lanchester

Can I have a livery vote for the Glasgow 'blue trains', please? In the early 60s, visiting the Bearsden relatives, they said 'modern' in a way that Met-Cam dmus, or Gateshead Grot EE Type 4s and rakes of distressed Thomsons, really didn't.

Richard 2, not Edward 6. His body, or at least a body, was displayed in St Pauls before burial at Kings Langley. In the present day, there would be a lot of support for a border along the Trent/ Mersey Trent Canal. Although North of the Tyne there is still a widespread assumption that the current Percy, or more likely his Duchess, actually runs the county anyway!

So which new-build Works are we missing so far? Off the top of my head I've got Gateshead and York (NER), Kilmarnock (GSWR), Cardiff (Taff Vale) , Longhedge (LCDR), Nine Elms (LSWR). Did we mention Gorton (GCR)? I don't think the Rhymney actually did any new build at Caerphilly? Did the MGNJR at Melton Constable, or the HBJR at Springhead, or the Cambrian at Oswestry? Did the L&YR build at Miles Platting, before Horwich was opened? They all probably had the capability - after all, the Lambton Collieries built several 0-6-0 tender engines, boilers included, at Philadelphia. And in very early days engines might have been built, or perhaps 'assembled' in other places - Edge Hill as mentioned above, or the first GNR works at Boston, perhaps?

Re the 'how bright is your backdrop' controversy, may I recommend a look at the East Yorkshire works of David Hockney. (The geology and agriculture of E Yorks is not dissimilar to that around Little Bytham) and then a look at the real thing. His colours are seriously bright - but that's not an artistic conceit. Try actually looking at the country in the appropriate season. Around May, for example - the acid yellow of rape*, the emerald of the spring-sown wheat coming through, the 'leaf green' of, you guessed, young leaves on ash and other trees, splashes of pure white from the hawthorn, perhaps a stripe of ultramarine from the bluebells at the wood's edge. Those colours are really there, and they are, at least on a sunny day, really bright, but you can (well I did) live sixty odd years without really noticing. *(Although I think that in Tony's chosen timeframe there would have been less rape. If it was like further North on the ECML the yellow would have been mustard - a close relative, but the yellow is a bit warmer and gentler).

IF ROD had sent them to French railway workshops they would never have seen them again. The French were notoriously reluctant to let their locomotives anywhere near the British sector, which is of course why ROD needed to bring over so many locomotives from Britain in the first place.

At the risk of displaying my idiocy, pedantry, or both, I thought it was 'Levenshulme' with an N, rather than 'Levershulme' with an R?

No, it's better than that - it IS overcrowded, but in the right, cramped preservation site, way, plenty of junk but the appropriate junk. Very clever.

Just popping back to Terrier pipework and the 'valve'. If the pipe is exhausting into the tank, could it possibly be a non-return valve to protect the gubbins from water surge caused by over-enthusiastic tank filling? Alternatively, it could be a very small air raid warning siren as featured a few pages back?

Trouble is, you hit the 'unbelievable' in unexpected places. Thus, no problem at all in imagining 55023 and other additional Deltics - but, timescale aside, no way would one have been named Red Rum if the new batch was for the ECML. Flat winners (preferably St Leger and the other Classics) only. On t'other hand, if the WCML had been sufficiently impressed to invest in some Deltics, then naming them after National winners (and regiments from the North and West of England and Scotland) would be highly likely? (If the Western Region had a Deltic phase, I'm sure the beach donkeys of Torbay had some suitably pretty names).

The 'giveaway' I suppose is that the glazing is squeaky clean - very unrealistic.

Out of interest, how was the Centurion in relation to the German loading gauge? Which presumably would be the arena that mattered?

Evolutionary 'progress' (note the quote marks - evolution has no vision of the future so can't 'progress' towards anything, the best it can do is a better fit to the present) is further compromised. As well as natural selection in the sense of favouring traits that leave you alive long enough for successful reproduction, there is sexual selection which means that particular, presumably desirable, traits (like compassion, mebis?) are favoured in the pairing-up process. Unfortunately, since the human male will mate, with consent or without, with anything with a pulse, sexual selection may not really work for the genus . (We'd better do this at genus level, because the sapiens species may already be below the critical population level for survival).

I think this is true: the story is that the US Congress held hearings on the loss of the Titanic, and one Congressman asked "I understand the Titanic was built with many watertight compartments - so why couldn't the passengers just get in to the watertight compartments?" Please let that be a true story - it so ought to be!

Should we have a sub-category for perfectly good-looking locomotives with just one fatal disfigurement - I'm thinking for example of the NER S2 4-6-0 that Raven fitted with Stumpf 'Uniflow' cylinders. Or some of the ACFI feedwater heating applications. Like a moustache on the Mona Lisa. You have to feel their pain.

Another was the Great North of England, Clarence and Hartlepool Junction Railway, where the 'Great' refers to the name of another railway, and is not a claim that the GNECHJR itself was anything out of the ordinary.

Just to go back to superheating for a moment, my understanding is that back when it was being introduced in the UK, say circa 1900, the disincentive for 'run of the mill' locomotives was that it was a bit of a waste of effort if you were still using slide valves, and hot dry steam with (more complex/expensive) piston valves, given the poor, by modern standards, performance of the lube oils available, was problematic - so you needed yet more expense in the shape of mechanical lubricators etc. Rape oil performed better than quite a few mineral oils (and I believe was still favoured for big ends until quite late on?). Whale oil was called train oil, but that is a coincidental corruption of some Dutch word. But it was valued as a lubricant in precision toolmaking, and was included in fluids for automatic transmissions until the whaling ban came in (1966, I think).

Could the ruined walls be what is left of the supports for a winding house, because in the early days there was an incline there but more powerful locomotives meant it could be worked by adhesion. For added interest these were often buttressed on the outside. You would have had one each side, but on the far side perhaps only a course or two is left, and as much or as little woodwork/ironwork depending from the top of the nearside one as you feel appropriate. (The kip, and any winding engine, would of course have been off scene to the left).

Would it be unduly cynical to suggest that, while the Labour government certainly introduced the concept of social subsidies for railways, they were careful not to do so until most of the likely candidates had already been closed? And that this might account, for example, for the unseemly haste in beginning to dismantle the Waverley route, just a few months after the 68 Transport Act was passed and, I think, before its provisions came into force? And am I right in thinking that in the 64 elections, Labour never actually said they would reverse the Beeching proposals. they just allowed it to be believed that they would! No actual fibs told. Despite being a Tory by instinct, I have a lot of time for Mrs Castle and I am sure she was, as MidlandRed says, 'fundamentally interested in transport co-ordination', but I don't think she was allowed to do much in this regard. Two possible reasons: one, she was of course a girl, albeit a feisty one, in an age of smoke filled rooms, beer and sandwiches. Second, just as the Tories had a road lobby fronted by the ineffable Marples, Labour had its own road lobby in the form of the unions, both in the car plants and particularly the TGWU - whose influence in the party and the TUC well outweighed that of NUR, ASLEF and TSSA. (Younger readers may need to Google 'TUC' - don't hear much from them these days). And, considering what we now call the 'optics', a car for every family can be portrayed as delivering the benefits of the 'white heat of the technological revolution' (even if it is a dodgy Austin, Morris, Hillman...): an improved but still loss making Victorian railway, less so. On a different matter, someone mentioned Serpell. Am I alone in thinking that report was actually the saviour of the rail network in that it forced politicians, economics gurus, 'taxpayer' lobbies and the chattering classes finally to look into the abyss and see what 'a railway that pays its way' actually meant?

The 'i before e' rule is nearly perfect, PROVIDED it's quoted in full - 'i before e, except after c, when the sound is EE'. That works almost all the time (and I think the exceptions, which I can't immediately recall, are all loan words from other languages). 'Seize' is a funny one, but I believe its from Middle French and was spelt (and presumably pronounced) 'saize'. 'Forfeit', similarly, used to be spelt 'forfait' - and I think still is in some legal context about which Edwardian may be able to advise us for the traditional six and eightpence consideration. Since I'm posting, just to scroll back a few pages and the false attribution of Stonehenge et al to the Celts and Druids. In fairness to the Victorians, this goes back a lot further - certainly to Stukeley in C18, and possibly to Aubrey and even Camden. Similarly, the bogus Scottish stuff is by definition Georgian (George IV) not Victorian. The Victorians were less about inventing spurious myths, and more about turning them into viable tourist industries. Had Tennyson been born a little further south and east, and/or had he majored in Boudiccan rather than Arthurian legend, the history and prosperity of the West Norfolk railways might have been very different. The crack express, the 'Iceni Limited' - non stop to Camulodunum and then on to Liverpool Street, laid on by the GER, would of course have competed with the GNR's 'The Boadicean', departing from Boudicca's traditional burial site at Kings Cross. The residents of Castle Aching thus treated to the near simultaneous departure of both green and blue singles. Must stop - I can feel some curious symptoms coming on.

The fashionability of beards from the 1850s onwards is often put down to the Crimean War and the utility of the beard as a muffler/draught excluder in the bitter Crimean winters. However, this is apparently not so. According to historian Kathryn Hughes in 'Victorians Undone' (don't all rush - it isn't at all that sort of book) in a chapter on 'Darwin's beard', "In the 1830s and 40s ... the prevailing taste had been for clean shaven faces.You only have to look at pictures of ...Disraeli, Dickens, Ruskin to see a series of girlish looking young men, tender and rosy skinned. But shift forward 15 years and each of those lovely faces now lies buried under bristling facial hair". According to Hughes, in the late 40s sideboards "began creeping further down men's faces, broadening out to the point where they became fully fledged sidewhiskers". In variety: the broad but close cropped muttonchop, or the long combed-out Piccadilly weeper (a synonym for the Dundreary). Could be on an otherwise clean-shaven face, or teamed with a moustache like Prince Albert. "Gradually, muttonchops and Piccadilly weepers crept further south, eventually meeting under the chin sometime in the early 1850s. The result was the Newgate frill or chinstrap, an odd arrangement whereby the neck and jaw were left riotously hairy while the rest of the face was clean-shaven". Darwin himself adopted a full or 'natural' beard, but not until 1862. Dickens was clean shaven in 1852 but by 1858 had gone for the 'doorknocker' style for which he is remembered. (A variant perhaps on the Imperial, popularised by Napoleon III, although wearing that may have had political undertones?) Tennyson went full beard and waxed moustache in the late 50s, largely because he had had most of his teeth out and his mouth had collapsed in. Ruskin had been of a Dundreary tendency in the 1860s but was full-bearded by the 1880s,possibly in response to physical and mental collapse. So while there were definitely fashions in face-fuzz, it seems there were early and late adopters of the various different styles.

For some reason I am reminded of the old war-time story. Two Free French officers travelling to Newcastle, but the train is held on the King Edward Bridge in the blackout. First officer steps out of the compartment, and as he plummets 100 feet down to the Tyne, snaps to attention and sings the 'Marselllaise'. Second officer, teetering on the brink, looks down and remarks 'C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la gare'. It's the way I type them.

Not quite the same thing but Eaglescillfe on Teesside should have been either Preston on Tees or Egglescliffe, both a couple of miles away. Stories differ about the name - some say it was a signwriting error that went uncorrected until it stuck. I've also heard that it was an error by the first Ordnance Survey.

I've no information on Spanish Flu, but your Quintinshill reference isn't really relevant - Q was 1915, and Britain didn't really go on to a 'war footing' until much later. Conscription only started in 1916, and serious restrictions on travel, rationing etc not much until the Uboat campaign in 1917 started really affecting things. In 1915 the war was still largely 'over there'. But I think by 18/19 there were also fuel shortages, which would have affected rail travel anyway.

The railway at night? For me, wheel-tappers (last heard on some sleeping cars at Carlisle Citadel in 1975). Never saw or heard any wheeltapping during daytime for some reason.

Oddly, I'm pretty sure we were on 2 apples to the Newton. Granted, the West Riding (as it was then) is not great orchard country - or was your school perhaps using the British Standard Cooker?