Trog

If the Autocar contained a tank engine could they not just go to a preservation society and have them run a Pannier or a Jinty up and down a few times while they record it? Please note that this suggestion might not be quite 100% serious.

Probably because it was easy to change them, traffic say heading south from the LMS would flow into yards like Willesden and Cricklewood be sorted into trains for the Southern and Great Western Railways and trip worked across London to the equivalent SR and GWR yards. These trains would then be broken up and sorted into separate trains destined for the different SR and GWR routes radiating from London. As to do this you would have to take the brake van off the train and its only cargo was of the self loading/unloading kind it was as easy to put your own van on the train as it was to keep the original. So avoiding administrative hassle, tools and lamps going missing in foreign parts and possibly a certain lack of parts for LMS designed vans in places like Cornwall.

There must surely be at least one circumstance or place where this to happened even if it was very obscure and happened rarely, as it is against the law for there not to be at least one exception to every rule on the railway.

Or could get mysteriously mislabelled, half a dozen wagons of serviceable sleepers off a weekend job I was on at Brinklow, somehow getting labelled for the Cambridge Sidings at Bletchley where I was relaying a siding instead of to Northampton CMD. Quite good of me to save both the depot staff the trouble of off and reloading them, and the accountants the trouble of crediting them to one job and charging another. Being a QS with the job of keeping the BR Civil Engineers Accounts in order must have been a dreadful task with materials being begged, borrowed and stolen left right and centre. I remember one job about a year after privatisation, a group of QS's came to our office to review the jobs we had done in the past year, on most we had made a couple of percent profit, a few losses of similar magnitude, some really good jobs where we had made four or five percent profit. There was one job of mine however that stuck out a bit as we had made a 400% profit. I was called in to explain how I had managed this, so I explained how the job had been planned as week-end work with a block, isolation and tamper over ten or twelve weekends of work by a graduate wizz-kid. But that the Head Relaying Supervisor and myself had sent a gang in mid-week between trains, and tamped the job once at the end. One of the QS's then asked if we were sure that the job was done as we did not seem to have ordered any materials, I confirmed that the job was completed and had been handed back into the care of the maintainers. When further questioning revealed that we had 'acquired' the 250 odd new softwood sleepers required from the maintainers, without benefit of paperwork they seemed to suddenly feel that perhaps did not want to know about how we had done this job after all. NEXT PLEASE.

Is there anything elf and saferty like?

Something similar that could be unpopular in built up areas near a line with a reasonably heavy amount of traffic such as the south end of the WCML was shooting a speed. If a speed restriction was put on in an emergency a man would be stationed at the warning board and tasked with putting a det on the line for every train to draw the drivers attention to the speed board until it could be advertised in the drivers notices. This used up a lot of dets and it was usual practice to use up all the dets over or near their expiry date for this. Two dets being used together to ensure against a dud. So many dets were used for this that it was normal to take them to site in old fertiliser sacks (not sure where we stole the sacks from). I remember awaiting a late possession one cold night at a site where a speed was being shot, with all of us gathered around a roaring fire using sacks of detonators as chairs.

There might even be human elements slightly skewing the figures while most staff having common user wagons on hand would load them randomly on a first come first filled basis. Porter Tidy Mind having two common user wagons on hand might tend to load the GWR one to Penzance, and the ex Highland one to Scotland, while I would grin to myself while doing the opposite. This might tend to make trains very slightly heavier on local and outlandishly foreign wagons than pure probability might suggest. You might also find a branch somewhere say deep in the GWR where they had a local and repetitive bulky traffic, and found a particular common user LMS wagon had doors a little wider or was a couple of inches longer than the normal which made a tricky loading job easier at both ends. I would not be at all surprised if such a wagon became unofficially allocated to that traffic, and purely by chance kept getting back loaded with goods to the station nearest to the bulky goods factory. Because any fool can make a job difficult. Slightly different but showing the mind set I think I remember reading of an officer in charge of troop trains during WW2 manipulating the use of carriage stock for leave trains for the Royal Navy because he thought it would be amusing to see SR coaching stock at Thurso. I myself once put a rare wagon I wanted to keep (a Tench) that I knew the Head Relaying Supervisor also wanted into a siding and then lifted the track in front of it. It being released for my use a few days later once I relaid the track in its new configuration. Remember that what used to go on, on the railway is not just stranger than you imagined, but was probably stranger than you can imagine.

Did they not have their own Chip Monk, or would that have been down to the head Fryer?

Is the Royal Albert bridge over the Tamar at Saltash not technically a suspension bridge? Only IKB being IKB he suspended his bridge decks from arches rather than the more usual cables.

Is the point rail not the piece of rail from which the crossing nose is machined, and that with its mate the splice rail makes up the V of rails in the middle of the common crossing between the wing rails. Traditionally the point rail side of the V would be that carrying the most traffic. The movable bits between the heel and toe of the lead are the switch rails which mate up with the stock rails onto which the slide chairs/baseplates and spacer block are mounted when the switch is closed.

Myself and a traction inspector got the job organising the erection the first road type signs on the Midland Line London to Bedford. Basically deciding where and what to mount them on. Chris Green who was in charge of Network South East at the time liked the idea and asked for the signs to be rolled out over all of NSE. The signs became instantly unobtainable as demand out striped supply. I was now tasked with doing the signs on the WCML and kept getting called down to see the Area Civil Engineer as Chris Green was asking about our lack of progress. As I could do without this, the traction inspector and myself went out and put a suitable left over sign up for the restriction on the UF at the north end of Berkhamstead Station so Chris Green could see it while waiting for his train each morning. That one sign kept him happy that progress was being made for the month it took to start getting the signs for the WCML. But for years afterword the observant would have noticed that it was of a slightly different design to all the other signs.

Presumably the West London Line was a trunk route. As am sure I was told that there used to be loading dock called the elephant dock as it was used to load/unload circus elephants at the south end of Kensington Olympia station.

Standard sleeper spacing for years has been between 24 and 30 sleepers per 60'-0" length. Although I believe the Underground may sometimes use less sleepers, as I seem to remember reading the results of tests comparing the BR EF28 and LT's first design of concrete sleepers, that included use at 20 sleepers to the length. From what I recall the LT sleepers were so good that they were replaced during their first week of service. On BR (Before Railtrack) 24 sleepers to the length was traditional with wooden and concrete sleepered bullhead and early flat bottom track. Later the sleeper spacing was upped to 26, with 28 being used on busy lines like the WCML fasts. By the early 2000's this had increased to 28 sleepers in 60'-0" on the slows and 30 sleepers on the fasts. Closer sleeper spacing is also sometimes specified on tight curves to help increase track weight and lateral resistance.

Water is incompressible if they were full of water would hitting them not be like running into a brickwall? Seem to remember hearing of something years ago hitting the hydraulic buffers in the Rugby South Bay, and some poor passerby being drenched in museum grade oil when one of the pipes burst.

After the grouping or perhaps from just before probably the standard S1/AS1, S2, L1 and M1 chairs, plus their S&C equivalents. Before that probably their own in house designs, of which I know nothing.

The wagon turntable nearest the Up Slow in the yard perhaps? Looked at some old maps on line, in the oldest there are a run of wagon turntables across the sidings and another in line with them in the centre siding. A more recent map perhaps more of an age with the photo just shows those in the sidings, but I suppose that could still require a lock to stop a turning wagon fouling the Up Slow.

It is a small photo and not that sharp, I can see that some of the levers have several numbers on them but can not read them.

That might make the Signalman my Great Grandfather Joseph Horne, born in 1869 so he could have been working into the mid 1930's. I think he worked several boxes locally as my Grandmother once told me that she used to come home from school to the railway cottages outside the station and make sandwiches. She would then walk across Boxmoor (A large open field mainly notable as being the site of the grave of the last Highwayman to be hung at the scene of his crime. Look for a white stone near to one of the groups of trees if passing on a train.) to Bourne End box where her father was often working, hand him his sandwiches, then sit on the box steps eating hers. I did ask her what she had seen but all I got back was a vague recollection of black engines, as she had not taken much notice. Strangely the site of Bourne End box was a site I visited not that long before I retired, and the H&S thought that the danger from the trains that I could see as far way as Hemel Station was great enough that I had to request a line blockage to walk under the adjacent road bridge, and I was not even burdened down with two rounds of sandwiches.

Gents / Ladies of the opposite sex, Attached is a family photo given me by my cousin, I think that it is of the interior of Boxmoor Signal box that once stood at the south end of the platforms at what is now Hemel Hempstead station. As part of my family once worked on the station there and in the nearby signal boxes, and I think that I can see the gable end of the still existent goods shed through the windows. Does anyone have any idea of the date of the photo or even know who the men pictured might be?

I always thought that Mermaid wagons with their manual tipping mechanism were more character forming. There were little anchors you could attach to the rails before tipping them too, not that we ever used them.

Don't worry about it most engineers carry such a disbelief field about them that no such phenomena can survive contact. It is a bit like the comment in Peter Pan that a Fairy dies if a child says that they do not believe in them, with Engineers we just have to walk into the same area to exterminate everything. Spiritual 2-4-5 T are us.

If you did want to bomb a railway following the flashes as the shoes ran on and off the con rail ramps by coming up from behind a train so you were flying along the line would probably increase your chances of a hit by quite a bit compared to trying to hit the line as you flew across it. If however the risk is very low that might explain why such boards are only on one line. Someone on the LMSR got enthusiastic about it and his SR equivalent was not impressed with the idea. Although I suppose night attacks may have got more likely the further north the target was, as the German escort fighters had only a limited range. So the daytime risk to the German bomber crews increased almost exponentially as they went further north, and their escorts left them to be replaced by squadrons of more northerly based Spitfires.

Even if the boards were later kept as an energy saving measure, would they have needed to be moved or replaced when the new fangled 501 stock was introduced? I suspect that they have been obsolete for a long while as they are quite robust yet only a few are left. Was cab riding on the DC years ago with a young driver being instructed by a more senior man. The young driver seemed to rather like the fact that the senior driver had not even noticed the signs before let alone knowing what they were for.

As the signs would have gone out of use in 1945 would an 1939 or early 1940's LMSR publication perhaps be a better bet?

Ballast from different quarries came in different colours, particularly when dusty. Nuneaton ballast had a pink hue, Loughborough was brown, that place in North Wales I can not be bothered to look up the spelling of tended to be cleaner more flaky and of a blueish colour. We also sometimes got ballast with a greenish dust attached but I am not sure where that came from, possibly Meldon.