PEMRC Newsletter October 2020

PORT ELIZABETH MODEL RAILROAD CLUB Newsletter

October 2020 #10/2020

Something for almost everyone In this issue: Club House

PEMRC Calendar

Committee

Luke Towan

Railroad vs Railway

British compared to American

Aha Moment – miracle track cure?

Appeal

Los Angeles to Salt Lake route continued

Layout Ideas

Milwaukee R & T

Port Elizabeth of Yore

Severn Valley Rly

Philip Hawkins Art

Wagon Loads

Vintage Ads

CLUB HOUSE The long wait for municipal approval…………

With Covid Level 1 starting on Monday 21 September, we are hopeful that the municipal staff will be back in full force to clear the backlog of plans awaiting approval since March 2020.

We will continue with our fortnightly gatherings whilst adhering to the prescribed pandemic precautions.

Although larger gatherings are now permitted, the overriding factor still is the limit of 50% of capacity of the venue. Depending on the venue of the host, our capacity limit is 10 persons.

Booking remains essential; please book the day before.

PEMRC CALENDAR Note changes in venue, time and host and host Sat 26

Sep 2020

Sun 4

Oct 2020

Sat 10

Oct 2020

Sat 24

Oct 2020

Sun 6

Nov 2020

Sat 14

Nov 2020

Sat 28

Nov 2020

Wed 2

Dec 2020

9-11

July 2021

29-30

Oct 2021

14-21

Aug 2022

Booking essential contact host 10 Wodehouse Mount Pleasant roelvanoza@gmail.com

14:30 16:00

Roel 082 739 7679

Port Elizabeth Model Locomotive Society Londt Park, Sunridge Park

10:00 to 13:00

1st Sunday monthly

Limited gettogether

Booking essential contact host 13 Lionel Road Walmer Downs

09:30 -11:00

Mike van Zyl 073 374 3280

Limited gettogether

Booking essential contact host 10 Wodehouse Mount Pleasant roelvanoza@gmail.com

14:30 16:00

Roel 082 739 7679

Port Elizabeth Model Locomotive Public running Society day To be confirmed Londt Park, Sunridge Park

10:00 to 13:00

1st Sunday monthly

Limited gettogether

Booking essential contact host 13 Lionel Road Walmer Downs

09:30 11:00

Mike van Zyl 073 374 3280

Limited gettogether

Booking essential contact host 10 Wodehouse Mount Pleasant roelvanoza@gmail.com

14:30 16:00

Roel 082 739 7679

Limited gettogether Public running day To be confirmed

International Day of the Model Railway PEMRC event on Saturday 5 Dec. 2020 details to be confirmed National Train Show Santa Clara California, USA Eurospoor 2021 Event & Exhibition Centre Jaarbeurs Utrecht, Netherlands http://www.eurospoor.nl/ NMRA National Convention 2022 Birmingham, UK https://www.nmra2022uk.org/

COMMITTEE 2020: Chairman: Treasurer: Clubhouse: Layouts: Librarian: Editor: Workshops:

Roel van Oudheusden Attie Terblanche Mike Smout JP Kruger Carel van Loggerenberg Roel van Oudheusden Graham Chapman Mike van Zyl Mike Smith

roelvanoza@gmail.com terblalc@telkomsa.net ma.smout@mweb.co.za juanpierrekruger@gmail.com annie3@telkomsa.net pemrailroadclub@gmail.com chapman22@telkomsa.net carpencab@gmail.com ‘Shop’: mwsmi5@iafrica.com WhatsApp: 078 069 7699 Subscriptions for 2020 are R300 for the year.

EFT is preferred, but the Treasurer may be persuaded to accept cash.

Bank account: Port Elizabeth Model Railroad Club FNB Walmer Park, branch code 211417, Account no. 623 861 2205

APPEAL:

1. My Story - How did you get into the model rail hobby?"

2. Send us pictures of your lock-down project(s) 3. Suggestions, comments 4. To which Model rail magazine(s) are you subscribed?

Please send your contribution regardless of grammar/spelling, long/short to: pemrailroadclub@gmail.com

LUKE TOWAN in Australia A Million Congratulations to Luke Towan for reaching a million subscribers on his YouTube channel!

Not a mean feat!

As a thank you gesture to his subscribers, Luke has made a behind-the-scene video which you can view on his channel by clicking on the banner.

You will find this as well as some of his other fine tutorials on the PEMRC Google Drive

RAILROAD versus RAILWAY CARRIAGE vs COACH etc.

I grew up with terminology such as ‘spoorwegen’, railways, ‘Bahn’ etc. but never RAILROAD! Now I am editing the newsletter of the local Model Railroad Club who also seeks to join forces with the local Model Locomotive Society. Here we also have a difference – when is it right or better to be a Club compared to a Society? When is it a Railway society and when is a Railroad Club more appropriate.

Perhaps the combined PEMRC and PEMLS could become the PEMRS (Port Elizabeth Model Railway Society consisting of the PEMLS and PEMRC).

What is in a name you may ask but let’s first explore the difference in terminology and how it came about, starting with an extract from a well presented article “Between the Lines” by Michael Quinion. (Link in the banner above) “Earlier this week I awoke to hear a BBC radio newsreader describing how a bomb scare had closed a number of London train stations, so stamping what some people would regard as the formal imprimatur of acceptability on one of our less commented-upon imports from the USA. Until very recently, the standard British expression has been railway station, a term which had been in use since the early days of passenger transportation on rails, and which is still usual among people over the age of about 40. The OED’s first citation is from 1838, eight years after the world’s first passenger station was opened in Manchester on 15 September 1830, but which must surely have been employed earlier.

The word railway itself is rather older, first used in the 1770s. The idea of moving goods by wagons running on parallel sets of rails goes back to the sixteenth century at least, but these early routes had wooden rails and were usually called wagonways or tramways. The shift in emphasis that led to the use of the word rail instead was partly due to the increased use of the technique in the colliery routes in north-eastern England, which came to be called lines of rails, but I suspect was most strongly influenced by the introduction of iron rails in the late eighteenth century. They became known as rail ways or rail roads, at first two words, using the word rail in its sense of “rod; bar”. This comes from an old French word reille, “iron bar”, whose Latin precursor regula, “straight stick, rod”, has also bequeathed us regular and rule. At first railway and railroad were used pretty much equally, but by the 1830s the former had prevailed in British English, though the latter was taken to North America and became the dominant term there.”

“A similar example of the conservative use of language can be found in the name for the conveyances on the new passenger railways. They were called carriages by analogy with horse-drawn vehicles, and this remains the standard term in British English for rail-drawn vehicles, specifically those containing seating for passengers (for which American English would use coach). American English has the general term car for railway vehicles, which British English only uses in compounds, such as restaurant car or sleeping car. (Incidentally, car is not an abbreviated form of carriage but a quite distinct word; they came from the Latin original by different routes, car being a very general term for any wheeled conveyance.)

As early drawings show, the design of British railway carriages was actually based on the enclosed carriages of the time and looked exactly like stage coaches on rails; unsurprising, as there were plenty of coach builders about who knew exactly how to create a vehicle of that type”.

“A station is a place, etymologically speaking, where one stands. It derives from the Latin statio, “a standing”, from which we also obtain stand and stationer (the latter was originally a trader who kept a permanent stall instead of moving about like a pedlar; since most were booksellers the term came to apply specifically to them and only later weakened to the modern sense of “office requisites”). Station had been in use since medieval times for a place at which ships are based and for military posts. The railway sense came from the later meaning of “a stopping place on a journey” and later still “a regular stopping place on a route”, which originated in river traffic in the USA and was imported into Britain in the early nineteenth century (the first recorded use in Britain for railways is by Henry Booth in his Account of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway of 1830).”

“As for train, that is a word with a long history. It derives from French words meaning “to drag; pull; draw along”. It came into English in the fourteenth century in the sense of “delay”, but was then applied to something that is dragged along, such as an extended part of a robe or skirt which trails on the ground. It soon took on the additional sense of a retinue or group of attendants trailing along behind some person of importance, and also of the artillery and wagons of equipment that travelled with an army, so leading to phrases such as train of artillery and, much later, wagon train. Out of this came the idea of a number of persons or things travelling one behind the other. When the first railways were constructed, the phrases train of wagons and train of carriages were employed and these were quickly abbreviated to our modern standard term.”

“The first railways were built entirely by hand labour by teams of navvies. This term first appeared in print in 1832, but must have been in spoken and informal use much earlier, certainly during the four years that it took to build the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The word is a diminutive of inland navigator, referring to the men who built the canals that preceded the railways.”

“Railways have the closest association with another sort of truck. This has a quite different derivation, being from the Latin word trochus (originating in a similar Greek word) meaning “to run”. It was first applied to the small wheels on which gun carriages moved (if a fighting man said in the eighteenth century that an enemy shot had taken off a gun’s truck, he meant the wheel had come off); it is closely related to truckle (a truckle bed was one which could be moved about on little wheels like castors). So, by extension, a truck came to mean anything with wheels on that was used to shift things about.

“A bogie is a British railway term for a wheeled truck or frame under a long carriage or engine that can swivel to help the vehicle around curves. It is of obscure origin, possibly from a northern British dialect word, but certainly has nothing whatever to do with the supernatural. In the USA, the word is generally applied to the equivalent unit on a large road vehicle, but not to a railway one, which is called, confusingly but logically, a truck. Such differences of vocabulary are extensive and need much elaboration: caboose, baggage car, diner, flatcar, gondola, boxcar, tank car, freight train, tie, switch and engineer are all words known to British English speakers only from imported cultural references in books, music and films, while in Britain the terms we use are guard’s van (both for caboose and baggage car), goods wagon, tanker wagon, sleeper, buffet or restaurant car, points and goods train and engine driver. A gondola is an open goods wagon with low sides.”

Troughs for scooping water between the rails are called track pans in American English.

“Until recently, the almost total separation of terms between British and American English would have applied also to train station. But it appears that the term is relatively new even in the USA, where railroad station was once the norm. But train station is old enough there for us to be sure of the direction in which it has travelled, and vigorous enough to oust the older term.”

BRITISH RAILWAYS Compared To AMERICAN RAILROADS “Two Nations separated by a Common Ocean and a Common Language” - George P. Landow, Professor of English and the History of Art, Brown University Although the first locomotives used in the United States of America were imported from England, the fundamental approaches to design and construction in each country began to diverge early until they became as George Bernard Shaw wittily remarked about another matter, “two Nations separated by a common ocean and a common language”.

The railway historian, Michael Koch pointed out, “the young country quickly established its own locomotive building industry suited to American operating conditions. This is not to denigrate the contributions by British railway designers, engineers and master mechanics to the basic design of the locomotive, including the separate firebox, multiple boiler, direct connection to the wheels, blast pipe and other features. American designers were to add improvements but these would be largely in the flexibility of the locomotive’s running gear”.

Despite the fact that the “first truly American locomotive” was built in 1830, a year after the first import, “some 120 British locomotives were purchased by American railroads”. Soon, American manufacturers began exporting locomotives, first to Germany in 1837 and Cuba and Austria in 1841. Perhaps most surprising, by 1840 the American locomotive builder William Norris “had supplied 17 locomotives to the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway in England”. Nonetheless, early American locomotives still depended to an important extent on England, for “English builders continued to supply the American market with components such as boiler plate, tires and forgings — a tribute to the superior quality of British metallurgy” At least half a dozen points distinguish the two countries' approaches to railroading:  Who financed railways in the U.K. and railroads in the U.S.?  

Approaches to creating the right of way and laying tracks Who built the locomotives

 

Locomotive and freight car (goods wagon) design Braking technology and technique



The Aesthetics of locomotive design

 Technical terms and vocabulary Financing the transportation revolution Put simply, in the U. K. “capital for development and expansion was readily available” (Koch). In the young Unites States of America it was not.

Laying tracks The first great difference involved building the railroad itself — creating the right of way and laying tracks — and the second involved the motive power and cars that ran upon it. Following the leadership of Robert Stephenson, one of great figures in an age when engineers repeatedly proved themselves truly heroic figures, British railways strove to have trackage as close to absolutely level as possible, something particularly important in the earliest days of railways when locomotives had very little power and hence would have encountered great difficulty pulling cars up steep grades. The British emphasis upon a level right of way led directly to enormous investments of time and money to create railway cuts, giant embankments,

bridges, and long tunnels, many of which remain in use, essentially unchanged, more than a century after they were constructed. These massive undertakings requiring hundreds of men often took years — the relatively minor Scarborough and Whitby Railway, for example, took thirteen years — were, as John Ruskin pointed out in "Traffic," the modern equivalents of the great medieval cathedrals: giant undertakings requiring great investment, ingenuity, and labour that represented the age that saw them built.

Conditions differed greatly in the United States, in part because the distances to be spanned were vastly greater than in the United Kingdom. Americans therefore in general devoted far less time and energy to massive earth-moving projects and instead often made use of elaborate, often spindly wooden trestles, sharp curves, and steep grades, many of which were later upgraded or replaced by tunnels or elaborate bridges.

Who designed and built the locomotives?

British design, experimentation, and construction of the machines that pulled people and goods saw far more centralization than they did in the dispersed, decentralized, often chaotic American context: Unlike British locomotive development, which depended upon the contributions of locomotive superintendents like Daniel Gooch and the output of railroad company shops like that of Swindon, American locomotive design was the product of a highly competitive group of independent domestic locomotive builders. In addition, high ocean freight rates and import duties made it difficult for British locomotive builders to compete in the vigorous American locomotive market. One result of such centralization appears in the fact that American locomotives occasionally proved more advanced than British ones, even when the key innovations actually appeared first in England. Koch offers three examples — (a) equalizing levers, (b) the truck, and (c) the bar frame: “Equalizing levers (which were first used by British locomotive builder Timothy Hackworth as early as 1827) provided two-point support by the four-coupled wheels.” Similarly, William Chapman patented the truck as early as 1812 and Edward Bury patented the bar frame in 1830. “Curiously, these devices were all used in America before they became accepted in the country of their origin, a delay British railway historians still deplore” Locomotives and rolling stock Having taken this different route to laying track, American engineers found them forced to develop more sophisticated locomotives that could negotiate the inferior (or at least more difficult) right of way. As a consequence, locomotives built in the United States early developed sets of leading wheels for locomotives that would make them less likely to derail, and because of London and Southwestern the steeper grades, particularly out west, U. S. engineers created 1887 Jubilee Class increasingly larger locomotives, eventually locomotive. producing giant articulated locomotives, such as the Big Boy and Challenger used in the Rocky Mountains and California, that essentially consisted of two very large locomotives on a single frame. In contrast to these monster locomotives that could pull trains a mile in length, small quirky locomotives that look neither like any British or other American ones developed for specialist use: The Central Pacific's Shays, Heislers, and Climaxes were three kinds of geared locomotives used White Eagle 4-4-0 by mining and lumbering railroads whose tracks were both unusually steep locomotive built from and curving and often only temporary.

1850s to 1880s

A Three-Truck Shay at the Colorado Railroad Museum.

These geared locomotives came in a wide range of sizes, the smaller versions having only two powered trucks.

The rolling stock differed on either side of the Atlantic, too: although British goods wagons, including hopper, tank, and freight cars, chiefly retained nineteenth-century short fourwheeled form well into the 1970s (and some are still in use), the four-wheeler died out in Americas well before the twentieth century. Again, relatively inferior trackage led to engineering innovation: Americans found themselves forced to develop swivelling wheel sets (freight trucks) that could better navigate curves and changing grades.

Braking Technology and Technique A third difference involved systems of braking. The steep grades common on many American railroads made something like George Westinghouse's airbrakes necessary, but when he tried to sell his invention to British railways, which had far fewer steep inclines, they didn't see the need for them, with the result that British freight trains ran very inefficiently for most of the twentieth century: without airbrakes to slow trains descending an incline, British freight trains long used the following procedure: before a section of inclined track the engineer would bring the entire train to a complete halt, the brakeman would then manually set the brakes on a selected number of cars — say, every second or third — the train would then move down the incline, halt, the brakeman would then remove the brakes, and the train would continue on its way.

The Aesthetics of Locomotive Design A McConnell "Bloomer", 1851: One of the very celebrated 2-2-2 express locomotives of the London & North West Railway, Southern Division.

From very early days, British-designed locomotives always looked far more smooth, elegant, even streamlined than their American counterparts for two reasons: first, well into the twentieth century, British locomotives placed the steam cylinders inside the frame whereas the American ones placed them outside, making them a key visual feature; by the 1930s most new British locomotives, even Sir Nigel Gresley’s super-streamlined record-setting Mallard (1938), used the American arrangement. Second, whereas American locomotives were covered with exposed piping, compressors, and various mechanical devices, British steam engines generally had all these things hidden under a smooth housing, which, furthermore, was often painted in bright colours — green, yellow, red, blue, or even lilac and bright white, as in the London and North Western Railways 1897 Diamond Jubilee celebration engine, the Queen Express!

The equivalent to British locomotive aesthetics of the 1850s or '60s doesn't appear on U. S. railroads until the Raymond Lowey's Twentieth-Century Limited and his other Art Deco locomotives of the 1930s and '40s, such as the Pennsylvania Railroad's electrified green and gold GG1.

Not surprisingly, those particularly interested in American railroading — historians, rail fans, and modellers — prefer the flamboyantly functionalist aesthetic found on American motive power.

AHA MOMENT – MIRACLE TRACK CONDUCTIVITY CURE “Black gunk” chemical analysis reveals primary component is metal oxide from electrical arcing.

After discussing the track fouling problem with a friend, he sent me a piece of heavily used, poorly cleaned silver nickel track which I then sent to the analytical lab for an analysis of the black crud that was presumed to be from using plastic wheels. The report came back today.

It has nothing to do with plastic wheels... sort of. The black crud is near 100% pure nickel oxide. Nickel (III) oxide to be specific. Saw the spectrograph output proving it. It is the natural oxidation of the nickel in the silver nickel plating on the track. Interestingly enough, it is deposited in such a manner as to suggest it was formed during an electrical arc. When viewed under extreme magnification it looks like random dots rather than a continuous film. The metallurgist explained to me it is likely microscopic irregularities on the tread of locomotive wheels and track face and/or common dust on the track which is causing momentary loss of electrical contact resulting in nanosecond duration, nanometre long electrical arcs which cause the nickel to oxidize far faster than would naturally occur. One could never see this with the naked eye they would be so small. He is only guessing based on observation of the deposits but who am I to question his analysis? The oxide is also very tightly bound to the track. This explains why a Brite Boy is effective while wet wiping is not.

When asked about plastic wheels he postulates the plastic has nothing to with it. Rather, metal wheels due to their harder surface are far more effective at wearing away the oxide. The wheels aren't responsible for the problem, they are the removers of oxide and plastic is just a very poor remover.

Bill didn't have any specific solutions to the problem but he did give us some suggestions. He believes we would have the best luck if we applied to the rails a very hard, very thin, titanium or magnesium based nickel conversion coating. Say that in English I said. A very specific type of anti-corrosive metal treatment he replied. Not exactly something you will find on the shelves of Wal-Mart. I Googled a bit and sure enough these products exist although they clearly are for industrial use only. Sorry I don't have an easy fix but at least we know exactly what the problem is and it isn't plastic wheels.

Who says lab guys are boring? We talked trains for an hour!

Ctrl+Click on the diagram to view the video here and then read the various views on the blog here

LOS ANGELES to SALT LAKE Route from the January 2010 issue of Continued from last month. This month: Wiring the layout The choice we had was to do block wiring or DCC (Digital Command Control). The choice was made for DCC since in theory DCC only requires two wires to the rails and that’s it, in theory!

Control drawer. The command station drawer is inset into the fascia, made from scrap material and drawer slides with a hole in the plywood fascia to serve as a drawer pull.

Location, location. The location of the DCC command station and plug panels are shown on this track plan and were chosen not because of space but to be close to the action. The blue arrows indicate feeder wires.

Blue and white was the colour choice for the feeder wires to the tracks since the KATO turnouts come supplied with their own red and black wiring. Be sure to orient the blue and white wires to the correct rails to avoid a short circuit caused by reversed polarity.

Work from the track sections and feed the wires through the base board and then through the joists, before any connections are made. Terminal strips make it easy to organize the layout’s wiring.

Labelling the wires helps troubleshooting later on.

Why were 16 pairs of feeders used? The KATO turnouts are power routing and if the turnouts for a siding are not aligned it will be dead. With DCC all the track can be live all the time.

A socket for a handheld throttle was made on the opposite side of the DCC Controller which then also allows for the drawer not to be open all the time. A cable connects the plug panel to the Loconet socket on the back of the command station.

LAYOUT IDEAS from the local prototype There was quite some excitement at the recent PEMRC meeting when we were treated on these images showing “current� repairs being undertaken on the George-Knysna line:

Our joy was short-lived when in his pursuit for the origin of the images, your editor discovered that they were taken by Allen Duff in 2005 when a landslip between Victoria bay and Kaaimans was being repaired. (Thank you Justin and Soul of a Railway).

I then stumbled upon a topographic image of the Goukamma section to Keytersnek and after searching a bit more I was able to put this together: This may be the start for your own design of your new layout!

MILWAUKEE RACINE & TROY HO TRACK PLAN

PORT ELIZABETH of YORE: The Railway Line to Humewood and the Driftsands

By Dean McCleland in Port Elizabeth of Yore Of all the Branch Lines in Port Elizabeth, this one appears to be the least known. Initially it was laid as part of the project to tame the supposedly deadly driftsands which would encroach and smother the site chosen for the harbour. To prevent this apocalypse, it was decided to cover this moving sea of sand with the garbage generated by the residents of Port Elizabeth. The garbage was required as fertiliser for the planting of the chosen species of grasses, bushes and trees, the sand being further stabilised by spreading tree branches and erecting wooden fences at intervals as required.

This standard-gauge railway line was constructed in late 1892 or early 1893, and the use of the coastal section of this railway for passenger traffic followed the sale, on 30 May 1893, by the Harbour Board of 20 marine villa sites between the original Happy Valley (where the Apple Express railway line now runs) and Klein Shark River. This act marks the beginning of Humewood which was named after William Hume, the Chairman of the Harbour Board at the time. As there was no direct connection between South End and the newly-proclaimed suburb, a direct road to the property following the coastline had to be constructed. Before the era of vehicles, the solution to the logistics problem lay with the railways. In 1890, Humewood and the surrounding area were totally undeveloped.

The Government had recently laid a railway line from outside Customs House in Jetty Street parallel to the Humewood road past the 20 stands, which had recently been sold, all the way to Shark River. In those days the Shark River had a bifurcated mouth, requiring the building of two bridges over the river.

The one branch of Shark River, now filled in, is no longer visible and the second over the Little Shark River was to become known as Happy Valley. After crossing this stream the railway line veered right into the sand dunes. The gauge of this railway line was the Cape Colony’s standard gauge of 3 foot and 6 inches.

The Sak River (now Shark River) which was flowing through what today is Happy Valley (My ‘Groot Woordeboek’ gives two interpretations of the Afrikaans word ‘Sak’ – 1. ‘bag’ (as in wheat) or ‘pocket’ (as in sugar) and — 2. To ‘sag, sink or subside’. The English population evidently thought the word meant ‘Shark’, hence this interesting interpretation)

The first section of this 3 ft. 6 in gauge railway still survives. It runs from the Humerail Station as far as Ocean Avenue, which is the turn-off from Beach Road to Kings Beach carpark. This railway line would only operate for 10 years. On the 23rd October 1903, the Harbour Board’s passenger train service to Humewood was terminated. As the Driftsands project was drawing to a close, it was probably apparent to the Harbour Board that the passenger service which only ran once per week on a Sunday, could not cover the costs of the service. In the wake of the extension of the tram route to include Humewood in October 1902, it made little sense for the Harbour Board to offer a competing service. On 21st January 1903, the tram service to Humewood, operating at half hourly intervals and a trip cost 3 pence, commenced.

From Christmas Day 1912 the tram extension from Humewood Beach to the Beach Hotel in Summerstrand came in use. This extension was probably laid down not only to service the customers of this hotel, which was then considered to be in the middle of the country, but it would also provide transport to an open-air bioscope operating in an enclosure next to the Hotel.

The ‘Apple Express’ narrow gauge bridge prior to 1908

Damage to the northern abutment of the narrow-gauge bridge during the 1908 floods

Port Elizabeth: A Social Chronicle to the end of 1945

by Margaret Harradine, Historical Society of Port Elizabeth

SEVERN VALLEY RAILWAY ACHIEVES RECORD LOCOMOTIVE AVAILABILITY LEVELS The Severn Valley Railway via the March/April 2020 issue of the Years of hard work behind the scenes is paying-off at The Severn Valley Railway, which has just announced its highest service reliability levels.

Weekly average figures just in from 2019 show that more than 99% of the Railway’s timetabled steam services were indeed hauled by a steam locomotive – a rise from 96% in 2016.

Moreover, services hauled by the exact locomotive named on the SVR website at the start of each running week has rocketed from 78% in 2016 to 96.7% in 2019 – its highest figure to date.

Neil Taylor, the SVR’s Head of Engineering Services, who started at the Railway in 2016, said: “These are pretty good figures for any heritage railway - in fact, if you compare us with the mainline, we’re coming out more favourably. Considering we’ve worked with locomotives that are over 100 years old, that’s a pretty impressive achievement.

“Reliability is key if we want to remain a leading visitor attraction – just one disappointing visit can put people off for life. I have seen for myself the looks of utter disappointment on the faces of visitors when a steam locomotive fails, and while that can’t be avoided completely, we’re doing everything we can to ensure that we can deliver the experience that we promise He put the latest figures down to a great deal of hard work behind the scenes and said some changes had been made since 2016, including having separate maintenance and overhaul teams.

“We now have separate teams, which has resulted in an effective maintenance regime, keeping the locomotives in good condition.

The figures come at the start of an important year for the Railway, as it celebrates 50 years since its official opening in preservation. A day of jubilee celebrations is planned for 23rd May – half a century to the day since the first SVR public passenger trains ran.

For more information, see www.svr.co.uk or read the extensive review which was published in Railways Illustrated in May 2019 here.

Photo: A Corfield

The Railway art of Philip Hawkins.

Read the full article published here on 22 Feb. 2018 and do visit his website.

For almost 40 years, artist Philip Hawkins has thrilled us with magnificent images of trains in all their glory. Now The Railway Magazine sketches the life story of one of the world’s greatest railway painters.

When it comes to art, one man’s meat is another’s poison… and that’s especially true in the world of trains, where a widespread passion for rivet-counting realism makes rail fans the most severe of critics. Pleasing these armchair pundits is no simple task. A remarkably high percentage are perfectionists and wherever two or more are gathered together, a debate on railway art can be guaranteed to produce a lively and often heated exchange.

“Waiting at Oxford” ex Great Western Castle class No.5037 'Monmouth Castle' circa 1958 For many enthusiasts, the more esoteric aspects of painting, such as surrealism and post-impressionism, can safely be consigned to the realms of academia. Of far greater importance are such issues as the shade of the livery, the size of the tender logo and the shape of the driving wheels. If just one point has been badly executed – no matter how trivial the matter might appear to a non-enthusiast – the rest of the picture might as well not have been painted.

Philip D. Hawkins was born and brought up in the West Midlands where, after leaving Lordswood Boys' Technical School, he attended Birmingham College of Art and Design graduating as a Technical Illustrator.

He worked at Metro-Cammell Ltd at their Washwood Heath, Birmingham headquarters. The company was involved in locomotive and rolling stock design and construction. Philip created artists impressions of company products to display to clients before actual construction, working from blueprints prepared in the company’s extensive drawing office. Running parallel with this 'proper job' he also found time to paint and indulge his passion for photography. The latter interest led to a job offer from a local newspaper to join their ranks as a press photographer which led to a two year spell covering anything from fashion and sport to Father Christmas arriving at Solihull in a helicopter.

Philip is a founder member of the Guild of Railway Artists, a national concern formed in 1979 to forge a link between artists whose depicted subjects include railways.

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