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Peterborough North


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3 hours ago, jazzer said:

 

There were certainly some strange train services in 1958 . Who in their right mind would be wanting to travel from Ely to Birmingham back in them days ?  A few years after that  I travelled from Ely to Peterborough behind a (Green) Brush Type 2 / class 31 towing three wonderful old Gresley coaches apparently deputising for a failed DMU. There was literally nobody else on it apart from me (train spotter) and two other boys apparently going swimming in Peterborough. It only stopped at March where nobody got on or off. There must have been times when it had no passengers at all.

Why they needed to pay Dr B.Ching  £24 k a year to tell them these services were uneconomic is beyond me . I could have told them that for nothing. 

A wonderful opportunity to model B17’s in their dying days though..........

Lovely pictures.

 

There was a reasonably frequent service from Birmingham to Leicester anyway, and one from Leicester to Peterborough, so one would expect local traffic to be picked up between those points. To take the service on to Ely would also provide a route from the West Midlands through to East Anglia, with connections to Cambridge and Norwich. Perhaps there wouldn't be many people going the whole way, but the train needs to be looked at as a series of shorter journeys, I think.

 

I believe this train, or something very like it, continued for some years after the end of steam, so there must have been a viable income from it. Wasn't it quite well known as being one of the last loco  and carriages trains in the area? A Brush 2 and four or five cars, as I recall?

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On 03/02/2020 at 12:01, Clive Mortimore said:

She turns up on a Mod's Lambtretta only to go and ride some Rocker's Bantam. I would loved to see her ride her scooter around the wall of death.

 

I remember my dad taking us to the wall of death at Southend, boring. I wanted to go back to Victoria and watch the trains.

 

Hi Gilbert, hope all is well with you. Been a lurker right from the start of PN, but sadly my technical knowledge on stock is limited, so I just watch the trains go by.....

 

However, as a mod back in the 60's, I'm not totally convinced that is a Lambretta...(pedant mode).

 

My first two wheeler was a Lambretta D and then an LD and I can't recall ever seeing a Lambretta with a fixed front mudguard as per the video. My TV175 was later and that was fixed, but not the early ones.

 

Can't put my finger on it and I be way off, but wondered if it was an NSU or similar whose name escapes me....

 

Someone here will know....

 

Edit: Could be the rest of the day written off now. Peugeot, BMW, Heinkel or Puch come close, but not exact.......:D

Edited by gordon s
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4 hours ago, CUTLER2579 said:

Jazzer,

it was called a service, if Mrs Jazzer needed to attend a hospital appointment in Birmingham,she could get there from her palatial home in Ely. If her next door neighbour wanted to work in Essendine he could get there by train. If Mrs Cutler a resident of Peterborough wanted to visit the "Ship of the Fens" (Ely Cathedral) she could get there  by  - you've guessed it by CAR.

:D                                                            

 

Ah but if Mrs J. had a palatial home in Ely I would never have met here as I only went there once and never went off the station. Therefore I would have had a lot more spare cash so instead of a bit of track in the garage that may one day resemble a model railway, I could have knocked two rooms into one and had my own Peterborough North instead of drooling over someone else's. :D

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1 hour ago, great northern said:

There was a reasonably frequent service from Birmingham to Leicester anyway, and one from Leicester to Peterborough, so one would expect local traffic to be picked up between those points. To take the service on to Ely would also provide a route from the West Midlands through to East Anglia, with connections to Cambridge and Norwich. Perhaps there wouldn't be many people going the whole way, but the train needs to be looked at as a series of shorter journeys, I think.

 

I believe this train, or something very like it, continued for some years after the end of steam, so there must have been a viable income from it. Wasn't it quite well known as being one of the last loco  and carriages trains in the area? A Brush 2 and four or five cars, as I recall?

 

According to the Summer 1960 timetable there were 3 DMU  week day services plus a Fridays only DMU between Ely and PN . The first of these were all stations the others called at March only so the stations at Chettisham , Black Bank and Manea seem to have only one train per day. All of those originated at Cambridge, but only one ran through to Birmingham. In addition there was the loco hauled Colchester-Glasgow and two late trains from Liverpool St that reached Peterborough in  the early hours. There couple of trains that originated for from places like  Hunstanton,  and Yarmouth through to Birmingham but these cut out Ely and joined the route at March. 

I suppose in the pre-motor way era and before the days of widespread car ownership  people depended on these routes more than we might imagine today.

The Brush 2 hauled train you mention could well have been the1.55pm ex-Cambridge via St Ives, (not Ely) -Birmingham  which didn't rumble in  to its final destination until 7.5 pm. or a replacement for a failed DMU

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3 hours ago, jazzer said:

 

According to the Summer 1960 timetable there were 3 DMU  week day services plus a Fridays only DMU between Ely and PN . The first of these were all stations the others called at March only so the stations at Chettisham , Black Bank and Manea seem to have only one train per day. All of those originated at Cambridge, but only one ran through to Birmingham. In addition there was the loco hauled Colchester-Glasgow and two late trains from Liverpool St that reached Peterborough in  the early hours. There couple of trains that originated for from places like  Hunstanton,  and Yarmouth through to Birmingham but these cut out Ely and joined the route at March. 

I suppose in the pre-motor way era and before the days of widespread car ownership  people depended on these routes more than we might imagine today.

The Brush 2 hauled train you mention could well have been the1.55pm ex-Cambridge via St Ives, (not Ely) -Birmingham  which didn't rumble in  to its final destination until 7.5 pm. or a replacement for a failed DMU

We moved to Cambridge (when I was 10 in 1959). From memory (and I lived alongside the loop at Milton Road), most Cambridge-March trains went via the St.Ives loop. I seem to recall one journey that we took went via Ely, that seemed very rare and exciting! Trainspotting at Chesterton Junction (the site of the present Cambridge North) seemed to confirm this as most trains on the Ely line were Kings Lynn or Norwich services.

 

Stewart

 

ps most services nowadays on the loop go to St.Ives or Huntingdon, though I saw one last week for Peterborough. I even photted a new electric at St.ives ! (for those not in the know, guided buses....)

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10 hours ago, jazzer said:

 

There were certainly some strange train services in 1958 . Who in their right mind would be wanting to travel from Ely to Birmingham back in them days ?  A few years after that  I travelled from Ely to Peterborough behind a (Green) Brush Type 2 / class 31 towing three wonderful old Gresley coaches apparently deputising for a failed DMU. There was literally nobody else on it apart from me (train spotter) and two other boys apparently going swimming in Peterborough. It only stopped at March where nobody got on or off. There must have been times when it had no passengers at all.

Why they needed to pay Dr B.Ching  £24 k a year to tell them these services were uneconomic is beyond me . I could have told them that for nothing. 

A wonderful opportunity to model B17’s in their dying days though..........

Lovely pictures.

 

"Now Runcorn lay over on one side of stream

And Widnes on t'other side stood.

And, as nobody wanted to go either place,

Well, the trade wasn't any too good."

 

M. Edgar.

 

 

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7 hours ago, gordon s said:

 

Hi Gilbert, hope all is well with you. Been a lurker right from the start of PN, but sadly my technical knowledge on stock is limited, so I just watch the trains go by.....

 

However, as a mod back in the 60's, I'm not totally convinced that is a Lambretta...(pedant mode).

 

My first two wheeler was a Lambretta D and then an LD and I can't recall ever seeing a Lambretta with a fixed front mudguard as per the video. My TV175 was later and that was fixed, but not the early ones.

 

Can't put my finger on it and I be way off, but wondered if it was an NSU or similar whose name escapes me....

 

Someone here will know....

 

Edit: Could be the rest of the day written off now. Peugeot, BMW, Heinkel or Puch come close, but not exact.......:D

All is as normal Gordon. There is some good golf, and rather more bad. Some trains on PN falll off, others don't. And thank goodness I am free of golf club politics. I have to confess though that I know nothing about scooters.

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That's a very pleasing 3/4 rear view of 60007, Gilbert;  perhaps because it's a trainspotters-eye-view sort of thing, watching it as it goes past?

 

Cheers

 

Scott

Edited by jukebox
typo
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Does the V2 standby ever move? Or change for another standby?

How about we could have a series of photos where a loco arrives, is failed, a posed crowd of railway men appear, the loco is removed and the standby takes over?

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When Gordon Brown was prime minister there was serious thoughts of naming a locomotive after him. The top civil servant responsible for naming stuff after senior government officials was sent off to York to liaise with the curator. The curator showed the civil servant a pretty little black tank loco and said "That it didn't have a name so would that be OK?" 

"No" was the answer, "it is too small and doesn't look important enough".

The civil servant asked if one with a name could be renamed. The curator replied, "Yes as long as it wasn't an important locomotive".

So the civil servant said "What about that big blue one", pointing at Mallard.

"Oh , no there would be a world wide outcry if its name was changed".

"The red one?" pointing at the Duchess of Hamilton?

"It has had its name changed in the past and that is what makes it historically famous".

"We are not getting very far are we" commented the civil servant. "How about that dark green one, that looks impressive?"

"Oh no not Oliver Cromwell, that was British Railways last working steam locomotive," said the curator.

"I can't go back to London without an engine named after the prime minister, what about my pension?"

The curator done one of the deep intake of breaths that a car mechanic does just before he says "it will be expensive". He pointed to the bright green locomotive in the corner, "It is for Gordon Brown, I suppose we could always paint out the F".

Edited by Clive Mortimore
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4 hours ago, JeffP said:

Does the V2 standby ever move? Or change for another standby?

How about we could have a series of photos where a loco arrives, is failed, a posed crowd of railway men appear, the loco is removed and the standby takes over?

It changes daily Jeff, but such is the reliability of the works of Gresley, and even those of Thomps*n, that it is very rarely called into action. This did happen during the previous sequence though, and it created a big problem, as New England has a shortage of V2s, which won't be remedied until some blue boxes arrive, hopefully before too long.

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