Tankerman

In my teenage years and living in Penryn, now very long gone, the reason for visiting Newquay in July and August was to meet the 'young ladies' from the Midlands and North.😀

Especially during the Liverpool and/or Glasgow weeks.

My experience, in other electrical fields, is that there is no Chinese language equivalent for the words 'quality control'

There's no chance of enforcing illegal car parking, even if your home is burgled there's no investigation, the most you will get is a Crime Number so that you can make an insurance claim.

Quote "it gives me enjoyment" Big or small, very scenic or just trackwork to run the stock on, that should be the main reason for building any model railway.

In the 1970's I lived in Taunton for a couple of years and sometimes we, me, wife and two sons used to go up to the Quantocks on a weekend. On one particular trip we went quite early on a Sunday morning and I parked the car in the middle of an open space about 8 to 10 acres in area. We went for a walk over a low hill which hid the car from view and returned about an hour later. With all that space to spread out in, the subsequent arrivals had first lined up parallel to our car and then made a second and third line behind the first one.

Like texting on their phone or watching a programme on their tablet?

Talking of Shackleton flypasts, I grew up on a small mixed farm in the 1950's which was about 10 miles north of RNAS Culdrose. We were used to the Gannets and Westlands flying around and didn't take much notice. However one summer evening we became aware of a very loud noise which rapidly got even louder. This turned out to be a Shackleton and four Gannets flying in formation almost directly over the farm buildings at less than 1,000 ft altitude. I was thrilled at the sight, but my parents were less happy when the hens laid a lot less eggs for a few days and the cows were similarly very twitchy at milking time.

Although I'm not familiar with the Helston branch, a couple of thoughts which might help and based on the workings I saw at Truro in the late 1950's . Re the mileage yard/sorting sidings at Gwinear Road. There was a similar set immediately adjacent to the station at Truro. It's a long time ago now but I'm fairly sure I am remembering it correctly. The wagons for the goods yard at Truro and the Falmouth, Newham, Newquay via Chacewater branches and Chacewater station goods yard were detached/attached from/to the through freight trains at Truro. The wagons for the goods trains for those destinations were then sorted by a Truro allocated 57XX tank engine, it's funny how certain things stick in the memory, but one of them was 3709. Given that the storage siding capacity at Hayle, St Erth and Marazion was somewhat limited could it be that the sidings at Gwinear Road served a similar function? If the photo of the extra carriages at Helston was post WWII it could be that they were for RN personnel based at RNAS Culdrose, either going on or returning from, leave.

No you didn't dream it, us Cornish did call the early spring Cauliflowers, Broccoli. The first time I was served Broccoli, east of the Tamar, I asked what the green stuff was.🙂 We also called what the rest of the Country knew as a swede, turnips and turnips, white turnips. Cattle wagons were extensively used for the Broccoli and other vegetable traffic. IIRC a lot of them were stored on the sidings at Gwinear Road. Another fact, now long forgotten, is that even in the 1960's, potatoes were sold by the gallon/half gallon (10lb or 5lb) in the local greengrocers. I was told that this was because at one time they were weighed out using a balance weight with a gallon or half gallon bucket filled with water on one end and a basket or bucket with the potatoes on the other.

Me too.🙂

It's not just nowadays that changing trains at Birmingham can be challenging, in the 1970's I lived in West Cornwall and I attended South Shields Marine College a number of times to obtain additional electrical qualifications as part of my time as Electrical Engineer Officer in the Merchant Navy. At the time there was a train which if I remember correctly ran from Edinburgh or Aberdeen, to somewhere on the South Coast. This arrived at Birmingham within 30 minutes of another service which ran, again from memory, from Glasgow to Plymouth, where I changed to a Paddington to Penzance service in order to get to Truro. On one of the journeys I arrived at Birmingham to find that the train to Plymouth was delayed by at least 40 minutes, so I went to get a cup of coffee and a snack. On returning to the platform there was a train at both platform faces and instead of checking the departure board I asked a station staff member which was the Plymouth train, he replied "The one on the left." you can guess what happened, I got on the train on my left, not his. As soon as the train departed I realised that it was headed north and not south, luckily it's first stop was Tamworth so I was able to get back to Birmingham in a reasonable time, but I was still over four hours late getting home.

I don't know if it's changed now, but Newquay in Cornwall used to be the same in the 1960's/70's. The local saying was "in the winter you can fire a gun down the main street and not hit anybody"

In the late 1950's/early 1960's there were quite a few ex GWR employees in Cornwall. One was an uncle of mine who was a Ganger in the Camborne/Redruth area and another a ticket collector at Truro who I got to know quite well as he realised, despite my young age, I was interested in the railway, not just the locomotives. Both of them always referred to the GWR as "The Company" and were firmly convinced that the BR management were a bunch of amateurs.

So this is where the Pilot ended up when he got sacked from the Suez Canal.