Castle Aching

[Nearholmer]

One of the questions raised in the English Heritage book about goods sheds is the lineage from canal warehouse to railway warehouse, mainly in connection with the large city-centre goods stations, but I commend study of the small-town goods yard at Newport Pagnell, because there the goods sheds actually were former canal warehouses, with access by turntables http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/n/newport_pagnell/ 

 

The whole complex of station, goods yard, and adjacent rail-served mill was very unusual, and it even had bits of a never-completed roadside narrow gauge steam tramway straggling into it for some years. It has been reproduced in model form at least once, in a sightly basic way, for the town museum, but it deserves to be the subject of a really god fine scale effort.

[Compound2632]

Goods sheds at right angles to the running lines:

 

The Great Northern example I had in mind was Horncastle, a branch terminus built in 1855. The 1906 OS 25" map shows the rather curious arrangement where two lines converge on the wagon turntable.

 

The London & Birmingham's Wellingborough station of 1845 is a better example, being a through station. The up and down sidings were connected to the goods shed by a spur that rans at right angles across the running lines, as seen on the 1886 OS 25" map. This arrangement survived until at least the 1920s. This layout was repeated at several other stations on the Northampton & Peterborough line.

Edited September 4, 2019 by Compound2632
Found Horncastle.

[Edwardian]

Grand Mogg Tarkin (Peter Cushing), explains how it's going to be .... 

 

 

 

 

[Compound2632]

Well, at least he's standing up.

 

[Hroth]

14 hours ago, nick_bastable said:

Having crossed the floor of the council chamber I'm heartily pleased by the direction this thread has moved towards

 

 

 

Nick

 

Be very careful, Darth Boris will send his Death Star around to sort you out....

 

[Hroth]

32 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

Well, at least he's standing up.

 

 

Very louche.

Our chaise lounge inclines to the left.......

[Edwardian]

11 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

Very louche.

Our chaise lounge inclines to the left.......

 

It's old, battered, frayed, torn, stained.  Liberties have clearly been taken with it. It's suffered long neglect and has quite a bit of the stuffing knocked out. 

 

At least what's left of  it remains squarely in the centre of the room .... 

 

 

 

[Hroth]

Very metaphoric....

 

[Edwardian]

12 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

Wymondham (Norfolk, GER) goods shed has its axis at right angles to the main line. Difficult to tell with the modern alterations, but I'd have expected there to have been several sidings entering the arches.  However this doesn't seem to have been the case, at least at the period of the 1906 25in map:

 

 

Particularly considering that those blind arches at the gable ends look as if there were originally open.  The oldest map I can find at the National Library of Scotland is the 1880 25" : Mile. This shows the same arrangement as the 1906 map.  This does not seem significant; a change in arrangement could easily have been made by then.

 

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Goods sheds at right angles to the running lines:

 

The Great Northern example I had in mind was Horncastle, a branch terminus built in 1855. The 1906 OS 25" map shows the rather curious arrangement where two lines converge on the wagon turntable.

 

The London & Birmingham's Wellingborough station of 1845 is a better example, being a through station. The up and down sidings were connected to the goods shed by a spur that rans at right angles across the running lines, as seen on the 1886 OS 25" map. This arrangement survived until at least the 1920s. This layout was repeated at several other stations on the Northampton & Peterborough line.

 

This is fascinating.  Sheds at right angles were clearly very common at one time.  What is interesting about some of these sites is how long the arrangement appears to have lasted in these places.

 

On the other hand, returning to the Stockton & Darlington, the Darlington and Barnard Castle Railway evidently used the more modern, linear, arrangement at Barnard Castle's first station (1856, IIRC), as is evidenced by the 1858 map (National Library of Scotland), the only one I know of showing it before conversion to a goods station. 

 

 

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

 

It's old, battered, frayed, torn, stained.  Liberties have clearly been taken with it. It's suffered long neglect and has quite a bit of the stuffing knocked out. 

 

At least what's left of  it remains squarely in the centre of the room .... 

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure what that is - not a chaise longue at any rate, nor one of these:

 

 

"a récamier has two raised ends, and nothing on the long sides" (ahem...)

 

It might be a courting sofa:

 

 

(Though this one may just be an ordinary armchair reproducing by mitosis.)

 

On the whole I think it's just a good old fashioned settee. Some days I know how it feels.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 4, 2019 by Compound2632
Style. On re-reading, I found I had begun two successive sentences with the word "though".

[wagonman]

16 hours ago, Regularity said:

Blakeney was the original intended terminus, but they decided to go the other way and meet up with the GER at Sherringham.

 

Not quite. The final destination of the L&F was its own station in Cromer. It was the connection built by the N&SJt that allowed GER trains to run into Sheringham. Railway promoters always had half an eye on Blakeney – and there were several schemes mooted – but the L&F one got the furthest. There isa house in Cley fancifully named 'The Stationmaster's House' (formerly the Birches and probably built around 1910) which is rumoured to have been built by someone who squatted the old railway company's land. The position is right, according to the deposited plans, so it may well be true. Trains would have faced quite a steep climb from Cley up to the junction near Holt.

 

 

[Regularity]

I knew that.

[Edwardian]

 

 

 

[Compound2632]

There is some passing resemblance to the leader of HM Opposition. As to being escorted off the premises by armed police, well...

[runs as required]

32 minutes ago, Regularity said:

I knew that.

But I never knew that the Norfolk & Suffolk Joint did anything up around Cromer until just now see the Clearing House Map here

I discovered the waywardness of the N&S Joint in 1962 when assigned to "station improvements" in BR(E) CCE's Kings +.  

A stationmaster (who worked for the Pyramid Company between trains) admonished me for labelling up and down platforms the wrong sides between Lowestoft and Yarmouth South Town.

Up to London from, say Gorleston-on-sea, was across the swing bridge over Breydon Water featured (and illustrated) in Arthur Ransome's 'Coot Club'!

[Northroader]

If you study this pre-raphaelite closely, you might find an item of furniture, very similar to the one you showed us, being used to good effect in the background, thereby proving its usefulness when you feel like a spot of socialising.

[Compound2632]

Those swans just don't know which way to look, do they?

[Nearholmer]

To avoid getting tempted into spending too long peering at that painting, which might, hopefully, corrupt me, can I ask: why were all these railway companies interested in Blakeney?

 

Its a very nice place, with a pretty good hotel, but it doesn't seem like the sort of place to support much railway traffic. Did they see potential for growth (its a bit silted-up for that isn't it?), or was it actually a hubbub of activity a century and a half ago?

[Compound2632]

@Nearholmer, seaside resort speculation seems to have been endemic in the 19th century. Haven't you been watching Andrew Davies' Sanditon?

[Nearholmer]

I rarely do TV. Sanditon is Eastbourne in thin disguise, isn't it? I vaguely remember that one of the places in it is Willingden, based on the real Willingdon, which is on a seriously bumpy bit of the South Downs Way that I cycled over recently.

[Hroth]

17 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

Those swans just don't know which way to look, do they?

 

They're thinking, "Its that Leda again...."

 

 

 

 

[Compound2632]

6 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

I rarely do TV. Sanditon is Eastbourne in thin disguise, isn't it? I vaguely remember that one of the places in it is Willingden, based on the real Willingdon, which is on a seriously bumpy bit of the South Downs Way that I cycled over recently.

 

Worthing, according to the author(s) of the Wikipedia entry: "where Jane Austen stayed in late 1805 when the resort was first being developed, while there is persuasive evidence that the character of Mr Parker was inspired by Edward Ogle, Worthing's early entrepreneur, whom Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra knew."

 

Willingden/don being on a bumpy bit of the downs fits the carriage accident that triggers the plot!

[Compound2632]

6 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

I rarely do TV. Sanditon is Eastbourne in thin disguise, isn't it? I vaguely remember that one of the places in it is Willingden, based on the real Willingdon, which is on a seriously bumpy bit of the South Downs Way that I cycled over recently.

 

Worthing, according to the author(s) of the Wikipedia entry: "where Jane Austen stayed in late 1805 when the resort was first being developed, while there is persuasive evidence that the character of Mr Parker was inspired by Edward Ogle, Worthing's early entrepreneur, whom Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra knew."

 

Willingden/don being on a bumpy bit of the downs fits the carriage accident that triggers the plot!

 

8 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

They're thinking, "Its that Leda again...."

 

 

... "my turn to pretend to be a deity in disguise."

[Hroth]

18 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

To avoid getting tempted into spending too long peering at that painting, which might, hopefully, corrupt me,

 

There used to be something similar floating around the web, with the caption "If you look long enough at this picture, you can see the sea!"

 

Talking about the sea(side)

 

9 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

seaside resort speculation seems to have been endemic in the 19th century. Haven't you been watching Andrew Davies' Sanditon?

 

11 chapters by written by  Jane Austen before she died and considerably embroidered for the modern fantasy of the early 19th Century by AD.  Can I say "sexed up"?*  I always render the title in my head as "Sandy Town", I think it might have been an Austenian dig at property speculators!

 

 

*  And that reminds me of this Punch cartoon

 

 

[St Enodoc]

20 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

I rarely do TV. Sanditon is Eastbourne in thin disguise, isn't it? I vaguely remember that one of the places in it is Willingden, based on the real Willingdon, which is on a seriously bumpy bit of the South Downs Way that I cycled over recently.

Crikey, I used to live there. Not the bumpy bit though, the eastern side near the Levels.