bécasse

I don't know what the book says but from other sources 555 and 638 would appear to be the pair. 638 is a definite as I have seen a photo of it in (very tatty) malachite livery but I think that it spent much of its time in that livery working on the Longmoor Military Railway. Ah I see from Wickham Green that 600 was the other one mentioned as well as 638. However 555 was definitely repainted "green" in the early war years, apparently after reinstatement, and I would have anticipated that that would mean malachite (but was apparently Maunsell Green with Bulleid-style lettering).

The map shows "principal" services even though it is headed "Inter-City". Although it is dated May 1982, just after the sectors were formed, it was prepared earlier and almost certainly before the new Sector Directors got their act together. The only InterCity Sector London-based service south of the Thames was the non-stop Gatwick Express inaugurated in 1984. InterCity services didn't receive government subsidies whereas London & South East (later Network South East) and Provincial (later Regional Railways) did, and retaining the Gatwick Express within the LSE sector would have reduced that sector's overall subsidy and therefore the total corporate subsidy.

And then there were the 319/0s that included First Class for one part journey (Brighton-Blackfriars) each Monday-Friday morning with the [1] window stickers being removed after the train departed from London Bridge!

The Talyllyn at one time allowed "picnic" parties to hire a wagon on which they could return to Towyn by gravity, by all accounts they often had to push the wagon in the vicinity of Rhydyronen to overcome the short stretch of adverse grade there. I came down by gravity once from Tunnel Mess to Tan y Bwlch in (IIRC) an ex-WD bogie wagon with a couple of dozen other deviationists, simply because the wagon was available*, an interesting ride in the dark.. Normally deviationists went up and down on foot along with a pw trolley for carrying rucksacks and the like, the trolley being pushed up and carefully restrained down. * It had probably come up attached to a train as far as Ddaullt carrying materials (bags of cement probably) and was then pushed on to Tunnel Mess to be unloaded.

At least with York Road you won't need to put many people on the platform!

There is a useful introduction to the great variety of different loading gauges that the big four inherited from pre-grouping companies here.

In the days when London Victoria-Gatwick trains ran hourly all night, the relevant STN clearly stated that trains that had already started their journey before 03.00 B.S.T. would run in B.S.T. timings throughout, and that there would be an additional departure at (say) 02.25 G.M.T. and that that and any later trains would run in G.M.T. timings. So, in effect, both London Victoria and Gatwick saw two "02.25" departures an hour apart during the early hours. Presumably something similar happens today.

It was discovered (the hard way) that the wheelbase of an 03 diesel shunter wasn't long enough to cope with track-circuit geometry in certain parts of the country. That led to them being semi-permanently coupled to fitted "runners" when working in the areas concerned, Conflat As being typical of the runners employed. The vacuum hoses were coupled up to give a marginal improvement to braking capability too.

Winchester City on the London-Southampton main line had a minuscule shed to house its pilot loco. The usual pilot loco (over many decades) was a B4 0-4-0T; they made excellent pilot locos, sure footed and able to shift almost anything, but running any distance light engine they pitched fore and aft so doing so was avoided if at all possible, hence presumably the provision of the shed.

Trying to establish definitive information for a different class I found it impossible to establish whether painted numbers were applied in white or straw during the "black" era although small lettering was definitely white, the livery application instructions seem to be strangely silent on the subject and it is quite possible that some works used white and others straw. However the question is somewhat academic as white quickly turns to straw when rubbed over regularly with an oily cloth as would have happened to the painted numbers if no other part of the paintwork. Incidentally I started an exercise to catalogue the as-built variations for each individual loco in the whole 04 class, but eventually had to admit defeat, not least because of a relative dearth of early photos of the prototypes. I can say, though, that Monty's article in MRJ 3 barely scratches the surface on the subject of in-class variations.

Tar (as a by-product) from Ryde Gas Works (rail connected on the upside between St Johns Road and Esplanade) I suspect. Probably used in highway maintenance.

With a long enough pick-up goods train, it would be possible to use the part or all of train (but not the brake van which would remain on the running line within the "loop" formed by the two yard connections) to pass through the goods shed to drop off or pick up wagons in either of the two neck sidings (depending on which way the goods was heading - so it would shunt in both directions) without the loco itself passing through the goods shed. That would work on a model but it wouldn't replicate how the prototype would have been worked. There are a handful of ingenious modellers out there who could probably make something akin to the magnet-based working model road vehicle systems work but even they would be somewhat pushed to replicate a man/men using pinchbars.

I don't think that it is known precisely when the bridge was rebuilt, 1900 is a possibility and it certainly had been done by 1908. There are a number of (distant) views of the bridge in Peter Paye's excellent book on the railway published by Lightmoor Press.

Shunting wagons into and out of the goods shed would be a very simple task for the pick-up goods in either direction, further movement of wagons, into and out of the necks for example, would be done using pinchbars. Locomotives wouldn't have been allowed to actually enter the goods shed from either direction.

It is a typical Arthur Pain bridge constructed as cheaply as possible from timber. The road was the main road from London and Ipswich to Lowestoft and Yarmouth, later the A12, so the bridge had to be reconstructed later in the life of the Southwold Railway to cope with increasing traffic levels (and weight). The reconstructed bridge was eventually demolished in the 1960s(?). There were some standard gauge Arthur Pain timber bridges on the Swindon-Highworth branch of the GWR, drawings of which appear in the Wild Swan book on the branch (out of print but readily available secondhand) and these would provide a reasonable basis for a model of the SR bridge at Blythburgh. There are other photos of the original SR bridge around but not necessarily on the internet.

More than a little mud although all the individuals accused were acquitted. Plässers had followed a long term policy of cultivating railway civil engineers with visits to their works in Austria with lavish hospitality provided including, apparently, prostitutes. Engineers who rose through the railway hierarchy were offered more substantial "support" in cash terms. The "bribes" weren't to persuade the railway to buy from the firm, who were, anyway, widely considered the best suppliers of such equipment, but to buy more machines than were strictly needed to do the job. I presume that the UK wasn't the only country so targeted. I took a special interest in what went on. For some reason now forgotten I had to phone a civil engineer at Paddington to give him some information (probably connected with Fishguard boat trains) and in the course of my call I could hear a sudden commotion at the other end - my respondent said that I wouldn't believe it but a posse of BTP had just walked into his office, waived a search warrant and proceeded to empty the contents of everyone's desk drawers into black plastic sacks. BR introduced a whole range of new "soft" financial controls in the aftermath, and IIRC several senior people left the organisation even though they escaped prison. I often used to look round at the ever increasing number of road traffic signals in the UK and wonder whether Siemens was playing the same game.

A lovely tale, but I suspect that that is exactly what it was, possibly even circulated to discourage wealthy passengers from even thinking about the possibility. The London-Derby driver would be readily identifiable and in the event of such a complaint being made would soon find himself an ex-driver. Company discipline tended to be harsh in days of yore - and in such cases quite rightly so.

Six decades ago the Southern Region London termini had a strict protocol laying down who got the newspapers left behind in incoming trains - starting with the "govn'r".

No

And for the record the sign is 2'-0" wide and 1'-2" high.

Sorry, Chris, a senior moment! They were installed at the approach to some rural stopping places which were devoid of signals. I presume that the criterion for their installation was that there were no other distinctive markers to aid drivers in determining their precise location. The yellow marker lights were always installed at the approach to termini without other signalling.

I suspect that that is undoubtedly true of the pre-grouping era when many companies continued to use worked distants in situations where describing them as an over-provision would be putting it politely (the approach to most stations on a single line, whether passing loop or terminus, for example). However, the work of the various standardisation committees after the Great War, together with the urgent need to eliminate even minor unnecessary cost as the recession of the late 1920s began to bite, seems to have caused the other "big three" to adopt fixed distants in a big way. On the Southern not only were many previously worked distants fixed but in places where fixed signalling could be eliminated altogether (with the box retained as a GF to work the points) yellow marker lights replaced distant signals. (White marker lights were used to mark the approach to intermediate stopping places devoid of pointwork.)

I believe that the various "standardisation" committees started work during the period of government control that lasted from 1914 to the actual grouping, so changes implemented in 1925 and 1926 could well be a result of their work. Certainly the change of colour (to yellow) for distant signals* started to be implemented about then even though most of the other signalling changes weren't initiated before 1929 or later. The change doesn't even have had to have come from a recommendation, the bigger companies were all well represented and knew what was being discussed and could simply have decided for themselves as a result of those discussions that it was a sensible move to make (unless you were the GWR who, of course, knew better). * The GNR, and possibly one or two other companies, had started to use yellow for distant signals just before the Great War. Distant signal arms had been notched since c1876, seemingly universally, prior to that they had been identical to stop signal arms, only route knowledge telling drivers which was which.

Given the conundrum over worked distants that could never have been cleared, I wonder if either or both of the station boxes could switch out?

1) However, with the exception of the inner London area of the SED, electrification of the suburban lines was accompanied by relatively little resignalling (which, of course, became a big, big problem on the Central in the late-1930s, only overcome pro tem by everyday - or at least peak hour - use of the Sykes key). 2) Given that the LMSR and LNER seem to have firmed up on the LHD position at the same time, I suppose it is possible that it was one of the agreed standardisation issues, the reality of signalling "standardisation" was obvious for all to see (even if it was everything but standard) but agreeing to go forward on LHD would have been less obvious, and thus less commented on, even though it fits naturally with the signalling changes. The fact that the GWR didn't adopt LHD might just add weight to this theory.