lanchester

Surprisingly little known, for a fairly major route, was banking of Southbound expresses from Macclesfield Hibel Road up through Macclesfield Central. Mostly Fowler 2-6-4T, I think.

Which if you think about it is what you'ld expect: North End, folks hurrying down the approach ramp need to know the time; but there isn't really anyone at the south end with that need (platform end trainspotters not having yet evolved).

A quick aside on Methyl Ethyl Ketone. Many years ago now I visited a company that manufactures the printers that put those purple batch numbers and sell by dates on the bottom of drink cans etc. They had a problem - in Europe, opinion was very against using MEK as the solvent because it is a potential carcinogen, so wanted to use one of the alcohols. In the US, however they were relaxed about MEK but dead against alcohol on the grounds that the workers might drink it. You can't win sometimes!

I take it 'Manchester' has been painted out to fool Jerry into thinking the location is one of England's many other ship canals? Shame the wagon code name isn't 'Pike'.

I think the July 68 special with the two Standard 4s was on 28 July and they would be somewhere between Carnforth and Skipton. The train started from BNS with a Brush 4, then Man Vic to Carnforth with Oliver Cromwell, Carnforth to Skipton with 75019/27, then Skipton to Rose Grove with 45156/45073, Rose Grove to Stockport with 48773 (a surprise as she was booked to come off at Man Vic) and then back to BNS with the same Brush - I think D1946 from memory: it was a long day out for an eleven year old! (The route was rather more complex than that but I forget the details: it'll be on Six Bells somewhere).

There is an apparently identical, right facing, Silver Fox in the Kelham Island Industrial Museum in Sheffield (it's on a plaque with some sort of inscription, but unfortunately at a height which renders this illegible!). I suspect the steelworks may have been dishing them out at any suitable opportunity for a spot of publicity.

Of course, up till (and beyond) the early 20th century, Lambton was using a variety of 0-6-0 tender engines on their own, and presumably the NER, 'main line' to the staithes. There would though be obvious advantages, on a cramped site, of using non-tender engines, and clearly these were bought (Kitson and RS) as they became available. And to boost the fleet (although some of the 0-6-0s lasted until the sixties), LHJC number 52, now I think on the Worth Valley Railway, was indeed acquired, as were others, by my great grandfather, Sam Tulip, (my name also) in his capacity as Chief Engineer of the Lambton, Hetton and Joicey. Amusingly (or scandalously if you think that familial connections should automatically rule you out of things), my father, Geoffrey Tulip,who was a partner in a Newcastle firm of engineering agents which had amongst other clients North British Loco, had the pleasure of selling to my grandfather, Winston, who had succeeded his dad as CE, and subsequently with the NCB in the equivalent role, a NBL diesel hydraulic as a potential replacement for 52, which at the time was engaged on the lower, non-cable, stretches of the old Hetton Railway. (Dad wrote a little article about this - presumably for some NBL newsletter or similar - whether it was ever published don't know). The experiment was, I understand, only partly successful - the NBL loco went on to other things, but 52 stayed in service (although not necessarily on the Hetton, which in any case closed only a little later). Incidentally, my grandfather was 'Winston', not 'Walter' as quoted in the IRS books, and as I explained to Colin Mountford post publication - I think the confusion arose because he used to sign letter WLT, for Winston Leonard Tulip, and if you are taking notes of documents and then reading them back you might well think that was Walter. (Family says that old ST was travelling home, who knows from where, and passed through the village of Winston, thought 'that's a good name for a lad'. ) There is another slightly surprising thing about my great grandfather's appointment, back in 1897 or there abouts. Joicey, later Lord Joicey, had essentially chiselled the Earls of Durham out of the ownership of the company, using methods (concert parties and the like) which might not be strictly legal these days. And yet he appointed ST (who was only in his early thirties) as Chief Engineer, even though ST was undoubtedly a 'Lambton man' - his father William was an engineman or enginewright for Lambton, his grandfather had got himself killed being a sinker in 1854 when they were widening the shaft of the Lady Anne at Lumley and there was a cave-in (my father who could be a callous b*gg*r said we should claim the record for the fastest hundred yards in pit boots!) Meanwhile, or more accurately later, great great grandfather William, reaching his Diamond wedding anniversary in 1918, received a rather maginificent print, finely framed and with presentation plaque, of the well-known picture of the first Earl of Durham as a child (all red velvet and stuff) with a dedication from the then Earl. Bear in mind this is twenty years after the Durhams had had any control over the pits, and William was only an 'enginewright' anyway. It casts a slightly different picture on the relationship between at least some coalmasters and their employees? Meanwhile, I would like, before I am brought to bank, to see 52 with her Lambton style cab refitted, reunited with 5 and 29. Oddly, my Dad's favourite engine, when he was growing up at Bunker Hill, was the 'Victory' Kerr Stuart tank - I think Lambton 41? I seem to remember he reckoned it was a good'un because it shoved coal wagons up to the top of the well-known coaling stage at Philadelphia. It must have been valued - I have inherited a very well framed picture - it's only the KS publicity shot of the first in class, but it seems to have justified decent framing. No record of anything like that for the Kitsons or RSH 0-6-2T, for which the system is more famous.

Unless I've missed it, no-one has mentioned Peterborough station. On a good day with a Sou'Westerly breeze you could inhale a) the sugar beet works b) the various brickworks and c) the brassicas (brussels sprouts etc) A lot of sulphur compounds in that lot! And God it was cold on platforms 4/5. Breweries? The Federation next to Newcastle Central had a particular aroma -very caramelised, compared to other breweries (and not reflected in the actual beer, curiously). Oddly, it reminded me of the smell from refreshment room tea urns. And what was that pipe tobacco so favoured by miners, in particular - 'Robin' or something? Smelt like soap, and thick on the top deck of buses when the back shift was going in. On a completely different topic, did anyone else notice how lineside brambles/blackberries declined with the end of steam? Don't know whether they were nurtured by soot/unburnt coal/ash; or were poisoned by diesel fumes, but at least in County Durham I noticed a marked decline in the mid Sixties (reference point, Lanchester Valley line to Consett - never completely diesel before closure in 66, but definite decline in fruit from 63/64 onwards as BR Type 2s and EE type 3s were increasingly employed). There is a slightly dodgy thesis to argue that steam engines were actually good for biodiversity, but I'm not pushing it 'cos I wouldn't want to get wrong of that Greta Thunberg person!

Well OT, but the Boardroom at Dean Smith and Grace used to have a great view of the Keighley and Worth Valley - which was rather more interesting than the Marketing Director's product presentation when I visited, many years ago. I felt for him, though - this was in the mid Eighties and we may have been the first trade journalists to visit in years. They had oiled the hinges on the executive drinks cabinet, and doubtless lads on t'shop floor had spiled a firkin of Timmy Taylor's finest - but sadly this was the start of the Yuppie/Hipster era, and all the bright young things in sharp suits wanted was Perrier! However, being old school I kept the directors company, and was later poured into a suitable train. Mind you, I did get the story about the new (American) owners' plans which hadn't been on the agenda until the drink loosened a few tongues! (The yanks were interested not for the machine tools but because DSG had an accredited foundry for Meehanite, a type of spheroidal graphite cast iron).

If you think about it, though, it is precisely those areas that don't have much 'heavy industry' that are likely to need at least occasional consignments of whatever from (much) further away. Think, for example, the agricultural machinery firms in Lincs or East Anglia - they are presumably pulling in raw materials and semi-finished goods from all over the country, albeit not every day or even every week. If the value of the goods and the competitive price offered outweighs the extra transport charges, you take it. (So you might think Rustons or such might get most of their inputs from South Yorkshire, being the closest 'industrial' area - but if a firm in Manchester or Birmingham or Glasgow offers a better price, you will take it, all else considered). Which means you can allow yourself one van or open wagon from pretty well any region/railway company of your choice - but probably only one of any given company, and only occasionally. An extreme example - your 'off scene foundry' may well have its own locomotive (perhaps virtual if it is off-scene). Now very occasionally that may need a new boiler, or a serious boiler rebuild. That could go to/from almost anywhere that has a boiler-making facility so you might get plausibly something down from Barclays in Kilmarnock in a GSWR wagon - but only, perhaps, once every thirty years! Generally though, as and for most of life, follow the money. If it made economic sense it would, at least occasionally, happen - if it didn't, it wouldn't

Couple of observations. Firstly, if you actually orient a map of the UK by true North, instead of leaning it over a bit to try and get Orkney and maybe Shetland onto an A4 sheet, the 'divide' looks much more like West-East, so including eg Cornwall, Wales etc, but also acknowledging that the East side of eg Yorkshire, Northumberland, Scotland tend to be, relatively, more prosperous than the west. Second, this is mostly geology. It's no coincidence that when the Romans came in 43AD, initially they called a halt round about the Fosse Way/ A46, a line roughly Exeter to Lincoln. That bagged them all the good arable land (and of course tribes that were through trade already a bit 'romanised' and so fairly happy to cut a deal. Sadly, the Romans didn't always spell out the small print, hence the Iceni, Boudicca, and other unpleasantnesses). Advances further north and west were partly in pursuit of metals and similar geological resources - although they really didn't have to as the Brits only now had one market; and of course generals and emperors believing, perhaps rightly in the short to medium term, that the Empire could only survive through continuing expansion. Hadrian, the wall chappy, recognised that this wasn't sustainable (and after a wobble by Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius came to much the same conclusion). But they had hit on the same problem that prevailed in 'the North' right into the Twentieth Century - such wealth as there was, was largely based on mineral resources, and as these were worked out, or became uneconomic against easier-won stuff from overseas, that economy died. That has been true at many periods - lead mining in the Pennines and elsewhere - collapse of Western Empire means no market, so why mine? And at several later periods the industry has revived, only to collapse again as market conditions changed. Third point - although we Northerners like to think that those industries, and the infrastructure such as canals and railways that supported them, were 'ours' it actually was rarely true. The Stockton and Darlington was, certainly, funded largely by the Peases, Backhouses and other Northern banking families, but most of the finance for railways, and collieries, ironworks etc, was then as now derived from London-based capital markets - and of course if they got nervous, or crashed, guess who suffered. See for instance the struggles of the Stanhope and Tyne Railway or, a generation later, the devastation caused by the collapse of Overend Gurney (which was one of those 'clearing bank' operations that none of us understand, but which took down a large number of other financial institutions, especially the more local banks in the North that weren't as well capitalised, nearly finished the Consett Iron Company who owed money to one of those local bans, pushed the S&D into merger with the NER [OK, that was a good thing] and so on). There's another thought about capital. 62613 above is of course quite right that profits from slave-powered overseas investments boosted the early phase of the industrial revolution - but by the time of the major investments in railways, say 1830 onwards, that system was thankfully at and end. Meanwhile, it isn't particularly obvious that 'slave money' was reinvested in British Industry - as with the Nabobs pulling dodgy fortunes out of India, the aim was to achieve social advancement which meant country houses and estates, not the grubby areas of trade and industry. (we can still recognise that - if you got a sudden windfall, would you put that into a better property (the value can only go up, can't it? literally safe as houses) or into a speculative new technology promoted on the one hand by a semi-literate Geordie, or on the other by a dreamer who wants to build ships that are bigger than the Almighty gave Noah, or carriages run by gusts of air, and in any case is suspiciously French! But after about 1875, land (as in agriculture) stopped being a profit centre, mainly because of free trade with the American Prairies, Russia/Ukraine etc. So just at the time when 'first generation, world leading' technology needed to be replaced, UK sources of capital started to dry up - while if you did have some free cash, overseas returns (sadly, not even in our Empire, where we might have done some good to balance the bad, but in competitors such as the US, Argentine, Germany and, notoriously, Russia) were more attractive. Any of this sound famiiar? My personal problem is that, despite what I have written above, 'free trade' is probably the only political/economic principal I would go to the barricades for. Does that make me a complete cretin? It doesn't, necessarily, make me 'Tory scum' - I'm looking at my great grandfather's daybooks from circa 1900. He is of course a Liberal because, even though the Lambton pits have now been bought over by Joicey, that is what that part of the coalfield was. (Might be different if you worked for the Londonderry pits, which he did later: skilled staff like engineers seemed to exploit the system rather like modern day footballers, happily transferring to a new 'club' against which they have been competing for years). Any way, the point is it was the new Independent Socialists who were vehemently against 'tariff reform' which basically meant protectionism, Empire preference and the like, because it would increase the price of food and other imports for the working man. The repeal of the Corn Laws still wasn't a settled matter even 60 years after. Mind you, if any of us or our kids and grandkids had been taught anything about the Corn Laws (which notoriously split the Tory party under that undoubted Northerner, Peel), we might have had a slightly more nuanced debate over Brexit!.

I have a grim feeling this has been covered before, but NER green is actually very simple - there is no reason to suppose that any more than a score or so of locomotives were in the same colour at the same time. It is of course 'official' that the (darker) Saxony Green of express engines is not the same as the, much lighter, green of freight and mineral engines - the latter familiar to those of us of a certain age on the E1/J72 pilots at Newcastle Central (68723/ 36 being the ones I remember, parked up next to the dmu's that took me to visit granny in Hexham). But I think the equivalent locos at Newcastle and York in the late 40's were presented in the darker 'passenger' green? As far as I can gather, the theory then was that as they were mostly dealing with passenger stock, they should be in 'passenger' green, whereas under BR they obviously weren't passenger engines and so should be in goods green. And of course, Gateshead, Darlington had their own theories on livery, and I'm not quite sure when eg York stopped splashing the paint brushes around. There ought to be totally reliable references in that the old York museum exhibits such as 1275, and 910, and a little later Aerolite and the class M, would have been painted for exhibition mostly by people who had done the 'real thing'. To what extent any or all of these have since been repainted, I don't know. The bit I really don't get is why it was the goods/mineral engines that got the lighter colour that was most likely t show the dirt?

1890s seem to have been troubled times for prices/inflation (only a year or two later, pithead prices for coals were up to 11/- and WE think we've got an energy affordability crisis!. No indication in Mark Ford's notes that second hand material was contemplated. I think the sleepers at Washington would have been softwood, which accounts for them being cheaper than in your figures. I suspect that your figure for ballasting (including material presumably) may not have been terribly relevant for a pit - there's enough stone coming out of the goaf and if you can find somewhere useful to put it, that's actually a saving! Price of rails - I'm thinking in 1876 these would still have been wrought/rolled iron - by 1890 they would likely be steel which by then would be appreciably cheaper. Interesting that cost of rail is dramatically lower, but fishplates significantly higher - I assume they are made of some more specialist iron? (Anyone know?). Labour for permanent way has reduced per yard, but that might be partly the use of longer rails? Overall, I suspect the increase in the price of chairs (which are basically the same material cast in the same process) is a reasonable indication of general material price movement over the twenty years but as we know today that isn't necessarily consistent over all materials, or indeed over labour costs (and of course in those days the men weren't agitating for increases so much as against decreases in wages. Things have got a little better for the working man/woman/pronoun! I haven't yet managed to decipher the old maps to work out whether this line was actually built. It was also a time of major change in the Durham coalfield, a lot of assets changing hands eg Joicey buying out the Earl of Durham (and, a little later, Sir Lindsey Wood at Hetton), the Marquess of Londonderry seriously rationalising his holdings (so he could afford to invest in development of Seaham Harbour) etc. Washington Coal Company bought the Usworth pit off someone (Bowes?) and it might have been essential to link the two by rail - or it might just have been in the 'nice to do' category. All events, my point stands - popping in a siding or spur to serve a customer is not cheap - £100-£200 for a 100 yard run plus signalling alterations etc - so the company ain't going to do it unless there is serious increase in long term traffic that can't be gained any other way (and of course road transport isn't, yet, a competitor so most customers don't have much option). From a modeller's pint of view, this may mean that goods yards etc in the period are fairly low density in terms of lines of rail, and laid out very much for manual and horsedrawn handling processes - even if there is a promising-looking business customer just over the fence!

I've been looking at a day-book belonging to my great grandfather, from when he was in training at Washington 'F' pit, Co Durham, in 1890. Included is an estimate for 'making a railway from F pit to Usworth Colliery, 1320 yards' which I thought might be of interest. Rails 97 tons at £4-15-0 per ton Sleepers (1320, so they are at 1 yard spacing) 2/8d each Chairs 42 tons 7cwt at £3-10-0 a ton Fishplates 3 tons 5 cwt at £12 a ton (quite expensive items, then) Bolts and nuts 17 1/2 cwt at 14/- per cwt Spikes 3 tons 10 3/4 cwt at £13-10-0 per ton (again, quite pricey) Keys 2,640 at £3 per thousand Cushions 2,640 at 35/- per thousand Labour for platelaying is at 8d per yard; if you want it fenced that's 1/6d per yard. Filling and excavating charged at 1/- per cubic yard. No great earthworks involved but still 20,757 cy yards charged at 1/- per cubic yard, accounting for almost half of the £2196-6-4 of this line. No sign of any points and switches, or of course any signalling. This work of course would be to colliery standards, not main line, although it might perhaps be comparable to the standards for goods yard sidings etc (and if my maths is right the rail works out at 82lbs/yard which is fairly chunky?). In which case, if you are putting an extra siding onto your layout to serve some customer you are looking at about £1 per yard, exclusive of earthworks and fencing (oh, and £20 worth of gates). You would need to be attracting quite a bit of extra traffic to show a profit on say £100 invested in a 100 yard siding (and of course if you are the proper railway you probably have signalling etc to pay for). A shilling a cubic yard on filling and excavating seems quite generous, given that elsewhere he notes the piece rate for filling a ten ton waggon with coal as 1/8d. (For reference, at the time the pithead price of best coals was around 6/- a ton). So manual transhipment and haulage might well be more economic than popping a siding in. (Although not strictly comparable given underground conditions, my ancestor was calculating that 'pony putting' was more economic than manual putting (taking the coals from the hewer to the tubs)at any distance of put much over 35 yards, even given the fodder and other costs of the ponies - this though didn't apply if the seams were so thin that the roof had to be raised (or floor lowered) to accomodate the pony which unlike a putter, can't really go on its hands and knees. As an aside, I notice that the hewers were paid by the 'score' (which was actually 21, like a baker's dozen) of tubs - the latter varying between pits at between 6 and 8 cwt capacity, so in the Lady Durham at Sherburn (to which my ancestor transferred) the tubs were 7 1/2 cwt capacity meaning that the 'unit of account' for a hewer was 7 ton 17 1/2 cwt, or as near as darn it 8 tons. May that be in part why the collieries remained so attached to nominal 8 ton waggons, rather than 10 or larger? Hope the above is of some interest - but I'd still like to know why fishplates were so expensive?

Given the heat generated when anyone mentions Thompson, I'm a bit reticent about putting this forward - but wasn't Thompson Gresley's successor as C&W boss on the Great Northern? And, contrary to the notion we are sometimes offered, that ET was viscerally opposed to anything HNG, Great Northern (and ECJS) carriage development seems to have continued on an even, mildly progressive, keel (allowing of course for the Great War). ET's much later developments such as plywood body sheets were a WW2 necessity, and his tendency towards 1/3, 2/3 doors rather than at carriage ends, whilst not I imagine unique, certainly counts as progressive. Given the relative costs and performance of steel against iron, structural timber, or some combination - the thing surely is not that HNG went for all-steel underframes with Gresley (if that is indeed when and why they changed) but why did anyone not?