Wickham Green too

You may have seen bullhead rail on its side on the recent 'Train Truckers' series on't telly ....... used to be a standard means of loading rail vehicles for road transport before the likes of Alleley's invested in purpose-made trailers.

I think this limitation only applied to the sets which were actually built as sets - the 54' & 60' vehicles : everything else started out as 'loose' and had its own dynamo.

C'mon then - if you've got pictures of brake vans being pulled apart, I'm sure we'd all love to see them !

Just the sort of thing you get on driver training simulators : unexpected photographer lying on the track.

Perhaps those are rejects going back to Brighton, then .......... the train looks to be heading roughly south east and it ain't paddling across to France !

I'd question that 'from Brighton Works' as the sun's pretty high in the sky and somewhere behind the photographer - so it looks like the train's heading south-east-ish.

Removing condensing pipes MIGHT be easier than scraping off a BR numberplate !!?!

As always with a BR backdate, you'll have to carve off the smokebox number plates ( is the shed plate moulded or printed ? ) ....... not always easy to do neatly !

Possibly even from before the D& E prefixes were introduced : I've not seen a Platform 5 'Combo' this year - but 08.220 ex.D3290, ex.13290 was still listed last year !

Returning - sort of - to the original 1948 question, one of life's greatest mysteries must be the book "Modern Locomotives" by Brian Reed and 'First published in 1949.' ( Temple Press ) which includes a wonderful colour painting frontispiece of loco 66014 ( By permission on Locomotive Publishing Co.Ltd.) and a photo of loco 66110 ( uncredited ) : 'A Western Region King Class 4-6-0 on a West of England Express' and 'Suburban traffic out of Paddington is worked by 2-6-2T engines of this type' respectively. Yes, the painting's a painting and the photo is obviously doctored - as is the shot of 44767 on the same page - but the numbering system was well and truly settled by this time as illustrated by a ( genuine ) photo of 60030 "Golden Fleece" later in the book ..................... very odd !

Don't forget the railway(s) often bought road vehicles as chassis / cab and built the bodies themselves - so the 'recognised coachbuilder' might turn out to be Swindon Works !

This seems to have gone wrong with the recent electrodiesel rebuilds which has resulted in two* very different class 73/9 variants - one of which should, perhaps, have been 73/8 ??!? * arguably three

It was probably far easier to remove the whole train from Waterloo - to free the platform - then work the observation car back from Clapham to Nine Elms where there was a nice big 'table.

The full brake was a feature of the Bournemouth Belle rather than the Devon one. With the latter formed of a mix of Kitchen and Parlour cars, First and Third Class, Brake and non any re-formation would have caused mayhem with the seating plan ............ let's see what Julian Morel has to say in his book "Pullman! ( David &Charles ; 1983 ) : "Two trains of up to 12 cars, each train with an observation car, were allocated to the service which ran to Ilfracombe, with a Plymouth portion. The train divided at Exeter Central. ...The seating capacity of the Ilfracombe portion - excluding the observation car - was 208 of which 138 were thirds. That of the Plymouth portion was 124 of which 102 were third class." - then, referring specifically to the observation cars - "After each trip the cars had to be turned , at Ilfracombe and at Nine Elms, since they always had to be the right way round at the rear of the train." I think young Mr.Morel ( latterly Pullman Catering Manager ) has answered the OP's question.

Both constituents of the SECR were as bad - though on a smaller scale, of course ......... then, to add to the confusion, they added 459 ( the highest SER number ) to the Chatham locos, when the working union was formed, rather than, say, 460, 500 or a nice round 1000 !

The connections for - shall we say - 'operative' or through pipes would have been physically identical so they were totally compatible .... but the hose coupling itself and/or the adjacent fixed pipe ( where visible ) was normally painted differently : the actual colours changed over the years just to confuse matters. ( Then you get even more colour confusion with two-pipe brakes and pull-push air connections but they're outwith the scope of this thread.)

One word of warning - well several, actually - the rear buffers on Wainwright tank locos generally had larger heads than the front though, of course, nobody ever photographed that end and you'll have to figure out what little you can see from the archetypal front three-quarters !

I was never hauled by 89.001 ......... but I was pushed by it from Leeds to Kings Cross : 17.35 on 29/3/97.

They'd have avoided turning the whole train as it would have played havoc with seat reservations.

.... as most didn't last long enough to receive their TOPS-allocated numbers - apart from some of the Woodhead Electrics.

The 10000 series was reserved for diesel locos and 20000 for electrics - and these were seen as the way forward ............ the question has to be why the WR were allowed to persist with their heavy numberplates which could have been melted down to pay for renumbering - without that anomaly a more logical scheme could have been implemented ( LMS loco retaining their numbers as the largest.

Photo 4 : I don't think there were any trio sets incorporating a hundred-seat third - though I've not checked Gould. Photo 5 : Your 'Ironclad' is probably one of the six flush-sided Corridor Thirds .... more like a proto-Thanet !

I thought you were going to say the bridge was torn off ......... which could have been somewhat ambiguous !

The only time I've come across an Insixfish - or was it a couple - was in Scotland ..... grounded in a farmyard somewhere within trucking distance of Inverurie like so much other rolling stock.

Apart from the Anglo-Scottish routes there were a number of regular through trains between different-braked railways : Brighton-Cardiff and the 'Sunny South Express' come to mind. Then railway amalgamations threw up mis-matches : the GER and NER became part of a generally vac-braked LNER and the former retained air braked services for many years. the Caledonian as part of the LMS has already been mentioned as has the Isle of Wight on the largely vac-braked Southern. The SR itself comprised the air-braked Brighton sandwiched between vacuum LSWR and SECR - thought the latter had barely rid itself of the Westinghouse legacy from the LCDR !