Michael Crofts

Hope this isn't off-topic but for those asking about mixed narrow and standard gauges in the UK there was a lot of such track in Woolwich Arsenal, the narrow gauge being of course 18".

Cheltenham Spa. Name is Alstone Carriage Sidings. Used to turnback service from/to London Paddington. Was also used by services from/to Newport, Cardiff & Maesteg but since Covid they seem to terminate at Gloucester - or am I behind the times with that?

Thanks for the answers. I agree the little (Ruston?) was probably in use, although I would have thought they would need something bigger when they were shunting Black 5s and so on. I nearly put in a bid for the Chivers loco, it was just so quirky, and I was a bit mad in those days.

I would like some help please, to identify two locos. I think I snapped them at Kings scrapyard near Norwich between 1967 and 1969. I didn't know what they were at the time and wasn't able to photograph any plates they might have had - I wasn't supposed to be wandering round, I just grabbed a moment when my escort was distracted.

My final post in this topic for the foreseeable future - I have uploaded my snapshots of the Aldeburgh branch to my Flickr account, including a set of snaps of the Richard Garrett battery electric loco. Album here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/119194913@N05/albums/72177720295447338

I was thinking about the question of who maintained the track at Leiston and decided to look for the signalbox diagram. I had the last one from Leiston 'box but lost it due to naivety and misplaced trust back in the late '70s. Anyway, I found this straight away on Flickr, and I think it shows the limits of BR ownership of the tracks at the time it was drawn... but I can't see a date. Image from Owen Stratford.

Here's my Telex railway-related reminiscence. In 1972 I bought six 2ft gauge steam locos from Empresa Carbonifera do Douro in northern Portugal, for import to the UK in partnership with Alan Keef. Several visits were required for this project. In those days telephone communication between Portugal and the rest of the world was inefficient, unreliable, and very expensive. The cost of making calls was such that it was a disaster to make a call and find the person you were calling was out of their office or on another line, and then the same thing happened in reverse. So Telex was used by everyone who did any international work. I spent quite a lot of time on borrowed Telex machines, using both punched tape and direct connections. Telex messages were often written like telegrams, for example using 'STOP' instead of a full stop. The expression 'EEEE' denoted a typo to be followed by a correction. In effect the telex worked like email does now except that there was no question of anyone having a machine on their desk. The machines were large, beautifully made, as solid as rocks, and often housed in "Telex rooms" with dedicated operators who would collect hand-written messages (or more often take dictation), send the message, then bring the printed reply back. It was a bit unusual for someone like me to be allowed to use a firm's machine but I found them fascinating and my shipping agents in Porto were very obliging. I also had a couple of friends in England who helped at that end. IIRC correctly one set up the connection using a dial instrument like an STD telephone and the machine would clatter into life and type a code when the machine-to-machine connection was made. I can't remember how charges were levied. I suspect there was a charge for the length of time one was connected, just like a telephone call, which encouraged the use of pre-prepared punched-tape messages and made "real time" conversations uneconomic, although during a period of crisis during the transaction I did use them in that way sometimes. Yes, they were very noisy. Here is a sample message from 49 years ago:

I grew up at Theberton and went to school in Leiston between 1958 and 1969, going over the GER and Works Railway crossings each day (I came off my Lambretta scooter on the GER crossing on an icy January morning in 1967). There wasn't just a connection between the works railways and the Great Eastern/British Railways lies. Within the station yard you'd have struggled to find any demarcation in the working arrangements because the Garrett locomotives operated over most of the track south of the platform road. To understand how Garrett's railways worked the starting point is that there were two distinct works railways, first the track from the Great Eastern station south (downhill) to the original Garrett works around which the town grew up, which became known as the Town Works, Old Works, or Bottom Works. This is the line which is being restored now. Later came the tracks around and into the New Works or Top Works on the south side of the station. When I lived there the names were Old Works and New Works. At that time Garretts were still very much in business and my Grammar School had an excellent metalwork shop, and metalwork master Mr. Molyneux, because it was expected that some of the pupils would become apprentices at Garretts. Sadly this was a folorn hope by the time my cohort passed through, and Garretts themselves were by then desperately clutching at straws to stay afloat. At one stage they tried washing machines, and then greenhouses. Very sad. Of the two 25 inch maps on the NLS site the 1903/4 edition is clearer and shows the layout before the New Works was built. The 1925 edition shows the New Works but the best online image of this is not on the NLS site, it's on the Leiston Works Railway site, linked here: http://lwr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Long-Shop-Leiston_0001-1.jpg None of the pictures on the LWR site show the actual connections between the works railways and the main line clearly. The image which Will Crompton linked shows the bottom level crossing, at the entrance to the old works, looking south. Anyone who does an online search will find Casserley's set but it is worth mentioning because it is without doubt the best set of pictures of the works railways available online. However it doesn't show the connection to the main line or any traffic, just light engine working, and I suspect Sirapite might have been put in steam just for the Casserley visit. By 1958, 2 years after these pictures were taken, the railway was not used very much. I only saw Sirapite in steam once. https://www.ipswich-lettering.co.uk/aldeburghbranch.html The next image is looking east and I think the connection to the Works railway is the line in the foreground. https://railphotoprints.uk/p770072476/hC528F1BD#hc528f1bd Here's the same view from further back (NB it's an ebay offer so may not be there if anyone digs into this thread in the future): https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Leiston-Railway-Station-Photo-Saxmundham-Aldeburgh-Great-Eastern-Railway-2-/252115099329 Here's a nice colourised view looking in that direction: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10158571246846871&set=p.10158571246846871&type=3 Looking from the other direction is this ebay offer: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/252873370007?hash=item3ae06d6997:g:UAAAAOSwvihY9HPm But better still is this one. It looks north west, from the level crossing of the line to the old works, and shows how that line entered the station yard. https://www.facebook.com/Leiston-Works-Railway-704647416303177/photos/pcb.3544988238935733/3544988098935747/ If anyone is modelling Leiston and has the patience to navigate facebook there are many more pictures on the Leiston Works Railway pages. In particular, look for the photographer Edward Lawrence. I knew the railway best when it was being worked by the Battery Electric loco (from which I was given the works plate and the hand-operated klaxon hooter when it was being scrapped). Sadly I can't put my hands on my photos at the moment. What I don't know is how the operation was managed. I suspect that the GER and then British Railways maintained all the tracks within Leiston station, with Garretts being responsible only for the line down to the Town Works and the sidings on their own land. The Garrett locomotives must have been licensed to run on the main line tracks.... or they just did it and nobody worried about it. Were they "plated" for main line use? I don't recollect seeing any such plate on the battery loco. I would like to know what the arrangements actually were. Here's a picture I bought years ago (it's also on the LWR site) showing Sirapite shunting on British Railways track (the line to the Town Works is the tiny bit visible in the bottom right hand corner):- Apologies if anyone thinks I have gone overboard with this.

Some photos to suggest how much coal might be left on the ground in the 1950s and '60s. My guess is that a lot would depend on the surface (whether it was loose or tarmac/concrete), and there would be no lumps left behind., but I suspect that where volumes were large and mechanical handling was used, front loaders for example, there would be more. I can imagine the men in the pictures of Hassocks picking up spillage quite carefully, but in the photo of Redbourn the foreground suggests a front loader has been used and it would be tad unusual to see the driver of a machine getting out of the cab to pick up spillage. Ian Nolan - Barcombe Station yard, 1960: Ian Nolan - same location 1960 Photos by Arthur Jenner, posted by Linda Chen - Hassocks, 1950s One of my favourite railway photos (but I'm glad this wasn't my work): Dan Quine - Llanfair Caereinion 1955 (pre-preservation) "Trains & Travel" of Flickr - Redbourn 1963

If anyone is interested, I have added some more dockside cranes to my Flickr albums. The collection of albums is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/119194913@N05/collections/72157715225807028/ The new additions are in the Prince William ( Plymouth) album and the Exeter quayside album. Edit: Royal William Yard, Plymouth

A trawl through Andy Kirkham's Flickr pages throws up gem after gem after gem... what a photographer! You often get the whole scene, and people, and all sorts of activities, not just close-ups of locos. Drump Lane near Redruth, April 17 1974 https://www.flickr.com/photos/52554553@N06/10419945123/in/photostream/ I've decided it's best to provide a link rather than embed the image.

Towyn 1975 Not sure who to credit

Brain's Tramway in the Forest of Dean would be a prototype for a narrow gauge railway hauling coal from a colliery to a transhipment point. I'm not going to give you online references because IMHO they are all plagiarism one way or another. The definitive source is an article by Ian Pope in "The New Regard" (Journal of the Forest of Dean Local History Society) for 2002, available for purchase as a download at a very modest cost, profusely illustrated, and with excellent maps. The railway was 2' 7 1/2" gauge and had 3 steam locomotives of two types, both of which are illustrated in the article (and there is an illustration in one of the Severn & Wye books). There were numerous narrow gauge plateways in South Wales and the Forest of Dean which carried coal, and famously the Little Eaton Gangway, but I guess that's not really what you are thinking of. Edit: I have remembered Firbeck Colliery. They had one of the 18" gauge Woolwich Arsenal locomotives, Albert Edward, and that can only have worked above ground. I would love to know exactly what the 18" gauge railway arrangements were at that colliery. Right now I don't have time to search the old maps.

More from Ipswich. The Ipswich Maritime Trust collection is magnificent.

Found this photo today. Pigeon baskets, about 30 years before your era, but I bet they hadn't changed much. Picture from the wonderful online book about the Hayling Island branch, here: 26-sd-the-hayling-island-branch-line-total-6 (1).pdf

I can think of examples where the track extended through an engine shed, but usually only as a short extension without leading to anything else. For example Aldeburgh but I've no idea what the extended track was used for or whether wagons were shunted through it. At Lydney Junction the Severn & Wye engine shed had access from both ends but that's not the same as shunting wagons through a shed. Winchester - see photo? Sorry, I didn't make a note where the image comes from. Probably an ebay item.

Ah, nostalgia (I was a guard at Cambridge in the late 1960s. My first job after school).

I've pinched that for my collection of modelling prototypes, filed under Permanent Way - Overgrown, ash ballast, soil Here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/n1vn0tbj245sdqn/AACv4GZWp5dV98pOkNmv1ZT5a?dl=0 Lots of other people's stuff there, so I probably shouldn't, but... If this is really bad behaviour someone tell me and I'll delete the link.

I came across a civil engineer who was working for one of the top 3 civil consultancies. They had been asked to do a pilot study of railway groundworks infrastructure including embankments, cuttings, and drainage, but not bridges or tunnels. This showed such dire results that the whole exercise was chopped. His personal off-the-record opinion was that the current incumbents were so frightened by what they were seeing that they decided to just cross their fingers and hope it would be the next generation who would have to deal with it. My acquaintance said one of the biggest issues they had identified was tree growth and the consequent damage the trees were doing to drainage and to embankment and cutting sides when they fall over and their root systems drag up a chunk of soil. This was about 8 years ago and casual observation tells me it's got worse since then. Two years ago when I went into the West Country in the summer I was appalled by the constant brushing of the train by foliage - the trees were that close! I'm not sure it's possible to recover back to the closely managed ground cover that was standard until the end of steam. Once trees are above about 30cm girth it's really hard to get rid of them. If you cut them down all you are really doing is coppicing and they will come back. If you try and dig the roots out you disturb the soil so much that it loses its structure. If you grind the roots out you leave voids. A huge part of the network is in the same state. There have been conifers growing between the tracks in Durham station for the last couple of years - it doesn't seem to be anyone's job to get rid of them and they just shrug off the weedkilling.

Done!

if i may join too your lordship, ive got some photos which were on this laptop which was given to me after my Grandfather passed away, the only railway place ii can't identify is this of a large miniature set up, taken in May 2015. i have many more places to find but theyre not railway I put a link to your post on the Facebook Miniature Railways Appreciation page and Richard Pearson got it within minutes - Stockholes Farm Miniature Railway. I've never been there so couldn't pin it down myself. 7 1/4" gauge.

A couple of shots of a bigger crane this time. Oil dock, St. Sampsons, Guernsey, taken last year. I was focussing on the vessel and the harbour, not the crane. Sorry about that.

At first glance they look similar and the Ancorton model would look fine to anyone except an engineer. Of course the Ancorton model is of a timber-built crane whereas the Barbican example is cast iron and steel. I am not aware of any timber-built railway yard or dockside cranes which survived after about 1900 - but perhaps someone knows of examples. There were certainly plenty of timber-built cranes inside goods sheds and warehouses right up to the end of wagon load freight. I remember the one at Monmouth Troy was there right up until the station was redeveloped for housing. So far as the engineering is concerned, warning: pedantry follows! The biggest engineering difference between the Barbican and Ancorton examples is that on the Barbican crane the winch near the base has reduction gears to a spool or drum, which winds a cable. That cable passes round the large wheel or pulley with curved spokes, the shaft or axle of which has another spool with a chain, and it's that chain which takes the load. The arrangement gives a large amount of leverage. You can see what I mean in the photo set, here: flickr.com/photos/119194913@N05/sets/72157716633746071/ On the Ancorton model there seems to be a single cable which passes round the large upper wheel, so that wheel provides no leverage at all, and it's not clear why such a large wheel would be needed. Even under stress a cable can run over a smaller pulley. The more I look at the Ancorton model the more I see things which an engineer would not like. First and most obvious, the large top wheel or pulley is not in line with the small pulley at the end of the jib. I'd bet money there is no prototype for that. It's dangerous. And the large wheel is mounted on the jib, not the post. That would never be seen in reality because it massively increases the stress on the joint between post and jib. The compression strut on the Ancorton model is simply faced onto the jib and post, presumably with bolts to hold the strut in place (not shown on the model), but bolts alone simply wouldn't work, in the absence of metal fixings the strut would have to be scarfed (inset) into the jib and post to prevent the compression forces moving it out on the jib and down on the post. Cutting the scarfing joints would weaken both jib and post. In reality for any timber-built crane in the post mediaeval period a metal joint would be provided at each end of the strut, like this one on the set of sheer legs preserved at Portland, but obviously adapted to the square-cut scantling of the Ancorton example. Also, on the Ancorton model the strut terminates above the winch instead of below it at the base of the post. The stresses imposed on the post by the Ancorton arrangement would be significantly greater than if the strut went to the base. I suppose there might be a prototype for that but I can't remember ever seeing such an arrangement. As I said, the Ancorton model would look OK to anyone except an engineer.

Does Hornby's fixed investment spend go on tooling only, or are they building up their own in-house manufacturing capability in their own premises?

I know the original post was about big dockside cranes, but I like little ones, so here's one I photographed last week at Commercial Wharf, Barbican, Plymouth. My photo. Link to more photos underneath. flickr.com/photos/119194913@N05/sets/72157716633746071/