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Jonny's "where are these?" photo album


jonny777
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I have been trying to work out where this might be, with a road running parallel to a two track railway which would have car trains running on it. For me, that rules out the M5 in Devon.

 

The loco is 47033, but that is not much of a help really as individual 47s ventured far and wide in later years. 

 

 

 

Scan-151118-0011.jpg.f5b74f27db636614b978819a962d9d1d.jpg

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15 minutes ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

Possibly the M40 between Hatton and Lapworth. I think it is taken from Finwood Road bridge at the site of Rowington Junction where the original line to Henley-in-Arden left the GWR Leamington to Birmingham line. Can't get that shot now as the trees have grown.

 

 

https://goo.gl/maps/9YXLwrcS3ANxxrVUA

 

Looks a good match

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16 minutes ago, beast66606 said:

 

 

https://goo.gl/maps/9YXLwrcS3ANxxrVUA

 

Looks a good match

That's where I was thinking of. On my regular Sunday afternoon bike rides when we lived in Birmingham and Solihull.

My best mate on the railway lived just down the road from there. For many years there was a hole in the hedge on the lane where he put his car through it on black ice on the way home from night shift at Saltley PSB.

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1 hour ago, jonny777 said:

 

Goodness me, the trees have grown. :o

Same almost everywhere alongside the railway alas.  Hence far more problems nowadays than in the past with leaf fall and  trees down across the line than ever used to be the case.  when i was dealing with passenger train performance stuff back in the late 1960s on part of the WR leaf fall problems were virtually non-existent and trees down across or fouling running lines were a very rare event.  Roll the clock forward to when I was involved in similar work towards the mid 1980s and leaf fall problems had become a seasonal norm in numerous places plus tree falls were a fact of every day life in certain weather conditions.  there was a very simple answer to these problems - fell the trees.

 

and that is of course without going into any drainage and bank stability problems caused by root networks.  20 odd years of failing to look after the lineside following the end of steam traction and changing the system of PerWay gangs has had a significant deleterious impact on British railway infrastructure.  And even the tree clearance programmes of recent years have not been followed by proper control of regrowth and the same is happening again.

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27 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Same almost everywhere alongside the railway alas.  

This is a problem no-one knows about. Despite furious detailed work by and discussion between parties in the run-up to 1.4.94, the RT1 contract between BRIS (on behalf of BR) and Railtrack failed to include so much as a clause about control of lineside vegetation. A few weeks later one Zone realised the omission....

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56 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

This is a problem no-one knows about. Despite furious detailed work by and discussion between parties in the run-up to 1.4.94, the RT1 contract between BRIS (on behalf of BR) and Railtrack failed to include so much as a clause about control of lineside vegetation. A few weeks later one Zone realised the omission....

Ah, RT1 - a rude awakening for a lot of people. 

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13 minutes ago, iands said:

Ah, RT1 - a rude awakening for a lot of people. 

A good example of 'you get what you pay for' and also the need to make sure that key performance indicators (KPIs) actually give the desired outcome.  RT1 was learning the hard way!

Paul.

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1 hour ago, Wickham Green too said:

Odd how the environmentalists are always going on about the loss of trees in the countryside since whenever ........ presumably they never travel by train to discover where those trees have gone !

 

It's not quite that simple. Older and well established woodland has a wide variety of interdependent species (not just trees but flora and fauna as well - not forgetting fungi, lichens, etc.); whereas these would not have developed in 25 years on a railway embankment even if the tree growth was rapid. 

 

 

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35 minutes ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

The cars were probably loaded at Bordesley and were probably going to Southampton for export. I believe that some also went via the Channel Tunnel to Europe in the late 1990s.

 

There was a daily train via the Tunnel, run by MAT on behalf of Rover. This conveyed vehicles from several sources; Minis from Longbridge, Land Rover from Bordesley and other vehicles from Cowley. However, the one in the photo seems to have some covered Cartics at the rear, which Rover didn't use on Italian traffic , and doesn't have a portion of single-deck wagons for Land-Rovers. I'd suggest either a Rover or Ford service to Southampton.

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24 minutes ago, jonny777 said:

 

It's not quite that simple. Older and well established woodland has a wide variety of interdependent species (not just trees but flora and fauna as well - not forgetting fungi, lichens, etc.); whereas these would not have developed in 25 years on a railway embankment even if the tree growth was rapid. 

............. and planting a new forest of - say - a million trees saplings doesn't go very far towards replacing said woodland or the Amazon rainforest - however well intentioned.

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I came across a civil engineer who was working for one of the top 3 civil consultancies. They had been asked to do a pilot study of railway groundworks infrastructure including embankments, cuttings, and drainage, but not bridges or tunnels. This showed such dire results that the whole exercise was chopped. His personal off-the-record opinion was that the current incumbents were so frightened by what they were seeing that they decided to just cross their fingers and hope it would be the next generation who would have to deal with it. My acquaintance said one of the biggest issues they had identified was tree growth and the consequent damage the trees were doing to drainage and to embankment and cutting sides when they fall over and their root systems drag up a chunk of soil. This was about 8 years ago and casual observation tells me it's got worse since then. Two years ago when I went into the West Country in the summer I was appalled by the constant brushing of the train by foliage - the trees were that close! I'm not sure it's possible to recover back to the closely managed ground cover that was standard until the end of steam. Once trees are above about 30cm girth it's really hard to get rid of them. If you cut them down all you are really doing is coppicing and they will come back. If you try and dig the roots out you disturb the soil so much that it loses its structure. If you grind the roots out you leave voids. A huge part of the network is in the same state. There have been conifers growing between the tracks in Durham station for the last couple of years - it doesn't seem to be anyone's job to get rid of them and they just shrug off the weedkilling.

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I remember a few years ago seeing a bush that was growing in the 6' of the Hendon lines that was big enough that it had started to spread out sideways in each direction with the underside of the canopy trimmed in two neat curves by the kinematic envelopes of the trains passing under it. 

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1 hour ago, Wickham Green too said:

Many, many places the weeds in the four foot are topiarised to suit whatever's the normal rolling stock. ( traction motors or final drives )

 

I'm pretty sure I've posted this before but it's kind of relevant. This particular area has always been a bit green but seems to have been particularly verdant last year.IMG_20200909_101941443.jpg.356643d77090a24707cbfa4447c2dbb7.jpg

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22 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Odd how the environmentalists are always going on about the loss of trees in the countryside since whenever ........ presumably they never travel by train to discover where those trees have gone !

And they are usually the very people who protest volubly when 'the railway' eventually gets round to cutting down etc lineside trees which are damaging the infrastructure or obstructing the view of signals etc.  They don't seem to realise that it is not 'ancient woodland' but (unchecked) comparatively recent growth and that it is causing significant damage and impacting on safety.

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20 hours ago, great central said:

 

I'm pretty sure I've posted this before but it's kind of relevant. This particular area has always been a bit green but seems to have been particularly verdant last year.

I've pinched that for my collection of modelling prototypes, filed under Permanent Way - Overgrown, ash ballast, soil 

Here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/n1vn0tbj245sdqn/AACv4GZWp5dV98pOkNmv1ZT5a?dl=0

Lots of other people's stuff there, so I probably shouldn't, but...   

If this is really bad behaviour someone tell me and I'll delete the link.

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On 24/01/2021 at 21:27, great central said:

 

I'm pretty sure I've posted this before but it's kind of relevant. This particular area has always been a bit green but seems to have been particularly verdant last year.IMG_20200909_101941443.jpg.356643d77090a24707cbfa4447c2dbb7.jpg

 

If you crouch down in the four foot and look down the line, if you see a green haze you know the track probably needs reballasting. (Note this should only be done by P-Way professionals). The track above looks to be well past this stage.

 

The worst example I have seen of this was at Kew where a sewer that overflowed into the ballast at every high tide  in the Thames had added enough organic matter to the track that you could hardly see the rails for tomato plants. That the dozer leveling the bottom of the dig when we reballasted it had a six inch bow wave of sewage in front of it also made for less than ideal working conditions.

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On 26/01/2021 at 11:35, Trog said:

The worst example I have seen of this was at Kew where a sewer that overflowed into the ballast at every high tide  in the Thames had added enough organic matter to the track that you could hardly see the rails for tomato plants.

I've posted a similar one at Hednesford previously, follow this link

 

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This is not a combination I remember being common, especially on a local stopping passenger. Perhaps the L1 has failed in some way and the B12 is assisting, or maybe control are just avoiding a light engine movement. Anyhows, the location is not given. 

 

It has been suggested that the large chimney on the right proves it is Whittlesea; but when asked where the sharp curve necessitating check rails appears next to the brickworks, there was a stoney silence. Similarly, Queen Adelaide might work if there had been an industrial complex instead of lakes and wetland. 

 

 

 

 

IMG_copy 7209.jpg

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