jazzer

I am out of touch with such things these days but where did the frame and petrol tank come from.? From this angle it looks like girder forks on the front Surely not but could we have a pic of them? A very strange looking bike.

Sorry I meant the sheds closed in June ‘62

Hi Clive, Just to clarify, as far as I know , the whole system was supposed to have the power on from November 1961, but I’ve done some checking to confirm my memory. According to the Shed Bash UK website , Plaistow and Tilbury sheds were both finally closed on the 18th June 1962. There were 33 locos recorded at Plaistow on 13th May 1962 . Apparently the AM2’s suffered traction motor insulation problems between November 61 and June 1962 , so putting 2and 2 together it might well have been the case that steam continued over the Tilbury loop until June 1963 because there were not enough AM 2’s to run a full service, although that is just my guess. However once the AM2’s came on the full service they were limited to 8coaches on the Tilbury loop because of platform lengths, so we can deduce from that , that 11 and 13 coach trains you refer to wouldn’t be running through Tilbury so the 7 Coach set you are intending to build remains a fairly typical LTSR train. I’m not quite sure how they would have finished up in Sheffield though.

Hi Clive, As I grew up mid way between the North Woolwich branch and the LTSR I look forward to seeing the finished article when the coaches are eventually (!) finished. Of course, back then I never took much notice of coaches , as the locos were far more interesting, but even from a young age I’ve always had the habit of counting the number of coaches, particularly going up to London with my mother on the District Line which of course runs alongside the LTS as far as West Ham. Quite often an LTS train would overtake ours on that stretch, so perhaps I can offer some comments on train lengths. I am not sure about fixed sets but trains were generally shorter in the winter than summer. Southend was always a popular destination for day trippers in summer but once all the amusements and fairground attractions closed for the winter traffic dropped considerably. All the trains seemed to be in sets of 5, 7, 11 or 13, usually 5 or 7 (mostly 7 ) in winter and 11 or 13 ( mostly 11 ) in summer . I can’t speak for coach types , but if you are building a 7 coach set then, irrespective of it being all your platforms would take, I would say it is probably the most typical off- peak train length you would find on the LTSR.. Hope this helps. BTW , I might have this wrong but was the Tilbury loop switched on several months , after the direct line , in 1962. I have a clear memory of visiting my grandmother in hospital next the the line and train spotting out of the window ,seeing a standard 4 halted at a signal while the driver phoned the signalman . I am sure that was 1962.

I don’t know if I was looking at the same part of the film as you but in the middle where the station master refers to the various jobs that need to be carried out he says that they have to be done in “ less than ten minutes” and the train in question at that part of the film is actually KX - Newcastle which expresses generally seemed to spend about 4- 5 minutes at York but I think he is talking about all trains not especially the one in shot at the time. You have to remember also that the film makers and scriptwriters are not anoraks like us and probably don’t scrutinise the timetables in too much detail. the other thing is that the Public Timetables and Working Time Tables often had different times, so for example I think the public timetable gave the ACE a two minute stop at Salisbury but the WTT gave five minutes and even that was often not enough to take water, shovel coal forward and detach a coach, so it very difficult to be precise about any of this. Back to Gilbert’s point: I have an ER timetable for Summer 1960 and I can’t find the Catterick camp train in it so either it had disappeared by that date or for some reason didn’t appear in the public timetable. So I guess the answer is we’ll probably never really know. I have to say though I find Gilbert’s thread fascinating as there are so many trains that were about to disappear from the scene completely that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about .

I have found pictures on rail-online of 47227 and 47203 on transfer freights at London Bridge and Holborn Viaduct respectively so there are your prototype examples ! I wish you well with the saw and file. You are a braver man than me ! Look forward to photos of the result

There are several pictures from various angles on www.rail-online. I think about 50 or 60 ran with condensers at one point so you should be able to find what you want. www.rail-online.co.uk/p361037592/h4dbcb056#h4dbcb056

The Drummer in that clip, Viola Smith, only died a week or two back, aged 107.

The Audley End and Buntingford branches sometimes had the brake vehicle marshalled in the middle , and sometimes at the end of a three coach set ( more often two though at Audley end).. I am pretty sure they were both second class only , or at least some services were. North Woolwich seemed to marshal anything anywhere , but sometimes had a four coach quadart set with obviously the brake at one end but there is also a photo at aNorth Woolwich at the end of Steam of a four coach set with on brake at the country end and one in the middle. I rode on the Branch at the end of Steam with the guard travelling next to the engine . Not sure what was at the other end of the train.

We are all about 13 /14 inside. If we weren’t we wouldn’t be playing with toy trains...... Yep life is great. Trains enable us to keep our sanity while the rest of the world go barmy

I absolutely feel for you Clive.Losing a dog is like losing one of the family. Beautiful looking dog too.

It seems the Southern were quite happy to take them according to Clive Groome’s book based on his diary as a Nine Elms driver . He says they were more suited to the regular stops of the Waterloo-Basingstoke/Southampton Semi -fasts than a Bulleid Pacific. However the Class 5s on the Southern were taking over jobs from the old S15’s which is a bit different to taking over a V2 job!

That slightly reminds me of the story of the cement mixer lorry driver that suspected his wife was having an affair , so one morning he drove off as usual then parked his lorry a few streets away and walked back . When he got back he saw a Rolls Royce parked outside his house, so he went and got his lorry and dumped half a ton of cement over the Rolls, then hid in the bushes across the road and waited. Twenty minutes later the front door opened and a man came out, passionately kissed his wife then got on his bike and pedalled off

Look, you may scoff but I'll have you know that GER and its territory was as much at the cutting edge of modern music as its superbly laid track took railway engineering to a new level. Heres one artiste whose ground breaking music typifies the GER's go ahead up to the minute service :- https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+the+singng+postman&docid=608019055489713685&mid=2AF63299BA11D29221422AF63299BA11D2922142&view=detail&FORM=VIRE

“Here is a station announcement . We regret to advise that that the 17.54 train to York has been cancelled as we have no driver available ............regrettably he fell asleep after his tea........ yes we know you want get home from work......I want to get home for dinner myself myself.........you think I like this sitting here all day with no heating in this run down dump of a station, making these stupid announcements and getting abuse because some lazy slob has too many cream buns and dozes off in his armchair ? ......Do you think he cares about you lot stuck here in the cold and rain......and It’s not my fault the BR management won’t put a roof on the station either...the drivers alright jack snoozing in his armchair........Anyway it’s six o clock now and I’m off...... you lot will have to get a bus home...no more trains to York till tomorrow......we would like to wish you a safe journey home and thank for choosing to travel by British Railways and we hope to see you all again soon”,

I have gone through the pictures several times over in the last few weeks and they still look just great. Creating a model railway is one thing but creating the right atmosphere around it is a totally different ballgame . For such a small layout you have done a terrific job in representing the run down South London feel of the era. Great layout.

Apparently the blue paint on the old Caledonian used to fade terribly. The story got around that the drivers were responsible for the cost of painting their own engines so being canny Scots they tended to thin it down quite a lot. Can’t find where I read that. It might have been The Lighted Flame by Norman McKillop. Not dead sure if it was true though. . The old Caledonian locos still looked great compared to the soul-leckys though. .

I stand to be corrected but I don’t think there were double headers out of Newquay either , but there is photograph record of big Prairies helping the heavier trains out of Kingwear.

Kingswear for me. I would love to have seen it in the late 195O’s , early sixties. Where else in the country could you see an island platform terminus at the end of a single track branch with class 7 and class 8 locos arriving and leaving with named trains, or a big 2-6-2 tank piloting a class 5 4-6-0 ? Or if the driver was brave enough, a Hall having negotiated those steep banks with 13 on. Trains arriving from all over the country, in chocolate and cream, maroon , blood and custard, and if you were lucky, green in connections with River Dart Excursions. Add to that the jetty with coal being unloaded by rail crane and taken up to Torquay power station behind any thing from a pannier to a Hall. I agree it’s lost a lot of its atmosphere now though. I think in part it’s due to it being a commercial tourist attraction rather than a preserved line as such. It doesn’t seem to exude enthusiasm in the way that the Bluebell, for example does. I was down there at the end of September, and went on it one day, basically to get out of the rain but it wasn’t a lot of fun. It still gets my vote on account of its heyday when trains still had character, before the days of mass car ownership.

Pretty much the story of my life except the said part never turns up until after I’ve given it up as permanently lost and bought another one.

Little Bytham on 3rd July 1938 !

A hard poll this time. Unlike the GE mainline, almost every station on the GN mainline would be interesting. I will go for Welwyn Garden City, in the pre diesel era. It must have been great in those days, with N2s terminating their inner suburban journeys there, L1’s and B1s on the semis fasts and Cambridge expresses, the Big Pacific’s and V2’s whizzing through , and apart from the mass of through Freights there was a decent sized goods yard that also served the Shredded Wheat factory , so I guess there would have been a J50 or something similar shunting to see when nothing else was going on. It also has a great memory for me. In my first year of Grammar school, aged about 12 an old boy of the school who had done rather well in the Insurance world wanted to take 6 members of the school Railway Society on an expenses paid train spotting trip. So to qualify for this day out we had to give a 5 minute talk and the best 6 got on the trip but we were given random topics drawn from a hat. My topic was Great Western broad gauge which nobody else knew much about , but as I had just been reading about it in my Trains Illustrated Annual I sounded very erudite compared with what everyone else knew so I was the youngest one to get on the trip . So off we went I think to Welwyn North and walked back over the hills ( all in school uniform) watching the trains between the tunnels as we went. He then took us to lunch at the first and probably the only posh restaurant I’ve ever been in ( the sort of place that’s so posh they give you soup before the meal ! ) then it was back to his house where he had this fantastic O gauge layout running round the loft, with all Bassett-Lowke and hand built locos including a special Britannia named “ Lloyd’s “ as he worked in Lloyd’s of London . All absolutely mind blowing for me having come from my 6x4 ft roundy roundy on the living room floor. It was all part of a magical world which sadly doesn’t exist anymore.

I don’t get slightly annoyed when people talk about “train stations “ instead of railway stations I get almost moved to violence! Audley End railway station for me as well, partly for the same reason I gave for Saffron Walden in the earlier competition, and partly because there is a great restaurant in Belleair Bluffs near Clearwater , Florida , called Cody’s Roadhouse that is decorated with all kinds of American memorabilia, and hanging up among all these number plates, and old petrol pumps and things is an old station sign in Eastern Region dark blue directing people to the trains . I am quite probably the only person that’s ever been in there that recognises it as coming from Audley End. I pointed it out the the Mrs but for some reason she was singularly unimpressed

Pretty much my thoughts, except leaving Liverpool St came to mind. I remember a report In Trains Illustrated of a rush hour departure from LiverpoolSt with an N7 the Bethnal Green line , a diesel hauled express on the fast line , and Gidea Park stopper on the slow line, all going up Bethnal Green Bank side by side but with the N7 outpacing the other two ! No doubt about it Finsbury Square absolutely oozes atmosphere and that was a great video.

OK I’ll go for Saffron Walden as well for the same reasons. Plus on the roundy -roundy layout of my early teenage years I often spent the day running the real life Audley End - Bartlow timetable in which most trains only went as far as Saffron Walden then back again to Audley End , the service being operated by a Triang Jinty and two LMS coaches.