Great book and printed media finds at rail events

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I can't find any particular thread that adequately deals with this aspect of model rail exhibitions, society 'open days ' or other rail based calendar events so here goes...

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So here is a spread of publications found over the last quarter since late summer at various open days and exhibitions mostly in the north east and Cumbria

Total outlay for this lot was £50 with most of the hardback 'finds' under a fiver.

• The most expensive at £20 was Vol 1 of the broad gauge locos of the GWR (the motley early lot that the North East lad Daniel Gooch sorted for IKB) by the clergyman who edited the Broad Gauge Society journal Canon Brian Arman. I shall read it and pass it on to a very elderly Bristolian who lives just outside Durham and talks as if he still remembers Rover cantering past Dr Day's Junction.
   
• Another newish one is the Border Counties photo book bought for a friend who has a 1.1 scale layout at the remote station he runs as a B&B on the line.
   
• 'The Eastern before Beeching' was personal nostalgia for my first job; we were an extremely committed CCE's office. Gerry Fiennes was our charismatic ER GM.
   
• Tuplin came really cheap. I do enjoy the certainty of his robust prose - even though he comes in for a lot of stick from real motive power engineers.
  Also cheap was the fascinating 1951 English Electric published book - the year the first Standards started on the GE Niorwich mainline amid the Shenfield 1.5 Kv electrics.
  The reprint of views along the N&C features the early line originally projected as a ship canal past our house.

It is proving excellent eclectic therapy for insomnia during the wee small hours.

dh

 

I will post later on my big find: Baron Gerard Vuillet the Frenchy OS Nock

Edited November 24, 2018 by runs as required

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A few weeks back I was pleased to find this book for under £20:
Railway Reminiscences of Three Continents by Baron Gerard Vuillet; Nelson London 1968

It is a "classic" of railway  literature like ‘Chronicles of Boultons sidings’ and the like.,

 

A disapproving reviewer comments

‘the quality of the writing makes the late O.S. Nock look like a master of flowery prose. Vuillet's text consists of little more than his notes transcribed. The text probably hasn't suffered in translation, as there is little to translate. This book would do nothing to dispel the myth that railway enthusiasts are little more than obsessive collectors of numbers and loggers of the minutiae of performance. So it's perhaps fortunate that the book is rare and long out of print.’

 

But I disagree with the above. I find these two paras very enlightening about Gallic motive power:
 

“There were in France broadly speaking, two schools of thought concerning the way locomotives should be built. One school was developed on railways whose main lines usually followed the course of rivers, presenting continuous curves and long regular gradients. The other school was found on railways whose main lines cut across the valleys threaded by rivers, usually at places where towns had developed, and were therefore characterised by difficult starts , and steep , if generally short, hilly sections. The PLM and Est belonged to the first group the Nord, Paris-Orleans and Etat Railway to the second. Before being combined in 1933 with the P-O the Midi belonged more to the first group although following the Nord and P-O designs.

 

The locomotives of the first group of railways had plate framesof reduced thickness, imparting a certain amount of flexibility, the idea being that the locomotive and the track were two parts of a whole, each one having to fit in with the other. In fact these locomotives rode very quietly. The engine were designed to develop a fairly high power continuously, but not to increase their mean output to any considerable extent for a short period. In the second group the frames were thicker and stiffness was sought after. More robustly built, the engines were expected to withstand a certain amount of thrashing when accelerating or climbing gradients. They were frequently hard to ride on.

 

Searching on line for Baron Gerard Vuillet I found little except details of his family crest and his lineage, that he was a French based international banker/financier (the family is still involved in financial services).

 

Born in 1899, his book starts in his childhood by recalling disembarking at Le Havre and boarding the Paris boat train in the early 1900s.  With his eye-line at ‘around the height of the adults’ knees’, he takes in the 4-4-0 l’Oest 4 cylinder compound.
Characteristically by the end of the opening para, he has borrowed and set out in OS Nock style, details of a run made on Sept 21 1903 behind No 548 of that l’Oest 4-4-0 class hauling the same train of eight 4 wheelers and a restaurant car weighing 180 tonnes!

 

By the 1920s, Vuillet has fought in the trenches and is well connected on 3 continents.  The book’s blurb states “His financial studies have lead him into financial management and control of large industrial groups and banking accounts and making official reports to the Office Central d’Etudes de Materiel. He is also a mountain climber, he sails and he skates.” Truly a Golden Youth.

 

His banker’s capability for quick calculations while weighing up investment opportunities during sophisticated social networking must also facilitate his developing passion for recording locomotive performance. Emerging at the interface of financial investment in engineering and steam engine developments, he contributes to Revue General des Chemins de Fer, Railway Magazine, Railway Gazette & Chemins de Fer

RHN (Dick) Hardy of famed Shed Master reminiscences comes across Baron Gerard Vuillet while at Stewarts Lane,

“an amazing man who had travelled the world on the footplate and who knew Andre Chapelon personally.  He was also a daredevil driver on the Torry Hill Light Railway [in Kent] on this, his only visit, and I had the job of slowing him down before he took off into the woods.

[RH402  More of the Torry Hill Light Railway.]

 

I could find no picture of the Baron but have the impression of a kind of Scott Fitzgerald ‘Great Gatsby’ Jazz Age character who, because of his feared International financial power, rides the biggest newest steam locomotives from the Southern Pacific through Doncaster down to Ventigmiglia and across to the Orient.

 

This is how the Baron writes about the eve of Chapelon’s famous break through in compound efficiency:

“A shadow of the events to come was symbolised by an unusual object I noticed when visiting the works of the Paris – Orleans Railway at Toursin October 1928; tucked in a corner stood a double-blast pipe with petticoats and a double chimney”

Very scant information was given locally as to the reasons why such an object was in existence. But a little more than a year later on 25 November 1929, the epoch making Pacific No 3586 emerged from the same shops rebuilt by Chapelon, later to be numbered 3701 and 231-701.”

 

V later summarises the ‘must have’ spec of Chapelon’s rebuilt Pacific:

• Chapelon doubles the cross sectional area through the regulator, the steam pipes, steam chests and the steam passages through the cylinders to the final LP exhaust
• installs that double-blast  Kylchap  developed from the Finnish Kylala
• As the existing LP cylinders were found to be working with virtually saturated steam, so a greatly enlarged superheater raises steam temp from 300C to 400C
• a Nicholson thermic siphon is fitted in the firebox to compensate for loss of evaporative surface impaired by the larger superheater tubes
• Lentz poppet valves replace piston valves in conjunction with the existing Walschaerts gear. Design of this was far from easy and achieving the desired cross sectional area took some time. Use of poppet valves has no influence on cylinder efficiency but allows large cross sectional area and reduces inertia and lubrication difficulties due to higher temperatures.
• A feed water heater of the ACFI ‘Integral’ type “was of course fitted”
• Frames and crank axles were strengthened and mechanical lubrication introduced to journals.

This has the air of an oversimplified Prospectus for a new Financial Product.

But there's a lot more to come : rides on Southern Pacific Cab forward articulated double Consolidations, Algerian streamlined Garratts, Belgian streamlined Atlantics, the last gasp of Frenchy steam with de Caso before the 141Rs dominate. 350 odd pages of seriously good value.

Edited November 26, 2018 by runs as required

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Tracing the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway

Vol 4: The Abandoned Lines

 

While I was enquiring about an out of print book at Bill Hudson’s Matlock bookshop stand at last week's York Show, my eye was caught by a glossy book cover featuring Bouch’s spectacular Stainmore Belah viaduct.

Zoe Elizabeth Hunter’s  Vol 4: ‘The Abandoned Lines’ of the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway, shows it crossing Monsal Dale high above the old Midland mainline.

I was hooked

The irony was that I had just roundly declared how I would never everpay more than £25.00 for a railway book;  moments later (amidst laughter from other browsers) I was willingly shelling out £38.00 for a privately published soft back paving slab of dense data.

 

1 Backstory

The backstory to my folly: I grew up on the Derbyshire/Cheshire border. Our scout hut (1stTaxal, Whaley Bridge) was at the foot of the grassed over C&HP Shallcross Incline running up from Horwich End sidings. 

For seven years I had a wonderful holiday job relieving Miss Salthouse, YHA warden at Windgather Rocks Hostel of her daily post-round at Christmas, Easter and summer, her busiest hostelling times. Out from Whaley Post Office by 7am, with a mail bag all sorted and ‘set up”, hers was a 15 mile walk delivering around the hill farms of Saltersford scattered above the Todd Brook valley east of the Goyt. 

 

Geographically we inhabited an intersection of early industrial north/south and east/west turnpikes and railways--canals. 

Old men spoke of railway mania projects surveyed to supersede Blind Jack’s road from Macclesfield over the Cheshire highlands to the Goyt and on across the Peak District. 

It wasn’t until I read Betjeman’s Spectator column ‘City & Suburban’ in the school library that I learned of totally grandiose unrealised trunk railways like the Manchester & Milford and the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway.

We Scouts used to love ‘Midnight Hikes’ ascending the water parting between Todd Brook and the Goyt up onto Cat Tor and Shining Tor (the stopping point for a flask of hot sweet Nescaff and a Penguin) gazing across at the lights of the Manchester conurbation and the Cheshire plain before contouring around Goyt Moss to return down the track of the Cromford back to base as dawn was breaking. We’d usually argue about how the LD&ECR might have run from west to east across this terrain, then through Buxton and so off to Chesterfield.

 

Zoe Hunter devotes a whole page map to no fewer than six projected lines across ‘my’ Cheshire highlands. The LD&ECR actually runs (in long cheating tunnels priced @ £56 per yard) under Thursbitch – the subject of an eerie fantasy novel by Alan Garner published in 2003.

Hunter also goes into extraordinary detail about how the LD&ECR skirts around the south of Buxton market place (with an alternative deviation) past a number of houses where schoolfriends of my wife lived when they all attended the former posh Buxton Cavendish girls’ grammar school. 

 

I just had to buy the book – if only to shew my wife where she’d enjoyed her teenage sleepovers!

 

But TBH, I’ve continued through the years pondering how the LD&ECR would tackle climbing from Buxton over to Macc with loaded coal trains. I’d tried with the OS 1:25000 scale map and a home made 1in50 gauge to plot an ascent across the contours from the Cromford’s embankment above Burbage, heading for the Blue Boar above Rainow; then I was going to descend east of Kerridge down through Bollington to the plain. 

I‘d also been trying to sneak an opportunity to look at the original plans said to be Archived in Riber Castle above Bill Bedford’s shop in Matlock.

 

2 The Review

Back to the book: its format is unusual: 376 pp of 10" x 8" [25.4cm x 20cm] Post 4to. It has more the air of a working document – such as an EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) Planning document. At first sight, flicking through, it appears a hotchpot of different material squirreled together with minimal margins; Hunter’s text interventions are all in 8 point Arial – even the Contents page, you’ll miss it first time around.

For me it all works beautifully – Hunter’s text is a simple narrator’s commentary that links all the different sources (many primary) that are collated into a sequential West to East succession including contemporary newspaper reports of local meetings organised in support of (or trying to lure deviations to) local settlement interests. Colour coding of text helps familiarise you with the sources.

 

Pride of place in the book are the plans and dramatic vertical sections of the various lengths of railway making up the Parliamentary Plans prepared for the Bill laid before the 1890-91 session of Parliament. The characteristic late Victorian graphics and typesetting provide the book with its overall typographic character.

Dominant however is the fascinating analysis Hunter has put together superimposing the LD&ECR line onto the NLoS suite of digitised old OS maps that sync with Bing Map’s satellite imagery. These key the viewpoints Hunter visits, photographs and appends. (all taken in the summer of 2018) 

 

 

I omitted to mention that the first 38 pages introduce the case for the railway, summarise the proceedings of the Parliamentary Committee and Engineering and Financial aspects. Briefly quoted too is the ‘anger and incredulity’ of many how a railway ‘which began nowhere and ended nowhere’ gained Parliamentary approval in 1892 at the same time as the MS&L ‘London Extension’ was rejected (it did win Royal Assent at its second attempt the following year).  

The final half of the book covers east Lincolnshire and Sutton docks, and the complex of colliery branches in Markham vale.

 

I can thoroughly recommend this book, though I can’t agree completely with the author feeling it has been a loss to the Peak that it was never realised. 

I am ordering another copy to send to the erstwhile Leader of my Peewit Patrol, now in his mid eighties.  He recently sent a copy of “Thursbitch” to me from his home (for the past 60 years) down in Ringmer near Lewes, Sussex.

 

dh