Tom Burnham

Been there, done that...

I suppose the bit that sticks out on to the platform had the levers for the passing loop points and signals. Surprising it continued to be called a halt - perhaps in part because there were no goods facilities.

There's this 1959 photo by Roger Joanes on Flickr -

Hesperus was a favourite name for engines on Colonel Stephens's railways. As a rude person once said, a good name for a wreck.

Saw Copper Wort at the Tonbridge exhibition last Saturday so it certainly gets around. Well worth seeing if it's in your area.

As an aside, one of Malcolm Burr's autobiographical books (he was the son of Arthur Burr, the dodgy financier behind the Kent coalfield and the East Kent Light Railway, trained as a geologist at the Imperial School of Mines, was a world expert on insects and a linguist and translator) is titled "Slouch Hat" because when he was in command of a rather scratch construction unit in Salonika in the Great War he had official permission to wear one instead of the approved officer's cap.

The GE would surely have had some incoming fruit traffic to the jam factory at Histon (even if the aim was to use locally grown fruit where possible), so other companies' fruit vans might then have been available for return loads, although it would have taken a certain amount of organisation.

Hmm, lots of things I didn't investigate at the time! I wonder whether the line might have been rehabilitated during WW2, either for agricultural or military purposes?

When I took the photo of the end of the Tramway (also on a bike ride by the way) there didn't seem to be much sign of recent activity. I have a vague impression of once reading something about fertiliser manufacture based on coprolite deposits.

This should be one of the key advantages of trains and why I think it's odd that rail ticketing has been and is being made more like air travel with having to book for a specific time. If you are heavily penalised for getting a different train from the one you're booked on, it significantly reduces the effective speed, as you'll need to arrive at the station much earlier than you otherwise might. I guess that will increase the turnover of retail units at the station anyway!

Was his company the one that eventually merged into Fives Lille Cail (even later Fives-Cail Babcock)?

Ouch! That's quite a well maintained PO coal wagon, by the way.

I believe there was a Canon Victor L Whitechurch short story attempting to carry out a dastardly act of sabotage in the interval between the pilot engine and the Royal train. It was of course foiled by the hero of the story.

As it happens I was reading an article about the connection between the Met and the GE at Liverpool Street just yesterday (in a 2021 London Railway Record). The conclusion was that the connection was laid in but never properly signalled or regularly used. With regard to cattle traffic I suppose one consideration was that there were fairly strict regulations on how often cattle had to be inspected and/or watered during transit.

The South Eastern Railway had " roader sheds" on the platforms of some stations, rather like a large garden shed with a door in the end. I assume that a goods train could stop in the platform if there were only consignments in the roader van to be unloaded, without having to be shunted into a siding. The goods could be stored securely until collected or moved to the goods shed. Some were repurposed after that stopped happening and occasional examples could be seen at least until recently.

Hmm, that's an interesting report. I wonder if the train continued to run only in July and August? I suppose the idea was to provide a facility for business men (sorry!) whose families had taken a house at Bexhill for the summer. And of course to compete with the South Eastern. I don't think the Hastings Car Train ever had a Bexhill (West) portion. I'll have to see what the connection at Crowhurst Junction was like. An early Southern Railway decision was to focus express traffic to Bexhill on the Bexhill West branch with portions of Hastings trains via Tonbridge.

Apologies if someone has already pointed this out over the intervening years, but the bean-counter at Leysdown was Holman Fred Stephens, who counted beans very carefully indeed because he often ended up paying for them out of his own pocket. When the SE&CR took over ownership of the Sheppy Light (they'd always operated it) they spent quite a bit to bring it up closer to their idea of what a country branch should look like, although they never quite got there.

That's an uncanny resemblance! I wonder what the train is in the photo? You'd expect it to be a transfer goods from Cricklewood via the Tottenham & Hampstead line to one of the yards on the Lea Valley line, or perhaps through to the Docks, but it seems very uniform to be a general mixed goods. Possibly an export consignment to be loaded on one ship?

Wasn't there also an ex-L&YR "Pug" used on the siding from Littlebrook to the Dartford Tunnel site in the late 1930s?

And Fiennes had pre-WW2 and during the early war years been at March White moor yard (Assistant Yard Master) and in Cambridge control, so was very familiar with running goods trains between March and Temple Mills as fast as possible (especially when March Town were playing at home). In later years he'd probably have thought that Whitemoor was in the wrong place, but it was technically one of the most advanced in Europe in its day.

I believe that would have been fairly usual. I recall reading a minute of one of the SE&CR Managing Committee sub-committees that apportioned the value of the year's lineside hay harvest between the SER and Chatham & Dover companies.

Quite good to photograph, though, from the outside (not in Sussex I know) -

Used to hate those things when I had to use the East Grinstead line before it was electrified... (Puts on tin hat)

Although OVSB had been on the Great Northern before Grouping so wouldn't necessarily know about a short term trial on the North Eastern.

The original proposal for the York Newcastle electrification was to use a protected third rail (possibly at 1500V DC, cf the contemporary SE&C plans) with overhead collection only in stations and yards. There were some experiments with a section of third rail laid on the Scarborough line out of York and 4-4-4T with pick-up shoes to assess the mechanics of third rail collection at high speed. I wonder if the aim of the loco under discussion might have been to investigate the effect of conductor rail gaps on a short vehicle, rather than any intention to use it as serious motive power? Just an idle thought...