Ghosts in the Machine.

[unclebobkt]

       A bit of Googling reveals that the "heritage-style makeover" at King's Lynn has been funded by Network Rail and First Capital Connect, following consultation with local groups, including the Fen Line Users’ Association.

  Full details here: http://www.firstcapitalconnect.co.uk/better-stations/kings-lynn/

 

Well done them.

 

       The pedant in me is pleased to see the correct use of the apostrophe!

 

     

[melmerby]

       The pedant in me is pleased to see the correct use of the apostrophe!

 

     

There seems to be a tendency to drop them completely when providing signs for place names.

 

For example "King's Heath" and "King's Norton" in Birmingham. No apostrophe on the road signage in Birmingham.

However Worcestershire seems to be more diligent e.g.  "Major's Green" , "Drake's Cross" are correctly shown.

 

Even Google when entering the search term "Drake's Cross" asked whether I meant "Drakes Cross" and promptly listed things to do with an apostrophe less  "Drake's Cross"!

 

Keith

Edited July 23, 2015 by melmerby

[Welchester]

North Berwick:

 

[45059]

It's been a while since anyone posted on this thread, but I think this belongs here.

 

This mural (dated 1988) is still to be found in the former ticket office at Harwich Town and prominently features an NSE liveried 312.

 

The station building is currently being used by The Mayflower Project, who are building a replica of the ship Mayflower which sailed to America with the Pilgrims.

 

The ladies inside kindly allowed me to take a picture of it this afternoon.

 

 

 

 

[Ronnie MB]

Not sure if mentioned already, but is the GNR boundary marker still visible in the Snow Hill tunnel?

[big jim]

Sign on a fence in Doncaster marshgate yard

 

[96701]

 

In the pavement outside the former station building at Newport (Gwent)

[Talltim]

Sheffield station, behind the buffer stops for platforms 3 and 4

[andye]

image.jpeg

Sheffield station, behind the buffer stops for platforms 3 and 4

I remember those, you could buy them form the TDEL, the terminal depots equipment list, coolant pumps that blocked up, battery chargers that gave up at a moments notice. Wish I had kept the A5 ring binder with all those quality products in! 

[dmustu]

Been meaning to get a couple of pictures of this building on London Rd in Derby for some time. It has a very nice art deco LMS in the stonework. There's been a lot of work going on in and around the building recently. I was once told that the APT department was based there, anyone know if that's true?

[Danim]

Hi dmustu this is a quote from Kit Spackman who was tilt engineer on the APT-E across on the APT-E thread

 

Yes, that's Hartley House on the opposite side of the road to the main bit of the RTC. It was the centre for the Scientific Services Divsion when I was there, and my wife worked there for a bit too.

[Thomas]

 

Another coolant dispenser at Newcastle today

[TheSignalEngineer]

Taking a short cut in New Mills recently I noticed the remains of an old gradient post at the start of the Sett Valley Trail, formerly the Hayfield Branch.

 

 

The line closed 46 years ago

[LNERGE]

Was it always a single side post?

[Nearholmer]

Some of the best "ghosts" that I've encountered were underneath Waterloo station. In about 1977, I spent a month assisting a chap who had the task of cataloging all of the "non-traction" electrical equipment at Waterloo, down to the last 13A socket, and producing a proper routine inspection/test/maintenance schedule - this was an absolutely massive task.

 

Under the station was (still is, but different) an incredible warren, on multiple levels. My favourite parts were the theatre, a tiny affair of about fifty seats, but fully-equipped, which had been the base of the SR Dramatic Society; the uniform store arch, which had odd leftovers dating back decades; the BTP rifle range, where the sergeant in charge taught me handgun target shooting during lunch breaks, using an impressively heavy thing that fired .303 ammunition (I sort of can't imagine this being allowed now!); and, the poster store, from which I took home "flyers" for the introduction of the Atlantic Coast Express, and smaller "handouts" which gave details of the schedule before it even got named, dating from the early 1920s.

 

Needless to say, we found lots of cWW1 electrical kit,dating from when the station was rebuilt, most of which we, sadly, had to condemn.

 

Kevin

Edited May 12, 2016 by Nearholmer

[PhilJ W]

Not Railway related but 52 years ago I took up my first job on leaving school. This was with Kealy & Tonge ltd. at their head office in Mitre Square in the City of London. This was in an old mid Victorian building taking up one side of the square. The building had many of its Victorian features including high desks with stools around the walls together with partitioned off desk spaces in the centre of a large office which took up much of the ground floor. In the cupboards under the high desks were ledgers and account books dating from the 1880's and 90's. Needless to say that building is no longer and even its replacement is being demolished to be replaced by a larger structure that the square itself will disappear beneath.

[The Stationmaster]

One amusing little incident is brought to mind by Kevin (Nearholmer's) post.  Back in 1976 I had managed - through the good offices of our Lampman - to obtain a brass & iron bedstead which I gradually took home by trains.  The Friday was set for departure with the smaller end when Tisbury suffered a £20 loss in booking and the chap there was getting a bit panicky as he couldn't work out what had happened.  So my boss duly ran me over, with the bedstead small end, to try to resolve the problem and then head home from there by train via Basingstoke.

 

Now to the ghost in the machine - as anyone familiar with station accountancy will know even in the 1970s there were numerous ways a loss (or surplus) could occur even with a daily book-up let alone a weekly balance so it was initially a question of going through everything as a £20 error could simple be that, just a wrong figure.  So I went through the lot from checking the cash to blank season ticket issues and the latter was where the ghost emerged because Tisbury recorded all blank season ticket issues in a book.  But being a small station the pace of issues was pretty slows and someone long ago being economical with stationery the book had a printed cover headed 'L &SWR' and had been opened with its first entry in 1913 - which made it the oldest piece of stationery in continuing daily use which i saw in my entire railway career.

 

Incidentally there was no accountancy error - everything was absolutely correct and we were still £20 adrift so I moved on to the next stage - dismantling just about anything that could be dismantled, until I found the missing £20 note which had gone down the back of nest of drawers.  Then i went home, small end of bedstead duly accompanying me.

 

BTW Kevin will no doubt be interested (frightened??) to learn that a former colleague of mine had a session using a Thompson sub-machine gun on that BTP range at Waterloo   A place I never visited although I did once go to the theatre for a  look round as ours Ops Manager was heavily involved with t for many years.

[petethemole]

Was it always a single side post?

 

If you look closely the remnant of the inner end of the other arm is present behind the surviving one.

[PatB]

... the BTP rifle range, where the sergeant in charge taught me handgun target shooting during lunch breaks, using an impressively heavy thing that fired .303 ammunition (I sort of can't imagine this being allowed now!); 

 

 

 

BTW Kevin will no doubt be interested (frightened??) to learn that a former colleague of mine had a session using a Thompson sub-machine gun on that BTP range at Waterloo   A place I never visited although I did once go to the theatre for a  look round as ours Ops Manager was heavily involved with t for many years.

 

Clearly fare dodgers and trespassers were once made of sterner stuff .

[Nearholmer]

Even at the time, I could never quite work out what the purpose of the rifle range really was. There were barely any armed police officers in London, let alone the BTP specifically, in the 1970s, and it seemed to be some sort of leftover from the war (home guard?), used mainly for "hobby shooting", which I assume the police were happy to support in case the need ever arose to suddenly increase the number of armed officers. IIIRC there was a similar range on LT propert at Baker Street.

 

K

[The Stationmaster]

Even at the time, I could never quite work out what the purpose of the rifle range really was. There were barely any armed police officers in London, let alone the BTP specifically, in the 1970s, and it seemed to be some sort of leftover from the war (home guard?), used mainly for "hobby shooting", which I assume the police were happy to support in case the need ever arose to suddenly increase the number of armed officers. IIIRC there was a similar range on LT propert at Baker Street.

 

K

 

I was given to understand that it was actually a 'hobby' range for some sort of gun club (but that was third hand from a former Nine Elms Fireman who by then was our Traincrew Manager).  Old Southern staff magazines might give a clue?

[railsquid]

Not Railway related but 52 years ago I took up my first job on leaving school. This was with Kealy & Tonge ltd. at their head office in Mitre Square in the City of London. This was in an old mid Victorian building taking up one side of the square. The building had many of its Victorian features including high desks with stools around the walls together with partitioned off desk spaces in the centre of a large office which took up much of the ground floor. In the cupboards under the high desks were ledgers and account books dating from the 1880's and 90's. Needless to say that building is no longer and even its replacement is being demolished to be replaced by a larger structure that the square itself will disappear beneath.

 

Not railway-related either but for a while in the early 2000s I worked in an office building in Berlin which had been converted from former workshops; there was a goods elevator which occasionally came in handy for transporting heavy post-industrial items (aka servers) to upper storeys, and I was delighted to note it bore a sign indicating it was constructed in 1899. I suspect the motor may have been replaced once or twice since then, but overall it was an original piece of equipment operated by means of a hefty lever ("up", "stop", "down"), and the stopping part was left to your own judgment.

[Martino]

Back in 1966 I joined the Great Western Society and eventually insinuated my way into the crew at the goods shed at Taplow station.

One Saturday afternoon a bunch of us crawled under the Brunel structure and found great 'snakes' of old wagon labels impaled on long wires. These were brought up to the daylight and all seemed to date from pre grouping days - 1800’s through to WW1.

 

I think the vast majority were handed over to the GWS, but a good dozen still remain with me!

 

Interesting to think that when we discovered them we thought they were old, being around 60 odd years old. That was 50 years ago!

[billbedford]

Even at the time, I could never quite work out what the purpose of the rifle range really was. There were barely any armed police officers in London, let alone the BTP specifically, in the 1970s, and it seemed to be some sort of leftover from the war (home guard?), used mainly for "hobby shooting", which I assume the police were happy to support in case the need ever arose to suddenly increase the number of armed officers. 

 

 

I think it would have been older than that. Shooting was one of the sporting pastimes that railway companies seemed to have encouraged pre-WW1, at least for the officer class.

[jamie92208]

I think it would have been older than that. Shooting was one of the sporting pastimes that railway companies seemed to have encouraged pre-WW1, at least for the officer class.

 

Also prior to the early 70's there was very little formal firearms training for police officers as most officers were ex forces or National Service and were presumed to know how to handle firearms. A lot of places had such ranges, including Telephone exchanges.  As Mike has said it was a hobby that was encouraged.

 

Jamie