Michael Bishop

Strictly the oblong smoking signs in carriages were replaced by the circle and bar ones in the Autumn of 1934. (as confirmed by dated photographs) Unfortunately the Lionheart carriages (I assume the one you illustrate of 2470 is one of theirs) are made this way. The latter were (with strange logic) red background for Smoking and green for Non-Smoking. The circle was the same diameter, but the bar was slightly wider to accommodate the 'Non-'. Drawings from originals are in 'Measured and Drawn' - at an enhanced size on the cross-section of the carriage No 2 at York on page 30/31.

Please note, Ian Coleby above, that the drawing he refers to in L&B Measured and Drawn, like the rest of the drawings in that book were transcriptions of my drawings published without credit - in fact stolen. The original pencil drawing is below.

The drawings by R E Tustin (published in Model Railway Constructor October 1952 issue) would have been based on the official dimensions, of the body being 10 ft 5" and 5ft 4" over the doors, and little else apart from photographs. The Locomotive Magazine for January 1900 illustrating the freight rolling stock said they were 10ft 5" in length and 5ft wide. The drawings in 'Measured and Drawn' went to original sources where possible and in this case were based on the remains of two adjacent doors and part of the roof and end a van in a back garden adjacent to Pilton Yard found in 2003. It confirmed all the dimensions just stated, the 5ft dimension referring to the width over the body without the doors. The door grabs existed on the surviving pair of doors and projected 2 1/2 inches from the door, making the van 5ft 9" extreme width. The actual doors were 1 13/16" thick.

I bought this interesting book at the railway bookshop on Sunday, having not found it on sale at any of the other outlets on the island in the previous week. It has an Eric Leslie painting on the cover. It has a lot of colour illustrations well reproduced and covers all aspects in 25 sections over 144 pages. I paid £25, but you will have to look at their website to see if they will mail. The photographs have been well chosen and I can recommend it. There are drawings by David Smith that might be the same ones that appeared in his Plateway booklet in 1989.

Seeing your creation of the lattice down starting signal a yard or two on the Lynton side of the water tower reminded me that I photographed the remains of the signal base in 1966, gone now I presume.

When I was researching the hotel site I concluded that there were TWO livestock auction sites here, the one that still exists on the Lynton side, and another on the Challacombe side of the hotel. Prior to that one of the auctions seems to have been on the north side. I will try and come to Thornbury tomorrow and have a brief chat if you can spare a moment from train operating - today too much Bank Holiday traffic on the M5 for my driver's peace of mind.

Another picture of the back and a few of the rest of August 1966 at a time when the restaurant was only an extension onto the platform. Just above the roof in the fourth picture can be seen the top of the Blackmoor Gate Hotel, owned by Mr Broom who bought the station in 1938. This property burnt down in December 1970 with fatal consequences for a young lady. It has been a vacant site since then, and I believe is planned as a car park when the station re-opens. At that time there was a petrol station where the toilets are now. In the last picture is my green 1937 Talbot Sports Saloon DYO 427 of revered memory. According to the DVLA website it still exists !

I live in Bristol - but I will speak to my chauffeurse (I don't drive any more) and hope I can persuade her that going to a model railway exhibition is really exciting. Sussex is a possibility as the Mrs doesn't need persuading to have a visit to the Bluebell Railway.

I have just been updating the staff list for the two intended volumes of my history of the railway in the light of the publication of the 1921 Census which has been closed for 100 years. Also available on the web is a census made in 1939, presumably taken when war broke out. This enabled me to find the address of my parent's flat which I had lost many years ago and forgotten. They had been married by special licence on 7 September, 2 days before the declaration of war, in Coventry Cathedral. I will leave what happened next to the imagination, both to the Cathedral and the flat, but luckily they were in a shelter (often playing Monopoly which I therefore played a lot of when young) and survived. (and that is why I am here about to bore readers silly) This census gives occupations but is unique is giving birth dates (as opposed to ages, which seems to have been beyond the mental arithmatics for quite a few) Thomas Archibald Short was born on 15 September 1906 and was a Porter Signalman. He had transferred from Hatherleigh station, reported in the staff movements in Southern Railway Magazine for October 1930. (the staff magazine for the SR) The actual date was 14 August 1930, which of course could be critical depending on the date of your layout in 1930. So, Roundhouse, your model figure should be 24 years of age. As I have mentioned, he transferred to Lydford per SR Magazine September 1932. Actual date 7 July 1932. On 8 July 1937 he went to Okehampton, and then Meldon Jct on 7 February 1945. If your layout is dated prior to 28 August 1930 you need to represent Short's predecessor in the role - Edward John Tolley, born 1898, because that's the date he left (two of them for a fortnight), so about 32 when he went. He had been Porter at Blackmoor since sometime before 11 July 1915 when 16 years of age, when he joined the NUR (National Union of Railwaymen) as most of the staff did at that time in an attempt to force the Company to pay the full war bonus being paid to main line employees (which the L & B Company realised it would be committed to when the war finished and therefore opposed). The sad part is we shall probably have to speculate from old photographs what these two looked like. Roundhouse, I bet you wish you'd never mentioned it, and all the other readers of this forum, if they've got this far, will have had their pants removed by now. But if your layout is ever displayed not 100s of miles away from me, I would like to see it please.

This picture is one of a set that had been attached to the walls of the Blackmoor Gate Inn. I acquired them from the former owner, Mr Kempf. They were acquired (I think by the owner before him) from a relative of the last Porter Signalman on the station, Wilfred Hann. He can be seen in the photograph of the last train standing beside coach 2465 reproduced in the 'Celebration' book on page 159. Mr Hann was born in 1906 and had been at Blackmoor since being made redundant at Bridestow in 1932. He replaced T. A. Short who transferred to Lydford. The fact that these pictures appear to date to around 1935 suggested that this one was also taken when Blackmoor was a working railway. The image is not a clear one as can be seen, partially due to the material the print was made on, but the original print appears to show the man with an SR cap and uniform. It also shows the extended metal chimneys, one of which was fitted after Mr Household's picture of 1927, illustrated in Magazine 74 page 49, and seems to have gone by 1937, and I took the risk that it could be relied upon to show what this side of the building looked like when the railway was operating. This page of the Magazine also has a similar picture to the one I have posted, but taken in 1952 after the station became a cafe where the terra cotta replacement chimney has almost completely disappeared.

I was the surveyor and draughtsman of the drawings that were transcribed by Stephen Phillips and used throughout the book Measured and Drawn. All these drawings were based on comprehensive surveys using a collapsible ladder and measuring poles, and every available photograph. Jon Baker cannot suggest that as he has seen (almost) no photographs I did not do so when compiling this drawing. I had available to me two similar photographs looking down towards the stables, therefore not full on, and there are unlikely to be any of those as there is a bank several feet high alongside of the 30ft road which goes behind the building to the goods shed and stables. One of these has what appears to be a man in an SR uniform feeding chickens by the concrete shed, maybe the same chickens that fed off the crumbs dropped by passengers on coach footboards. The fact that they are an oblique view of the back of the building was the reason for the cautionary note about the part of the ground floor being obscured by a post-railway (glass-fronted) addition and that therefore the similar Woody Bay building was consulted. I put a similar note about the window in view of the obliqueness of the available photographs. I take issue with the statement that 'Measured and Drawn relies on conjecture for much of the detail,' because it relied on a hard graft over a 50-year period surveying every building on the line and a selection of bridges and viaducts, except the odd one, such as the footbridges in Barnstaple and the water tanks at stations, that were destroyed in 1936. I also have scans of the slides all round the Blackmoor station building I took in 1966 which show it nearer than it does now to what it looked like in 1935.

The book quoted is by two authors, as stated in the loose insert included in every copy: Stephen D Phillips (two Ls) and Michael J Bishop. The latter prepared most of the original drawings (in the case of the box van only the remains of an original body) from which those in the book were transcribed.