green who designed a series of handsome stations between Newcastle and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Apart from Alston, which was gas lit, the rural charm of the stations was enhanced by elderly oil lanterns.

The line continues in a southerly direction to Slaggyford station, eight and a half miles from Haltwhistle and 750 feet. above sea level, that had a signal box to operate the level crossing gates and a station house.

The fi nal four miles to Alston are, arguably, the most appealing on the line as the South Tyne valley narrows and the railway clings to the thickly wooded hillside which contrasts to the windswept moorland above.

It passes over Gilderdale Burn, which marks the Northumberland/ Cumberland county border, and then crosses the River South Tyne for the third time to enter Alston station.

The initial Alston branch timetable offered just two return weekday passenger trains but this had increased to three by 1863, trains taking a leisurely 40 minutes for the 13 miles. The frequency continued to be improved, and by 1910 four return weekday services were provided with an additional Saturday evening return working. Whilst the nearby Hexham to Allendale branch was closed in September 1930, the Alston branch enjoyed modest prosperity and by 1946 its service consisted of eight weekday return trains. However, this had dwindled to fi ve on Mondays to Fridays by the summer of 1954 with a couple of extra services on Saturdays. During the early 1950s period Class G5 0-4-4Ts monopolised the passenger service but in June 1953 a pair of Ivatt Class 4MT 2 6-0s appeared only to be superseded by a couple of BR Standard Class 3MTs, Nos. 77011 and 77014. Class J39s also worked the passenger services when the need arose.

Diesel multiple units (DMUs) were introduced on the branch from 2nd November 1959 and from that date the last remaining regular steam passenger train workings along the Newcastle to Carlisle line were also abolished. The North Eastern Region made several attempts to close the branch and, in a determined bid to balance the books and make an estimated £6,000 annual saving, withdrew all cheap day and other reduced fares, a development that

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Lambley station with its decorative chimney pots. Note the variable platform height. MICHAEL WELCH

coincided with the improved DMU service.

An innovation was the 8.55am from Alston, and 10.50am return, which ran through to Newcastle in 97 minutes stopping only at Hexham and Blaydon. There were estimated to be around 120 regular passengers who relied on the branch, that figure being boosted by summer tourists. Formal closure proposals were made in 1961 but these were rejected by the local Transport Users Consultative Committee in July 1962 because, due to poor roads in the area, it was not possible to provide an adequate replacement bus service to Haltwhistle and, in any case, harsh winter weather frequently made the

localities’ narrow roads impassable.

The branch was tabled for closure again in the Beeching Report but the Minister of Transport swiftly rejected the proposal due to the extent of road improvements that would be required. Normally, Metropolitan Cammell DMUs formed the trains but, from May 1965 until early 1966, Waggon and Maschinenbeau rail bus Nos. E79963 and E79964 were used – a quite remarkable development.

In September 1965 the branch was converted to a ‘basic railway’ following the withdrawal of the goods service, Alston station became unstaffed and the line became a ‘Paytrain’ operation.

A fresh closure proposal was

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The attractive setting of Alston station with a train awaiting departure. MICHAEL WELCH

(RIGHT) For a short time in 1965 and 1966 German built Waggon and Maschinenbeau rail buses Nos. E79963 and E79964 were used on the line. On a snowy 6th December 1965, E79964 awaits departure from Alston.

STUART MACKAY COLLECTION.

made in the autumn of 1970 and news fi ltered through that a decision had been taken to upgrade a section of road in the South Tyne valley to allow the introduction of a Haltwhistle to Alston bus service. The writing was clearly on the wall and the end came for the Alston branch as a standard gauge branch on 1st May 1976, when 5,000 people visited, and this delightful backwater fi nally came to rest.

But that date merely marked the start of a new chapter in the history of the line and preservationist society commenced negotiations with BR but, while talks were still ongoing, BR lifted the track between Haltwhistle and Lambley and demanded £40,800 for the Alston to Gilderdale section.

In July 1977 the society opted for a narrow gauge line and in 1979 the Cumbria County Council purchased all BR land within its boundary.

Progress from that point was rapid, the fi rst track being laid in May 1980 and on 30th July 1983 the fi rst public passenger train ran. Trains operated for a time to a temporary terminus at Gilderdale and currently run fi ve miles from Alston to Slaggyford through glorious scenery and Haltwhistle is now within the railway’s sights.

By the time the branch opened the local lead mining industry had already passed its peak so the Alston branch really was a line that came too late.

The guard seems to be checking his watch as a DMU waits to leave an otherwise deserted Alston station with the 12.25pm to Haltwhistle on 16th May 1970. By that date the branch had been reduced to ‘basic railway’ status bereft of all but the most basic facilities, but at least the graceful gas lights were still in place. RON HERBERT

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TAMCESTER

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Photography by: Phil Parker

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in partnership with BRM

Ben Sharich’s sectorisationera urban layout is the perfect showcase for his love of West Coast main line traffic in BR days.

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fter a few years of playing around with second-hand layouts, Ben Sharich finally decided to go for a bespoke layout that would fulfi l his needs. While his DIY skills were slowly improving, Ben decided a professionallybuilt layout (by Steve Hornsey) would give him much less to worry about and let him concentrate on adding his own details. Once he had figured out the space available for storage and transportation, Ben had to work out compromises such as train lengths desired, operational interest, and space available to decide what he could be satisfi ed with.

The location and sectorisation era were chosen because it’s the earliest railway memory Ben has. Watching West Coast Main Line trains at locations such as Berkhamsted and Hemel Hempstead evokes strong memories for him and, over time, reading books, old magazines and watching railway videos had led him to realise what variety there was available for the discerning modeller.

Tamcester is a large town between London and Birmingham, served on a loop off the West Coast Main Line. The main period of operation is 1987-1993.

The stock is a big mixture – Graham Farish, Dapol and Revolution Trains being the mainstays, plus a few unique kits, such as a Class 85 produced by Leicester Modellers. The stock is in a variety of liveries from BR blue to the last of the sectorisation liveries and in a variety of weathering levels. The traffi c contains everything from Intercity, Network SouthEast and Regional Railways in a variety of guises, and all sorts of freight, along with the occasional steam charter.

The Dapol Class 86 is by far the most numerous locomotive, with at least 12 of the fl eet usually found working on a good running session or at an exhibition.

The layout is standard DC operation, with two Gaugemaster hand-held controllers, and ideally needs four people to operate; two drivers and two fiddleyard assistants. Ben usually likes to operate the layout with a mixture of gleaming passenger stock and some forlorn-looking freights, or perhaps gleaming passenger stock with tired freight locomotives.

There is no set timetable that trains run to. With a relatively complex trackplan for its size, and multiple routes along with a mix of train lengths, movements are usually well planned with cooperation between the operators.

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The backscene features a mixture of card kit fronts in front of a printed skyline using a few different locations.

The access road to the fuel sidings and crew building is usually found with a BR staff van (a Leicester Modellers creation) on it. The usual mixtures of vehicles are found on the roads, as well as a compact forecourt littered with people, including the obligatory spotters at the end of the platform!

A typical modernist BR building station and a small crew building by the fuel sidings are the only two full buildings on the layout. Especially pleasing for Ben is that the station building and platform layout have had various comments of being reminiscent of locations such as Birmingham International or Ealing Broadway, so he is pleased they look the part.

Setting out building this layout, Ben has achieved what he most hoped to do, maximising the limits of the space

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available with an interesting layout for both operators and viewers.

His advice to modellers new to N gauge would be, “If there is anything that can be kept simple, keep it simple! Having manual points is a great mental exercise on a busy railway as it keeps operations interesting.

I can always recommend using large rolls of paper and spare track to draw the prospective plan up life-sized, because it really helps put things in perspective using stock as a visual guide. Making a change with pencil and paper is much better than ripping up track, as I have found in the past!”

For the time being, Ben is enjoying taking ‘Tamcester’ out on running sessions and to exhibitions and meeting many people who come to watch the trains go by. The dream one day would be a layout based on London Euston or Crewe (or both!) in the same era. Watch this space!

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12B Nasmyth Court, Livingston, EH54 5EG Tel: 01506 441023 sales@transportstore.com Railway books from the UK and world-wide The world’s largest transport literature website

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Unique, precise, easy to use, great way to plot and form realistic track routes

Limited Edition Dapol OO Wagon S Thompson & Co, Kendal Only available from:

01606 889610 07743 426393 www.3cp-tools.co.uk info@3cp-tools.co.uk ADVERTISERS’ INDEX ACCURASCALE............................. 2 JAMES GREEN ............................. 3 IVATT DIESEL RECREATION SOCIETY .................................... 19 3CP-TOOLS ............................... 29 BRANCHLINES ........................... 29 CAMBRIAN MODELS .................. 29 CRAFTY HOBBIES ....................... 29 DREAM STEAM .......................... 29 NICK TOZER ............................... 29 RCTS ......................................... 29 TRANSPORT STORE ................... 29 HATTONS MODEL RAILWAYS ...... 32 RAILS OF SHEFFIELD ................. 51 DIGITRAINS ................................ 52 |||www.traction-magazine.co.uk |||

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Heljan Class 58

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ere’s a model that proves that the O gauge RTR diesel-electric locomotive market has reached maturity. The Class 58s haven’t been the most widespread, longest-lived, or – dare I say it – most loved of the diesel-electric locomotives. And yet, arriving with Heljan stockists is a newly-tooled model for the scale.

Kindly sent for review is a sample of a ‘Version 1’ model (5851) in Railfreight red stripe livery. Heljan has tooled the Type 5 for early and later-built variants, with six liveries on general release, plus Coal Sector and Railfreight red/grey exclusives for Tower Models, and a Gaugemaster iteration in Mainline blue (also stocked by Tower Models).

A ‘plug-and-play’ DCC interface designed for ESU’s LokSound XL (58515) decoder is now a familiar sight with Heljan’s ‘big diesels’ and the trend continues, as does the manufacturer’s (and our) love for its powered roof fans, independently controlled in DCC mode.

Bogie detail variations have been thought through, with transparent sandbox covers, as seen on ‘Phase 2’ locomotives, while models are supplied with three alternative sets of cab door/etched metal baffle plates. These are standard handrail, handrail with ‘baffle’ and handrail with ‘baffle’ cutout. In addition, cab roofmounted NRN radio pods, as added to locomotives from the late-1980s, are provided in the accessory bag, with bogie steps, too. The last-mentioned have etched treads applied over the injection-moulded plastic components – a time-consuming factory process, but one that adds further detail.

‘Version 1’ models have CP3 bogies and no panel handles, with ‘Version 2’ models having CP3a bogies and bodyside panel handles.

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Words and photography: Howard Smith

As is now standard practice from the manufacturer, many of its liveries are unnumbered, allowing the modeller with a deft hand to number locomotives to match a prototype using transfers from specialists such as Fox Transfers.

Alternatively, many of Heljan’s retailers offer a renumbering and weathering service at additional cost, allowing the collector to receive a specific locomotive depicted at any given time period, provided useful photographic evidence can be sought. Tailoring an RTR model to match a specific livery and era is all part of the fun, requiring creativity and research, resulting in individual models.

On test, we couldn’t find the limit of traction from this brute, whose die-cast chassis gives it a great haulage capacity – there just weren’t enough wagons! From experience, we know that many of these locomotives are likely to be confined to a display cabinet, or run ‘light-engine’ on an MPD diorama. Few can afford to build the expanse that is ‘Heaton Lodge’ with its scale-length trains. Nevertheless, once weathered – as many Heljan diesels are shortly after ownership – fi tted with a

smoke unit as ESU’s Loksound decoders allow, and the characteristic ‘thud, thud’ sound of the Ruston-Paxman prime mover is playing, memories of Merry-GoRound trains and later mixed-freight or engineers’ trains can be rekindled.

One for the post-1983 modeller with room for a depot, or heavy freight in tow, or for the collector – highly recommended!

Factfi le Models: (5851) BR Class 58 in Railfreight red stripe livery Body: Injection-moulded plastic Chassis: die-cast Weight: 2500g Minimum curve radius: R2 (1028mm) Accessories: Bogie steps, handrails (three versions), NRN radio pods

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in partnership with BRM

NEWS

‘Scottie’ dog exclusives for model shops

Bachmann Europe launched two new ‘sales area exclusive’ OO gauge models last month, to tie in with Monk Bar model shop’s birthday celebrations.

The models depict two Scottish Class 20 prototypes, 20048 and 20100, and will be available from Bachmann retailers in Scotland, the North East and North West of England, and North Yorkshire.

Both examples sport disc headcodes and carry the West Highland Terrier logos, as applied by Eastfield Depot during the mid-1980s, where the pair were allocated. Both models will be available in standard or sound-fi tted formats with an RRP of £224.95 and £324.95, respectively. With delivery due in September 2023, all versions can be ordered from retailers in the specified regions now.

Located in the historic city of York, Monk Bar has been a stockist of Bachmann products since they were first launched in 1989 and was named Bachmann Retailer of the Year in 2007.

DVT gets ‘Flying Scotsman’ treatment Rounding up the release of Hornby’s Mk. 4 coaches in LNER livery is this Mk. 4 Driving Van Trailer (R40370) representing 82205. Carrying a recommended retail price of £84.99, the free-running model fi tted with working lights also benefi ts from sprung buffers, and an excellent highquality rendition of the vinyls seen on the prototype.

The ‘chiselled’ edge to the DVT cabs were designed to echo those of the then newly-introduced Class 91s. Hornby’s rendition works well and the small lettering and OHLE warning labels stand out. Painted door handles and handrails are neat, too.

The accessory pack contains air hoses and a NEM-mounted close coupling device.

Class 153 breaks cover for ‘O’

With calls for a Second Generation ‘Sprinter’ DMU in ‘O’ gauge growing all the time, Heljan has responded with a model that will “set new standards for detail and high-end features in this scale.” Based on original research and assistance from Porterbrook Leasing, the Heljan Class 153 is designed with modellers of the BR Sectorisation era and post-1994 privatisation period in mind.

All models will be offered DCC-ready with an “easy-to-access” 21-pin decoder interface or with factory-fi tted DCC and sound.

The first batch of liveries planned are as follows: • (53201) Regional Railways 153301 DCC READY • (53203) Regional Railways 153301 DCC SOUND • (53241) Stagecoach East Midlands Trains 153311 DCC READY • (53243) Stagecoach East Midlands Trains 153311 DCC SOUND • (53251) Northern ‘Swoosh’ 153351 DCC READY • (53253) Northern ‘Swoosh’ 153351 DCC SOUND • (53271) Transport for Wales Grey/Red 153906 DCC READY • (53273) Transport for Wales Grey/Red 153906 DCC SOUND • (53291) London Midland City 153356 DCC READY • (53293) London Midland City 153356 DCC SOUND • (GM7240701) GWR Green 153380 DCC READY – GAUGEMASTER COLLECTION

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British Rail’s attempt at launching a tilting high speed train service used three 14-coach trains, each with two power cars in the middle flanked by two six-coach fully articulated passenger sets. With the wisdom of age and hindsight, engineering opinion today tends to the view that in APT-P there were too many innovations in one design of train for a reliable introduction into regular service. The tilt system usually worked as designed, but even that had reliability problems among its components. This view show a full-length train on a test run speeding southbound through the upper Clyde Valley in Scotland. Observant readers will identify two carriages with tilt faults, one tilting further than it should and one tilting the wrong way. COLIN BOOCOCK

My worst nightmare Colin Boocock once found himself ‘between a rock and a hard place’ during a consultancy project. He explains: Background

I retired from full-time employment on the railways after 41 years working mainly for British Railways. By that time, early 1996, I had amassed, over the decades, considerable experience as a railway engineer, manager and senior offi cer. Maybe there might be a way that the railway industry could still tap into all this knowledge.

Happily, other people thought that, too. I was quickly invited to an interview with a major consultancy in Croydon.

That resulted in my being taken on as a part-time senior consultant in a section that dealt with railway strategy. I was to work there for two or three days a week.

Privatisation of our railways was just getting going. Our consultancy team was gaining some contracts to help aspiring franchisees to prepare their applications. We assisted one of these bodies with their rolling stock strategy which included the wish to obtain and operate a fl eet of tilting trains. This excited the Department for Transport (DfT) who, being typically risk-averse, needed to be convinced that tilting trains could operate in this country.

I was tasked to produce a report to DfT that would explain the principles

34

of body tilt in high speed trains, record the examples that were in successful operation around the world (at that time mainly Sweden, Italy, Australia and Japan), compare the different tilt systems used on these trains, and make recommendations for the UK situation.

Memories of the Advanced Passenger Train appeared to have faded into the distance, and that is where I left them.

Tilting trains

Older readers will recall the efforts that BR had put in to getting the three prototype APT-P trains into service. All three 14-vehicle trains had been allocated to Shields depot in Glasgow. They were intended for service on the West Coast Main Line to and from London Euston. They were permitted under test a speed allowance up to 160mph to test their curving performance compared with conventional trains. I rode one test trip where we ran through the curves at Whamphrey in southern Scotland at a maximum of 156mph, and I was impressed with the ride at that speed. I was also impressed with the performance of the hydrokinetic brake.

(This was before one collapsed at speed

and illustrated one of many serious design weaknesses in the trains, almost none of which related to the principle of tilt.) These prototype APT trains had bodies narrower than standard above waist level. The sides sloped inwards towards the roof so that during tilting they stayed within the loading gauge.

They sloped suffi ciently so that, even if a tilt failed or a coach body tilted the wrong way, the carriage was still within the C.3 loading gauge (at least, that’s what I was told). However, when placed into regular passenger service even with a limit of 125mph, they failed to survive the effects of a Scottish winter (air systems froze) and were withdrawn after a few days.

The purpose of carriage body tilting was to maintain passenger comfort when a train curved faster than was permitted for non-tilting trains at normal speeds on track with normal cant. On high speed main lines, track is normally canted on curves up to a limit of six degrees; conventional trains are allowed to run through these curves faster than the balancing speed (the balancing speed is that when carriages stay perpendicular to the track) up to a cant defi ciency of six degrees. That

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Nineteen-eighties’ technology might have been enough to control the tilt on APT-P, but everything had to work well. This diagram shows the configuration of the tilting mechanism of the coaches in APT-P. COLIN BOOCOCK

two reasons: (1) there was not enough time to fi nish the report to get it in the hands of a courier by 11:30 next day at the latest; and (2) DfT was adamant that the detail that Railtrack was objecting to had to be in my report which had to state that Railtrack had given its agreement.

Worst nightmare

I went back to the hotel very worried.

I worried as I ate dinner. I went to bed worried. I didn’t want to let anyone down. DfT wanted me to write that Railtrack agreed. But that company had not agreed and I just couldn’t write an untruth in the report. Also, I didn’t want to deliver the report later than the deadline because that would put the consultancy in a very bad light, but there really wasn’t enough time. For the fi rst time in my career, I was about to fail to deliver on a very important task.

Whatever could I do?

All I could do that night was to pray, which I did: a one-word prayer – “HELP!” figure has been selected as imposing on a seated passenger an outward force which is just within the comfort zone.

By artifi cially tilting the carriage body inwards towards the curve centre, some of this outward force can be reduced (or even eliminated as in APT). This enables tilting trains to curve faster, but not so fast as to be too close to overturning speed.

Report for DfT

So, back to my report. We had several meetings that included Railtrack as the UK infrastructure provider. To satisfy Railtrack’s more recent scientifi c thinking, it was necessary to defi ne the basis of a ‘kinetic envelope’. This would in effect be the loading gauge within which a UK tilting train could work, adjusted for the dynamic effects of different degrees of curvature and speed.

My report needed to illustrate examples where tilting trains were operating successfully on high speed services in other countries. The fi rst to go for active body tilting was Sweden with its X2000 electric trains. These were designed to tilt suffi ciently to compensate for about 60% of the lateral force felt by passengers (APT had aimed for 100% which was later blamed for occasional incidents of ‘mal de train’).

Italy had followed with its Pendolino trains that were probably the nearest equivalent to the type of tilting used within APT. Both these groups of trains used hydraulic cylinders to push a

levered framework that sat between a carriage body and its bogie suspension so that the lower part of the body could be pushed outwards while the top swung inwards.

Japan, I discovered, used a similar idea but with the body carried on rollers running in curved guides that facilitated the tilt movement. In all cases, the beginning of tilt, its degree (angle) and the end of tilt was initiated by outputs from sensors on the vehicles that measured the lateral forces induced by the vehicles’ movements along the track. (The Spanish Talgo trains use a passive form of tilt that does not have the signifi cant speed uplift potential of active systems.)

My memory of some of the detail is now hazy but I think it was the format of the UK kinematic envelope that was causing concern with my contact in Railtrack, whom I shall call ‘Mr X’.

“Railtrack will never agree to that,” were words I heard from him many times. It was, however, something that DfT wanted to be included in my report, so I knew I had to do more work to get Railtrack’s agreement.

Then, as late as 17:30 one afternoon, as I was about to leave the offi ce to walk to my hotel, I received a telephone call from one of DfT’s managers that put me on the spot. My report needed to be brought forward and had to be ready in the form of a bound copy at the Marsham Street, London, offi ces of the Department for Transport by midday the next day.

That was not likely to be possible for

Answer to prayer

In London the Railtrack offi ce people didn’t start work until 09:00. I allowed my contact, Mr. X, ten minutes to arrive at his desk and settle before I picked up the telephone at around 09:10. An unfamiliar voice answered. I asked to speak to Mr. X. “Oh, he doesn’t work here any more. Can I help?”

That was a big surprise! Mr. X had not hinted he was off to somewhere else when we spoke the day before. So I posed the contested question, to which the new man immediately replied, “Oh, I can agree to that!” So by about 09:20, much to my surprise, I had Railtrack’s agreement and could get stuck into the report. What a relief!

I had estimated that it would take me a couple of hours to fi nish the text.

The consultancy required all such documents to be sent upstairs for printing and binding before any could be released to the recipient. I knew that was not enough time to enable the report to get to the DfT offi ces in London by the midday deadline.

Nonetheless, I ploughed ahead, completed the text and appendices, checked it all once over, and pressed the computer key that sent the document upstairs.

Only then did I look at the clock. I imagined that at least two hours had passed since that critical telephone conversation, yet the clock showed it to be only 10:30. There appeared to be plenty of time for the printing, binding, collection and delivery of the document.

How was that possible? It almost |||www.traction-magazine.co.uk |||

34 my worst nightmare.indd 35

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11/09/2023 14:37

A Swedish Railways X2000 tilting push-pull unit bound for Copenhagen stands at Göteborg on 28th September 2003. While the six passenger coaches were enabled to tilt, the power car on this type of train did not tilt, but the driver’s seat was suspended so that it could swing to compensate for centrifugal forces. COLIN BOOCOCK

The first sizeable batch of Pendolino trains was this type, ETR450. These were initially used on services between Milan and Rome on the main line and the new Diretissima high speed lines in Italy. By the late 1990s they had been displaced by more modern tilting trains; they then worked on services on the winding routes across the Apennines. This one is arriving at Roma Termini on 20th February 1999. COLIN BOOCOCK

seemed that time had slowed down!

Then a respected, older colleague came across the room and complained, “Isn’t time dragging this morning!”

The spread of tilting trains

While I was studying the earlier days of tilting trains for my report I took part in a visit by a potential franchisee to Fiat’s Savigliano factory in northern Italy to see some of the detail put into that company’s Pendolino trains.

36

Examples were being built for Italy and Switzerland. We sampled one of the Cisalpino ETR470 sets from Milano to Basel; the tilting was impressive and was almost imperceptible to the lay traveller even though the journey was via the twisty, curvy route via the old Lötschberg tunnel.

Recent railway history records the spread of Class 390 tilting Pendolino trains in this country on the West Coast Main Line under the initiative of the

fi rst franchisee, Virgin; by that time, Alsthom (as it was then spelled) had bought the Savigliano site and the rights to the Pendolino design. Virgin had also obtained from Bombardier some tilting Voyager trains for part of its CrossCountry fl eet of Class 221 fi vecar high speed DEMUs. Tilting DMUs also appeared for regional services in Germany as well as on a few DB InterCity-Express (ICE) trains for routes crossing the Alps.

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Seen in the Savigliano factory of Fiat Ferroviaria in 1996, this Pendolino bogie shows the robustly-designed brake discs on the axles. The tilt bolster that supports the coach body is prominent above and across the bogie frame. There is unfortunately enough equipment on this bogie to hide any view of the tilt activation mechanism! COLIN BOOCOCK

The first international use of tilting trains outside Scandinavia was the sharing of ETR470 Pendolino trains by SBB and FS on the Milan to Basel route across the Alps. A service from Milan to Basel is seen approaching Kandersteg after passing through the original Lötschberg tunnel on the BLS railway on 25th February 1997. The Swiss Federal Railways later purchased its own tilting trains for these and other services around the mountainous areas. COLIN BOOCOCK

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On 10th February 2004, a Virgin Class 390 Pendolino tilts into the curve as it races through Tamworth Low Level on a London Euston bound service. COLIN BOOCOCK

21st century

In the other direction, a Virgin Pendolino was seen tilting hard through Lichfield Trent Valley Low Level on 17 November 2018.

COLIN BOOCOCK

38

It seems that in our ‘modern’, government-led railway, the idea of tilting trains has been quietly set aside.

Avanti, sensibly seeking electric train replacements for the diesel Class 221s on the West Coast Main Line, has less sensibly ordered new trains from Hitachi that do not tilt. As a result, Network Rail is now being pressed to ease some WCML speed restrictions so that the new Class 805s don’t have to extend journey times too much! Even worse, that obviously ideal main line for tilting trains, London St Pancras to the East Midlands and Sheffi eld with its many speed-limiting curves and its sawtooth speed profi le, is going to have to put up with East Midlands Railway’s new Hitachi Class 810 bi-modes for the foreseeable future. However, the nadir will be reached when HS2 trains penetrate the WCML north of Crewe to reach Glasgow and Edinburgh. No HS2 trains will have tilt capability, so they will be notably slower on that section of their journeys than the existing Pendolini that they will displace.

With all the experience that has been built up, and the potential benefi t of recent technical innovations, the apparent sidelining of the idea of new tilting trains is, to me, a mistaken development. Regrettably, our UK railways are too closely managed by politicians nowadays, and politicians seem disinclined to take even welladvised commercial risks.

Very sad, that.

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11/09/2023 13:53

With the guard waiting to operate the ground frame, 45077 has just arrived at Appley Bridge with 6J77, the 13:29 departure from Dean Lane, on 29th May 1985. The train has run round at Burscough Bridge in order to approach the terminal in the correct direction. At that time Appley Bridge was receiving daily trains from Dean Lane and Northenden.

Household refuse terminals Paul Shannon looks at the sometimes chequered history of household refuse flows on the railway.

M

oving household refuse by rail entered a new era in the 1970s when BR won several contracts to transport compacted waste in containers from urban areas to landfi ll sites. Specialised terminals were an essential feature of the schemes, using either fi xed gantry cranes or mobile reach stackers to load and unload the containers.

The household refuse business has had its ups and downs, with some flows ceasing because of increased recycling as well as ever keener competition from road haulage. But several of the schemes launched in the 1970s and 1980s are still in operation today.

Alongside the household refuse traffi c, the railway has picked up a number of temporary and longer term flows, mostly using conventional wagons for discharge by mechanical grab.

London’s refuse

The fi rst containerised refuse flow was launched in 1977, when the Greater London Council (GLC) opened its rail served transfer station at Brentford.

The GLC gathered the refuse from several London boroughs, compacted it and loaded it into totally enclosed 20ft containers. BR then ran a nightly

40

train of Freightliner type wagons from Brentford to Appleford landfi ll site near Didcot. The existing sidings at Appleford were equipped with a new gantry crane for the traffi c.

Two further schemes in the London area were established in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One connected Hendon (Cricklewood in railway terms) transfer station with Stewartby (Forders Sidings) landfi ll site, on the Bedford to Bletchley line. The other ran from Hillingdon (Northolt) to Calvert, north of Aylesbury.

Both Stewartby and Calvert were former London Brick sites where many decades of clay extraction had produced some very large holes in the ground. At Stewartby the waste transfer sidings and gantry crane were formerly used to load bricks for ‘Fletliner’ trains to London, Manchester and Liverpool. At Calvert one long loop line and siding adjacent to the former Great Central main line (closed to passengers since the 1960s) was adapted to its new waste-handling role.

All three London area schemes were strictly for trainload operation, with no shunting of individual wagons taking place at either end and with the mainline locomotive remaining in

charge all the time. In order to reduce turn round times some terminals used ‘slip working’, where the locomotive from an incoming train returned with wagons left at the terminal from the previous service.

None of the London operations survives in its original form today. Since 2016 the traffi c from Brentford and Northolt has formed a daily combined trainload to the Severnside Energy Recovery Centre near Avonmouth.

This is a much longer rail haul than previously but at least the waste now produces energy instead of going to landfi ll. The Cricklewood to Forders flow was diverted to Calvert in 2005 but fi nished altogether in March 2021 when the Cricklewood site was released for non railway development.

A further London scheme operated from Dagenham to Calvert between May 2003 and July 2010. It ceased because volumes shrank to the point where a regular train was no longer viable.

Manchester area

Outside the London area, Greater Manchester Council began dispatching household waste by rail in 1981. It eventually opened four transfer stations at Northenden, Bredbury, Pendleton and Dean Lane. In the early years the refuse was offloaded at a former quarry landfi ll site at Appley Bridge, between Wigan and Southport, using a single

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45050 arrives at Dean Lane refuse terminal with the morning empties from Appley Bridge on 30th August 1985. At that time the Dean Lane siding formed a loop from the double track line to Oldham; today the left hand track is electrified for use by Metrolink, while the right hand track remains with Network Rail solely for running round refuse trains.

ended siding and mobile reach stackers.

With no run round facility at Appley Bridge, incoming trains had to continue to Burscough Bridge and retrace part of their route. The four transfer stations all had through sidings, although Dean Lane had no loop within the terminal so the locomotive had to use the main line to run round.

All the Greater Manchester transfer stations still produce rail traffi c today, but there have been a number of changes of destination. The use of Appley Bridge was paused in favour of Wakefi eld for a time in 1987 and ceased altogether in 1993 once the quarry was fi lled. The Greater Manchester traffi c then became the fi rst of several different waste flows to Roxby, near Scunthorpe, where the former ironstone workings needed to be fi lled.

A big change for the Greater Manchester refuse traffi c came in 2009, when the then operator Freightliner agreed a 25 year deal with Viridor Laing to serve a new energy from waste plant at Runcorn Folly Lane. While that plant was under construction, trains continued running to Roxby and some were later diverted to Oxwellmains in Scotland. Eventually all trains ran to Runcorn, comprising a daily service (RIGHT) Transrail liveried loco 56099 ‘Fiddlers Ferry Power Station’ uncouples from its train at Northenden after forming 6M05, the 09:30 departure from Roxby, on 18th May 1998. At that time Roxby was the destination for all Greater Manchester refuse trains. Most were routed via Diggle but one ran via the Hope Valley instead. The booked haulage was either a Class 56 or a Class 60. |||www.traction-magazine.co.uk |||

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After the closure of Appley Bridge in 1993, refuse trains from Greater Manchester faced a journey of 80 to 90 miles across the Pennines to Roxby, where the containers were lifted at a simple two track terminal for emptying in the former ironstone workings. 60052 stands at Roxby ready to form the 09:30 departure to Northenden on 29th October 1997.

from each of Bredbury and Northenden and a daily combined working from Pendleton and Dean Lane.

Both carrying BR departmental livery, 31308 and 31203 pull out of the loading terminal at Cricklewood with 6A61, the 08:00 departure to Forders Sidings, on 31st March 1999. Just visible on the right is the electrified Midland Main Line.

After leaving the terminal the refuse train ran forward into the headshunt and then set back into the sidings next to the main line before heading north. The terminal itself comprised two single ended sidings.

Other flows

The short lived county of Avon opted for a rail based refuse disposal scheme in 1986. It built two new transfer stations at Bristol Barrow Road and Bath Midland Road from scratch and adapted a third at Westerleigh for rail access.

The destination was Calvert, reached via Swindon, Oxford and a reversal at Claydon. All the transfer stations were equipped with gantry cranes and the operation comprised a single daily train which exchanged empty for loaded portions at each location in turn. The trains stopped serving Westerleigh in 2002 and fi nished completely in 2011.

Edinburgh was the next municipal waste authority after Avon to choose rail based waste disposal. The City of Edinburgh invested in a purpose built transfer station at Powderhall on the former Granton branch and acquired its own small fl eet of wagons. The service began in 1989 and ran initially to Kaimes, on the line to Glasgow via Shotts. After Kaimes reached its capacity in 1997 the trains were diverted to Oxwellmains. The traffi c ceased in 2016 and the Powderhall branch was taken out of use.

(RIGHT) For more than four decades the railway has delivered various kinds of waste (household refuse, industrial spoil and contaminated waste) to the former London Brick clay pits at Calvert. The substantial gantry crane at Calvert is pictured on 13th May 2000, with the daily train from Northolt occupying the through siding. In recent times this stretch of the former Great Central Main Line has become inaccessible because of the building of HS2, but a new waste terminal slightly further south is expected to open in 2025.

42

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Merseyside joined the fl uid list of authorities with rail based refuse disposal schemes in 2016, when it began sending up to two trainloads a day from Knowsley to Wilton on Teesside. The railhead at Knowsley, reached by a spur from the Wigan to Kirkby line, had been opened by the Potter Group in 2001 as a general distribution railhead but had fallen into disuse after the rundown of the wagonload freight network. The Wilton terminal serves an energy from waste facility similar to those already in operation at Severnside and Runcorn.

Alongside the household refuse traffi c, the railway has gained numerous short and long term flows of industrial waste in the past 40 years. Most of the industrial waste flows have used open box wagons for discharge by mechanical grab and the forwarding terminals have been simple sidings with little by way of fi xed infrastructure. However in the late 1980s BR won two contracts to move industrial waste from Barking and Willesden to Forders Sidings in 20ft containers on Freightliner type wagons, similar in principle to the household refuse flows. For a short time in the 1990s EWS conveyed container loads of contaminated grit from the shot

The Ineos Chlor energy from waste plant at Runcorn Folly Lane is equipped with two through sidings for loading and unloading plus a run round loop. In theory the terminal can handle eight trains a day, but in practice the maximum number is three because the plant receives much of its waste by road. 70010 has just arrived at Folly Lane with 6F33, the 09:16 departure from Bredbury, on 19th April 2021.

blasting of ships from Falmouth to Pendleton.

Another flow of containerised industrial waste operated in 2002 from Bow Midland to Forders Sidings, later switching to Calvert. Unfortunately that traffi c did not last long, despite

the receipt of a government grant and the provision of branded containers.

However the site at Bow later became a busy loading point for spoil in conventional wagons, with destinations including Calvert, Appleford, Tyne Yard and Burton-on-Trent at various times.

Within minutes of the train’s arrival at Northenden, the first containers are removed from 6M05, the 09:30 departure from Roxby, on 7th June 2012. At that time the wagons and containers were still the originals dating back to the early 1980s, but the containers had been repainted in blue Viridor livery in place of the original Greater Manchester orange. The facilities at Northenden had recently been upgraded to include a materials recovery facility which sorted recycled materials from household collections, as well as a mechanical biological treatment facility with an anaerobic digestion plant to create methane from organic material.

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66207 backs into the Severnside energy from waste plant with 6C03, the 09:33 departure from Northolt, on 16th March 2020. This was the day on which the government ominously advised people to start working from home where possible; little did we know what awaited us!

44

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Roxby no longer takes household refuse by rail but is still busy with deliveries of inert waste from various sources. The terminal comprises a single loop but can accommodate two trains simultaneously when necessary, provided that the locomotive on the first train has run round before the second train arrives.

Nearest the camera in this view dated 10th September 2020 is 66101 with 6E58, the previous day’s 22:44 departure from Angerstein Wharf. The other track is occupied by an earlier arrival carrying colliery spoil from Rossington near Doncaster.

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English Electric Type 3 (later Class 37) D6803 was one of the first of the class to be delivered in 1963 and was allocated to 41A (Tinsley) on January 9th. It was in all over green with a small yellow warning panel as carried by most of the class; earlier deliveries of the class originally came without the yellow panel. It was part of a sizeable batch working from Tinsley and, unusually for the class as a whole, Tinsley English Electric Type 3s saw regular employment on passenger duties. In its early days Tinsley had such work over the East Coast Main Line and also on the Great Central route, where it was recorded at Gerrards Cross with a football special on 9th May 1964. J. L. LEAN/ COLOUR-RAIL.COM

The Life and Times of D6803 by J. Crosse

46

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The first change of identity would have been the removal of the ‘D’ number prefix after the end of BR steam in 1968. It may also have gained BR blue livery before the next identity change which was to see it renumbered as 37103 under the TOPS scheme in February 1974, by which time it was allocated to Immingham.

A month after renumbering as 37103, it returned to Tinsley shed and stayed until 1979 when it moved to Healey Mills. Other depot changes followed rapidly with two spells at each of March and Stratford as well as another at Immingham, all by mid 1984.

Whilst on the books of Stratford it again was employed on a number of passenger turns and was seen at Harlow Town on 22nd February 1982. COLOUR-RAIL.COM

11/09/2023 14:41

As can be seen from the photographs, 37103 was one of the ‘split headcode box’ variety and on the cessation of the use of headcodes it had one marker light installed in each box.

However, the connecting doors remained untouched. In 1985, when allocated to March, 37103 was in charge of a train on tank wagons approaching Chesterfield. It was soon to move south with an allocation to Cardiff Canton in March 1986. P HUGHES/ COLOUR-RAIL.COM

37103 was selected for conversion to a 37/5 being re-geared and fitted with CP7 bogies. No doubt at the same time the headcode boxes were removed, the nose door area re-plated and a headlight was added.

The records show that it was nominally renumbered 37511 in July 1986 although it was seen on test from Crewe works numbered as such at the end of June. It moved to Thornaby in January 1987. As seen in this view taken at Bescot in 1988, the livery changed to two tone grey along with a sector panel and aluminium depot plate. It was named ‘Stockton Haulage’ at Stockton station on 24th February 1988.

In 1993 it moved to Immingham and for the next 18 months was in and out of storage with great regularity. COLOUR-RAIL.COM

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11/09/2023 14:41

Its next change of identity came in November 1995, having lost its name in mid 1994, when it was rescued to become 37607 and was modified to work with Channel Tunnel stock. It was intended for use on Night Star services and it received EPS livery and was allocated to Bristol St Philips Marsh depot, later moving to Old Oak Common. However the prospects for cross channel travel by rail did not live up to expectations and it found little to occupy its time and in July 1997 it was bought by DRS. The special couplers fitted for Eurostar duties were removed and at the same time the loco took on a new look with revised light clusters on the nose. It was, on occasions, noted working Class 1 passenger duties whilst allocated to Sellafield, moving to Carlisle Kingmoor in May 2000 when DRS opened that facility. Whilst the initial business of DRS was the moving of nuclear waste, they expanded their portfolio to include the running of track recording trains and it was seen so employed a long way from its Carlisle home at Plymouth on 7th September 2007. At that time it had what might be described as the original style of DRS livery with medium sized bodyside numbers. COLOUR-RAIL.COM

The loco was recorded as being in store in 2012 but that was possibly a cover for being under repair as it emerged re-liveried with the new DRS Compass livery. However, it seems that its duties remained the same as it was in charge of the Plymouth to Truro track recording train when seen at Laira on 11th June 2014. It moved into storage in 2017 before being sold to Harry Needle Railroad Company and becoming part of their hire fleet. Some work followed, including a short spell with Colas, but the loco has spent recent times in store at Barrow Hill.

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A year after the big lift In summer 2022 the LMS10000 project had two giant cranes lift the chassis of donor loco 58022 and turn it upside down, onto a wagon. The operation was named the Big Lift and can be seen on the LMS10000 website video gallery and YouTube channel.

The reason why the chassis has been inverted is to provide an open and easy working environment for volunteers to work on alterations required in order for the ex-EM2 bogies to fi t the chassis. The chassis’ has now been stripped on its under side – now the top surface. Since the underneath was not designed to be walked upon, a wooden walkway has been created to aid workers. A safety wire and wooden safety fence have been added around the exterior to prevent falls. This fenced chassis has been topped by a transparent tarpaulin.

In February 2023, an extensive design stress analysis of the chassis adaptations was completed and approved by an independent railway vehicle structural engineer. The changes to be made will achieve the correct profi le of 10000. This analysis will allow the project’s engineers to establish the exact scope of works specifi cations and to seek further approval and appraisal for all works required.

Meanwhile work continues on the bogie’s braking system and the electrical cubicle, which includes elements of Class 56 and 58 electrical systems.

Work has been mainly carried out on bogie 139. All three traction motors have been removed and stored, ready for refurbishment. Thankfully, the condition of the traction motor we assessed to be in the least good condition, is, better than we might have thought.

The bogies had built up dirt and oil over the years, which has gradually been removed. Parts were copiously lubricated for a number of years, in order to prepare them to be taken off the frame for assessment, refurbishment and painting. Our opinion of the design and build of these MetroVick built bogies is that they are very solid and long lasting.

In all, they have weathered very well and this will positively impact the overall cost of the project. In May, ultrasonic testing was carried out on all axles of the two bogies. They are all in good condition for heritage railway use.

GBRF has donated to us an alternator for use in the loco, courtesy of donor loco 56104, part of the Class 69 project. The alternator came with Ruston power unit attached! This unit, is, in effect, a design descendant from the English electric 16SVT in 10000, so it is interesting to have both available to compare. We received a range of other equipment free of charge from GBRF via ProgressRail, and very much appreciate their kindness,

49 a year after.indd 49

by Andrew Hoseason

which has certainly aided us in terms of time and money needed to complete the project.

One of the items received from GBRF was the electrical cubicle. The frame itself could not be used since it is the wrong shape for a class D16/1 body shape. However the Class 58 cubicle fi ts the bill, so that will be used instead, with a variety of parts from the two cubicles together with parts bought from DB Cargo some time ago. A team of electrical engineers is working on evaluation and refurbishment of parts and regular reports are given in the monthly ‘Ivatt Informer’ email sent to members and website subscribers.

Additional former Class 56 parts were obtained during the last year from UK Rail and from Ruddington, formerly part of the collection of parts associated with 56097. This included additional alternators and a rectifi er along with numerous smaller parts.

Agreement has been reached to acquire former EM2 parts from the Netherlands, including much needed manganese liners and refurbished traction motors.

However it has proven diffi cult to identify and complete the correct customs arrangements in this post-Brexit world.

We await their eventual arrival at Wirksworth.

Centenary Works at Wirksworth has been enlarged during the last year, with two shipping containers and additional storage and workspace being provided.

One cab off 58022 stands as a gate guardian for the EVR site. It is gradually being refurbished and the interior is being restored.

Our Trust, the Ivatt Diesel Re-creation Society, continues to rely on the financial support of our membership.

In addition to attendance at other locations, whenever there is a special event at the EVR we arrange an Open Day at Centenary Works; and in addition ad hoc visitors are always welcome when volunteers are on site (typically Fridays, Saturdays, and Tuesdays). Our volunteer workforce has grown over the last year and we welcome anyone interested to get actively involved. There’s a wide range of ways to be part of the re-creation of the new 10000.

New members and volunteers are always welcome, contact us at info@LMS10000.co.uk

EUROPEAN RAILWAY ATLAS www.europeanrailwayatlas.com The atlases are available as printed books or as downloadable pdfs.

Book 1. ISBN 9781838488611: printed book £24.95: pdf £16.95 Book 2. ISBN 9781838488628: printed book £23.95: pdf £17.95 Book 3. ISBN 9781838488635: printed book £26.95: pdf £19.95 Both printed books and pdfs are also available at a reduced price when ordering all at the same time.

These three railway atlases by well known cartographer Mike Ball cover the railways systems of Europe in considerable depth and are an invaluable source of information. The books are stitch bound in A4 format with card covers. All railway lines are shown indicating whether they are multiple or single track, main line or secondary, freight or passenger or out of use. The standard gauge of the railways in each country is indicated as are locations where the gauge changes. Narrow gauge lines state the gauge on the maps. Different colours are used to indicate non electrified or electrified at different voltages. Heritage lines are listed with details of traction used. The scale for each page in the atlases is shown at the bottom of the page. All stations are shown including proposed ones and border stations. Complex areas are given enlarged maps to aid clarity. Lines that have names are shown as such, as are timetable numbers for some countries.

The atlases can be highly recommended for their clarity and comprehensiveness. Sit back and plan your next railway journey across Britain or further afield!

Book 1: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

Book 2: Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland Book 2: Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Kalingrad, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine.

11/09/2023 14:42

Letters

E-mail: steverabone@hotmail.com Editorial postal address: 120 Churchill Road, Middlesbrough TS6 9NS consternation at the time with our Southern Region colleagues. As an addition to cement terminals we also worked regular loaded trains to Greaves Sidings between Banbury and Leamington also from Northfleet.

STEVE BARTLETT BY EMAIL

CEMENT AND GE CLASS 86s I have just received TRACTION 277. It is well up to your usual standards. The articles set in East Anglia were of particular interest as that is my home area and where I worked on the railway for 38 years. A couple of observations if I may. The article on cement working was very interesting but fails to mention that Blue Circle had a rail connected factory at Claydon (Suffolk) which received coal in particular and despatched cement by rail for virtually all of its working life.

I have attached a photograph of mine depicting 40152 passing Blue Circle Claydon Works. The Class 40 is working 7F15 1009 Whitemoor to Parkeston (Speedlink Service) on 8th December 1977 but clearly visible on the left are wagons in the loading/unloading sidings at the cement works.

A particularly active flow took place between 1987 and 1995 with the building of Sizewell ‘B’ Nuclear Power Station. All the cement used in the construction being supplied from Claydon and transported by rail to Leiston along with other construction materials.

The photo spread of East Anglia Class 86 operations was also very good but I fear that an error has crept into the caption for the middle picture on page 49. It depicts Ipswich Station London end with 86227 in platform 3 and 86237 in platform 2 and implies that both are waiting for departure to Liverpool Street. I would suggest that 86237 in platform 2 is heading for London but 86227 in platform 3 is reading for Norwich. By the date of the picture pushpull working with Class 86 and DBSO sets was well established. 86227 looks to have its tail lamps illuminated so is almost certainly propelling a Down working.

ALISTAIR BARHAM BY EMAIL CEMENT TERMINALS Having just read the article about Cement Terminals in TRACTION 277 reminded me of working down to Handsworth with traffic in 1980 from Northfleet using double headed Class 33s whilst based at Banbury.

Sadly it was only a short lived contract. I do seem to remember Banbury men being passed out on the Class 33s caused some

050_Letters.indd 50

D5654 Regarding the caption to the lower photo of D5654 in J. Crosse’s article in TRACTION 277, I can provide a more accurate location for this shot than the one presumably supplied to him. The train is actually some way north of Maltby Colliery, although it is on the South Yorkshire Joint line, and it is heading south near Wadworth on the outskirts of Doncaster. It is just about to head under Carr Lane bridge a little over a mile south of St Catherine’s Junction and we can faintly see the headstocks of Yorkshire Main Colliery at Edlington on the extreme left of the misty skyline. The topography around Maltby is considerably more hilly than the flatlands around Doncaster, which gives the lie to the true location.

ANDY OVERTON BY EMAIL Many thanks for the fascinating pictures of D5654 in TRACTION 277. With reference to the first of these showing the loco at Hatfield in 1964, it is surely hauling the ‘Ashburton Grove Pullman’, as it was lovingly known. (It was also called the Stink Train!) This took domestic rubbish from Islington to a landfill site at Blackbridge sidings on the old GNR Luton branch from Hatfield. The sidings were not too far to the west of Welwyn Garden City.

There is more information about the sidings on the Disused Stations website (search under ‘Wheathampstead’), which also includes a picture of similar wagons to those shown here being unloaded at Blackbridge in 1970, not long before the site closed. The rubbish transfer station at Ashburton Grove stood where the Emirates stadium, home to Arsenal football club, is now situated.

The fact that the sun is behind the train indicates that this train is northbound.

On the GN line at that time, a ‘C’ in the headcode indicated a destination between Hitchin and Grantham, with the main line south of Hitchin (and also the Cambridge line) being covered by the letter ‘B’, but I assume that, since Blackbridge was off the main line, it also came within the ‘C’ area.

LEONARD ROGERS, BONNYRIGG, MIDLOTHIAN Your speculative caption to the top photograph of D5654 on page 40 of Traction

277 is, I’m afraid, rather wide of the mark.

The headcode displayed is a bit puzzling (8B29 would make more sense) but, in any event, the train is certainly not heading for Temple Mills. In fact, it is travelling in the opposite direction, taking domestic rubbish from Ashburton Grove, south of Finsbury Park, almost certainly to a tip at Blackbridge, on the branch from Hatfield/ Welwyn Garden City to Luton. There were two or three such workings every weekday until the tip closed in 1971 and they were known locally as the ‘dustbins’ or the ‘Ashburton Grove Pullman’! The steelbodied bogie wagons were a particular feature of the trains. They were not designed for brick traffic (GN/LNER brick wagons were wood-planked) but for carrying bagged ammonium sulphate fertiliser from the ICI works at Haverton Hill. Eighty of these ‘sulphate’ wagons were built in the 1930s and quite a number of them ended their days on the ‘dustbins’, alongside standard BR 16-ton mineral wagons.

DAVID PERCIVAL, KNEBWORTH

THE MIDLANDS MODEL ENGINEERING EXHIBITION This is THE show for model engineers and is being held over four days from Thursday 12th to Sunday 15th October 2023 at the Warwickshire Event Centre, near Leamington Spa on the Junction of the A425 and B4455.

One of the special attractions this year is a newly completed 10 ¼ inch gauge LNER P2 “Cock O’ The North” which will be on display. The exhibition will see the return of the lectures presented by the Model Engineer and Model Engineers’ Workshop to celebrate their 125th anniversary. There is a full range of talks from leading magazine contributors.

Nearly forty of the leading model engineering specialist trade suppliers will be present along with hundreds of fascinating models in competition and display classes and on nearly thirty club and society display stands and outside steamers.

Tickets are on sale now at www. midlandsmodelengineering.co.uk and will also be on the day of your visit from the ticket office.

Opening Times: Thursday to Saturday 10am - 4.30pm. Sunday 10am - 4pm.

Tickets: Adult £12.50, Senior Citizen £11.50, Child (5-14 inc) £5.00

11/09/2023 14:42

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11/09/2023 13:41

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11/09/2023 14:00