Sproston. Signalling Alterations

[Junctionmad]

Thanks Phil , must appreciated 

[The Stationmaster]

13 hours ago, bécasse said:

I rather suspect that they ended up in a skip when Reading signal works was cleared out ready for subsequent occupation by BR computing. There was certainly a period in the 1970s when Porchester Row was actively discouraging the acquisition of more material no matter how interesting, and, unless an individual expressed an interest, a skip was the only answer. I was given the task of clearing out the historical archives on international train services when the SISD moved from 50 Liverpool Street to Eversholt House in the mid 1970s, they were full of interesting items, some SECR files dating back well before the Great War, but, apart from a handful of choice items, they all went in a skip.

Whatever still existed when the Signal Works closed in the mid 1980s would have gone with the staff.  The Drawing Office and design folk were moved round the corner to Western Tower where they remained until they began to be sectorised in the early 1990s.  The last rump of the Regional S&T organisations lasted until 1994 although they were almost entirely under sector management by then.  At that time the remaining S&T design functions in Reading were privatised going mainly to one company which subsequently (in the 21st century) sold them on.  in the meanwhile another company had been started by a former WR signal engineer and employed almost exclusively ex WR staff which was originally c.100% former WR S&T signal engineering design and management staff.  That company diversified considerably and quite rapidly and I worked for them as part of the signalling part of the company (although my background was operations and infrastructure/signalling scheme origination) after I left full time railway employment although I did some minor signalling related design work while I was there.  That company later took over what had been the privatised rump of the Reading S&T design etc office and in later years the S&T design part was sold to Network Rail.   when I was working there one job I dealt with required me to go through all the information they held about almost every remaining WR signalbox and the files were very thin indeed.

 

Apart from location and organisation changes many of the WR Drawing Office Instructions were being overtaken by BR Standard Signalling Principles by the late 1980s and more or less completely so in the early '90s - a process which had started in the couple of years following nationalisation.  Thus various Drawing Office Instructions went through numerous opportunities to be thrown out or simply forgotten and lost - I don't know anybody among the people I worked with who had kept any of them as paperwork.  The man who taught me a lot about the finer points of WR locking practice held all that information in his head.

 

There was at one time in the '60s an official instruction on the Western that any items of historical interest were to be sent to Clapham.  Later the Porchester Crescent (I think it was the Crescent) took over responsibility for WR stuff that was being taken out of office use but I'm pretty sure that everything which went there was from Paddington HQ (both general management and civil engineering) and I doubt anything went there from Reading.   With privatisation nobody would take responsibility for the stuff held there and a vast amount of it had to be destroyed.  The chap who managed the unit saved what he could by going through everything and selecting what he considered the most historically important and saved about a container load privately.  I don't know what has happened to it all because I haven't seen him for many years but he was well aware of its significance and might have persuaded the NRM to take it but knowing roughly where it had all come from I doubt there was any S&T related stuff.

 

Some S&T stuff definitely survived presumably in private hands.  Thus a few years back I bought at auction the works order book which dates from the late 19th century and includes such gems as a request for extra authority because of an S&T overspend during gauge conversion on the South Devon coast.

[The Stationmaster]

11 hours ago, Harlequin said:

Hi @Junctionmad

 

The track and platfom colours I used on Sproston are not solid. I gave them a bit of variation to simulate an ink wash and I gave them a smaller scale transparency variation to give a slightly grainy effect. So their final appearance depends on the colour behind them.

 

Here they are in close up over the light buff paper colour that I used for the drawing and also over pure white:

 

I can't claim that these colours are accurate to the prototype drawings. The photographs that you can find on the net usually show very old drawings that are yellowed with age and/or bleached by exposure to sunlight. So I made best guesses to the original colours without going too saturated.

 

The convention I'm using for track colours is: grey for primary running lines, blue for sidings and orange for secondary running lines (such as goods relief lines). The secondary orange is a slightly stronger version of the platform orange shown above but I didn't have to use it on Sproston.

 

Sample RGB values over buff paper colour:

Platform orange = #ecceb3

Primary grey = #c6c1bb

Siding blue = #a4c5d7

 

Sample RGB values over white:

Platform orange = #f6e1d3

Primary grey = #c5c0bd

Siding blue = #abcbde

 

The track outlines are 60% black (#666666) - they should possibly be a bit darker.

 

The tan colour is pretty good to the original.  The blue is too dark and not really blue enough and the grey is far too dark.  But there is of course the age old problem about the way our computers are set to render colour.  When I can get at one of my diagrams I'll take some pics but you'll you will then be getting my camera and 'puter settings I'm afraid.

[RailWest]

>>>There was at one time in the '60s an official instruction on the Western that any items of historical interest were to be sent to Clapham....

 

I can recall difficulties when trying to buy stuff from the S&T at Exeter in the 1970s. They had instructions to send it all to Reading, who in turn claimed to have instructions to send it all to Collectors Corner at Euston - needless to say, the latter rarely actually ever got any WR or SR stuff. It took me a great deal of persuasion and bureaucratic wrangling to persuade them that, as I lived near Exeter and wanted to buy something from Exeter, then I really did not want to have to go all the way to Euston to get it - even then I had to pay CC at Euston for it and get their receipt!

 

What was even more frustrating was the fact that the S&T at Exeter were throwing out a lot of records relating to old boxes on the line to Salisbury and simply refused to sell or give it away, insisting that it had to be destroyed (burnt or in a skip). :-(:-(

 

 

[Harlequin]

54 minutes ago, RailWest said:

>>>There was at one time in the '60s an official instruction on the Western that any items of historical interest were to be sent to Clapham....

 

I can recall difficulties when trying to buy stuff from the S&T at Exeter in the 1970s. They had instructions to send it all to Reading, who in turn claimed to have instructions to send it all to Collectors Corner at Euston - needless to say, the latter rarely actually ever got any WR or SR stuff. It took me a great deal of persuasion and bureaucratic wrangling to persuade them that, as I lived near Exeter and wanted to buy something from Exeter, then I really did not want to have to go all the way to Euston to get it - even then I had to pay CC at Euston for it and get their receipt!

 

What was even more frustrating was the fact that the S&T at Exeter were throwing out a lot of records relating to old boxes on the line to Salisbury and simply refused to sell or give it away, insisting that it had to be destroyed (burnt or in a skip). :-(:-(

 

 

Another sad story!

It seems like we've lost a lot of info that would have been very useful to us now.

 

[bécasse]

3 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Whatever still existed when the Signal Works closed in the mid 1980s would have gone with the staff.  The Drawing Office and design folk were moved round the corner to Western Tower where they remained until they began to be sectorised in the early 1990s.  

It has to have been earlier than the mid-1980s. I took over as the commercial manager of the fares computerisation project in March 1983 and one of my principal BR computing contacts was then based in the signal works and had been for some time. Indeed it was only a short while later (1984?) that he too was moved into Western Towers (and subsequently actually into my team at 222).

Whenever organisations moved offices at that period (and especially ones that had had a long domicile at their old location) there was tremendous pressure placed on them to ditch everything that could be ditched, such pressure being applied in the simplest way possible by just not providing storage space.

The policy decisions that lead to that pressure were taken in the run up to the implementation of territories in 1975, and I was then one of the team that had been specially recruited within the BRB Management Services organisation to ensure that procedures were standardised as the territories were created. Ironically it was one of our pilot projects that demonstrated (what to me as a trained physicist seemed unremarkable) that chaos was more efficient than standardisation, thus knocking out the cost-saving rationale behind the principal of the territories and leading to the sudden cancellation of the whole project (and ultimately to sectorisation instead).

[4069]

On 12/12/2019 at 15:44, The Stationmaster said:

Thanks Phil - I was obviously looking in the wrong place (I blame the index, again).  The interesting question of course is when did TC indications first begin to appear on diagrams?  The earliest I can trace with any certainty are in the 1930s when it appears that the original single white light to indicate an occupied track circuit was first used - it could possibly have been used even earlier than that.  The two red lights in a single lozenge shaped cut out would seem to have come some time later.  I suspect that Wolvercote Jcn might not be a very good example as it was a wartime job being altered in 1942 when the Down Loop from Oxford North Jcn was added.

 

Incidentally the change of style would not have depended on the size of the installation but would have been governed by the date on which the Drawing Office Instruction was issued.  One of the biggest losses to the student of GWR signalling is that a comprehensive list of Drawing Office Instructions - let alone example of them - never seems to have come to light where they're accessible the enthusiast world.  They were the GWR, and subsequently WR, equivalent of Signalling Principles and also covered such things as interlocking standards but over the years I have only learnt a few oddments from the people who used them and have never seen any of the written versions.

In my experience the best source for details of GWR/WR diagram practice is the Signalling Record Society Signalling Paper "Signal Box Diagrams of the GWR and BR(WR)" by Alan Price, which was written in the 1980s by a Reading Works insider and is still available via the SRS website https://www.s-r-s.org.uk/pubpapers.php .  He says that the first GWR illuminated diagrams were installed in 1927 as part of the Engine & Carriage lines resignalling at Paddington, and were drawn at Reading although they owed some elements of style to Westinghouse practice. Page 92 of Vaughan's Great Western Signalling has a 1932 picture of Westbourne Bridge box with such a diagram.

 

Stuart J

 

 

Edited December 13, 2019 by 4069

[The Stationmaster]

9 hours ago, bécasse said:

It has to have been earlier than the mid-1980s. I took over as the commercial manager of the fares computerisation project in March 1983 and one of my principal BR computing contacts was then based in the signal works and had been for some time. Indeed it was only a short while later (1984?) that he too was moved into Western Towers (and subsequently actually into my team at 222).

Whenever organisations moved offices at that period (and especially ones that had had a long domicile at their old location) there was tremendous pressure placed on them to ditch everything that could be ditched, such pressure being applied in the simplest way possible by just not providing storage space.

The policy decisions that lead to that pressure were taken in the run up to the implementation of territories in 1975, and I was then one of the team that had been specially recruited within the BRB Management Services organisation to ensure that procedures were standardised as the territories were created. Ironically it was one of our pilot projects that demonstrated (what to me as a trained physicist seemed unremarkable) that chaos was more efficient than standardisation, thus knocking out the cost-saving rationale behind the principal of the territories and leading to the sudden cancellation of the whole project (and ultimately to sectorisation instead).

I think the works finally closed in 1984 when the remaining stores stock was moved to a building on the former Woodley Airfield and that in turn was closed in 1986 with the contents being sold off to anyone who happened along on the sale day (I bought over a ton of channel rodding plus sundry other bits & pieces but there wasn't much left there by then).

[The Stationmaster]

10 hours ago, Harlequin said:

Another sad story!

It seems like we've lost a lot of info that would have been very useful to us now.

 

The same all the way round I'm afraid Phil. some of us managed to secure various items from office moves and 'thinning out' sessions but it's all a matter of storage space plus being there at the right time to lay hands on stuff.  I've got a number of 'office copy' signal box diagrams I obtained through that process - they are uncoloured copies printed on paper - plus various operations stuff such as Appendices etc.

[5BarVT]

On 10/12/2019 at 19:03, The Stationmaster said:

As far as the lock(ing) bars are concerned the use of two inside bars on the switch rails definitely happened and there are photos around which show it

Somewhat late to the party as I don’t usually read this section.

Newbury Racecourse had inside switch FPLs where the two down platform loops split. Still there autumn ‘75 and I was told that they were very heavy!

Paul.