Football Specials

[Nick Holliday]

I understand that there is quite a lot of footballing activity currently going on.  I chanced upon the following whilst scanning through the very interesting Steam Index pages and thought it might be of interest. Taken from Locomotive Magazine No 165 - 15th May 1906:-

 

The football specials.
The "Final Cup Tie" at the Crystal Palace on Saturday, 21 April 1906 between the Everton and Newcastle teams brought a record number of excursions from the North of England to the Metropolis.
Euston headed the list with 43 return specials, and they were despatched homewards at 5 min. intervals up to about 4.00 a.m. on Sunday. Paddington with 20 specials was not so busy.
Marylebone had 16 specials to send on their return journey at about 10 minutes' intervals from 10.10 p.m. to 1.15 a.m. These all went via Quainton Road, and were non-stop as far as Leicester. To make up these trains, saloons belonging to the L.B. & S.C., S.E. & C., and L. & S.W. Rys. were requisitioned.
The bulk of the St. Pancras special traffic came from the Birmingham district, and 22 special trains were booked, saloon parties being conveyed in Pullman drawing-room cars, Somerset & Dorset, Midland & Great Northern Joint, and G. & S. W. Ry. coaches.,
There were 27 specials booked into King's Cross, of which six ran in duplicate, making 33 in all, mostly from Newcastle and that district and the trains consisted generally of the new excursion stock of up-to-date bogie coaches, and E.C.J.S. coaches, with a few trains also of North British, Lancashire & Yorkshire, and North Staffordshire Rys. saloons. As on the same occasion last year, the No.2 road from Finsbury Park to Wood Green was reserved for working empty trains close together to Bounds Green, block working being temporarily suspended. The Great Eastern Ry. for once seemed to appreciate the possibilities of the situation, and this year ran three specials, as against two in previous years. All came via. Cambridge from Doncaster, Norwich and the district served by the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Ry.

 

First of all, it gives even greater justification for all those (etched brass) saloon coaches, travelling to far-flung places. Presumably the requisitioned stock had made its way to the north in the days leading up to the final, and would make a leisurely return on the Monday. 

There is no mention of any through trains to Crystal Palace, either High or Low Level, but I would have thought there would have been some, via Snow Hill or Kensington, but the majority of attendees would have had to make their own way from the major termini using the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District to get to suitable LBSC and ex-LCDR stations to continue their journey. Presumably the LBSC and SECR would have run plenty of additional trains to accommodate the visitors and the London fans attending.

 

[Compound2632]

On 17/06/2021 at 16:02, Nick Holliday said:

Taken from Locomotive Magazine No 165 - 15th May 1906:-

The bulk of the St. Pancras special traffic came from the Birmingham district, and 22 special trains were booked, saloon parties being conveyed in Pullman drawing-room cars,

 

 

The majority of the former Pullman cars had been converted to picnic saloons in 1894/5. The parlour cars had been purchased by the Midland from the Pullman Co. at the end of 1883 and the sleeping cars in 1888. It's rather quaint for them still to be described by their original 1874 description of drawing room cars over thirty years later! Apart from the four that were at the time doing motor train service coupled up to the MGN/ex-Lynn & Fakenham 4-4-0Ts, they must have been very close to the end of their working life as railway vehicles, though many lasted for another fifty years or more as staff facilities at locomotive depots etc. - according to Radford's book on them, they'd all been taken off their bogies and grounded before the Great War. In fact, a batch of twenty new picnic saloons had been built in 1898/1901, handsome 48 ft square-light clerestory carriages - at which point the ex-Pullman saloons presumably went on the duplicate list. 

 

On 17/06/2021 at 16:02, Nick Holliday said:

Marylebone had 16 specials to send on their return journey at about 10 minutes' intervals from 10.10 p.m. to 1.15 a.m. These all went via Quainton Road, and were non-stop as far as Leicester. To make up these trains, saloons belonging to the L.B. & S.C., S.E. & C., and L. & S.W. Rys. were requisitioned.
The bulk of the St. Pancras special traffic came from the Birmingham district, and 22 special trains were booked, saloon parties being conveyed in Pullman drawing-room cars, Somerset & Dorset, Midland & Great Northern Joint, and G. & S. W. Ry. coaches.,
There were 27 specials booked into King's Cross, of which six ran in duplicate, making 33 in all, mostly from Newcastle and that district and the trains consisted generally of the new excursion stock of up-to-date bogie coaches, and E.C.J.S. coaches, with a few trains also of North British, Lancashire & Yorkshire, and North Staffordshire Rys. saloons.

 

 

This sort of borrowing of stock from other lines seems to have been not that unusual when large numbers of people needed moving on a single day - troop trains provide another case, though photographs of Aintree on Grand National day show solid ranks of LNWR and L&Y carriages only. It's curious that while the Great Central and Great Northern seem to have borrowed quite eclectically, the stock borrowed by the Midland was all firmly from its "sphere of influence". I hope there was no squabbling with Kings Cross over the M&GN vehicles!