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By IAN SIXSMITH
By Allan C Baker
A secondary line wandering through rolling countryside bordered by brooding hills; obscure to modern minds but a substantial double track railway nonetheless, curving and twisting through the pleasant, rural, Alyn and Wheeler valleys, linking the Welsh county towns of Flintshire and Denbighshire with North West England. The Denbigh line was very good, they said, ‘but too good to last.’ Like so many, it certainly was.
A complex story that begins before the Battle of Trafalgar; the canals, industries, railways, political and commercial struggles and rivalries of this little known but fascinating corner of a little known but fascinating county, Staffordshire.
At last, at last, The Book of the Coronation Pacifics, one of the first in the series and unavailable for so long, is to be reprinted. It won t be around for long so get your stock in straight away. But there s more. Collectors of this wonderful series now have the pleasure of TWO paperback Photographic Accompaniments a blue one and a red one packed with further photographs and information. High quality paper and reproduction at the give-away price of just £6.99 for each Accompaniment. These two paperback Accompaniments are the latest in a fast growing series of pictorials, packed with further information and pictures. Each one covers every single member of the class. All the photographs are different, too. They follow on the highly successful introduction of the Photographic Accompaniment to the Book of the Britannia Pacifics last year. More are planned, to become almost a de facto occasional magazine, heavily trailed and advertised in the Irwell Press magazines British Railways Illustrated and Railway Bylines.
Picture This
Due to a manufacturing error, the final 300 copies of this book have a slight fault on the spine. A small amount of bubbleing occurs under the lamination which is almost undetectable. However, Irwell Press apologises for this error but should customers still like to purchase a copy we are discounting the published price by £1.
Little that is wholly new remains to be said concerning any major class of British steam locomotive, though of course there is still a lot to celebrate and illustrate. A similar point was made in the two preceding books of this series The Book of the BR Standards and The Book of the Coronation Pacifics. There are always a few nuggets to be had, and one or two particularly glistening ones have been introduced to the story of the Royal Scots.
Since the first one was published in 1997 The ‘Book Of’ series of locomotive studies has developed into something of a library devoted to more and more of the principal BR steam classes. A number of titles have sold out over and over, and have been reprinted or are in the process of being reprinted.
Two into One Does Go It was George Hughes, CME of the new LMS, that got development work under way, or at least it was he who first began to think about, a Garratt design for the LMS. This was at the end of 1923, according to E.S. Cox; a mogul and a Pacific had been proposed, together with a Garratt for heavy freight work. The notion of the articulated Garratt, it should be recalled, was the stuff of newness at this time, the design being barely more than a decade old. It is always said of course that the reasoning behind the Garratts was to supersede double headed coal trains on the Midland main line between Toton and Brent and this was indeed the case, though it seems clear that wider horizons were envisaged, or at least contemplated at one stage. The mighty Garratts would replace a pair of 3Fs/4Fs and on every one of the countless coal trains that so characterised the Midland main line and a crew (or rather their wages) would be saved. While it is true that Garratts were indeed able to accomplish this (in spades; their power was restricted only by the loading gauge and the firing rate) and while the Toton-Brent workings may well have been at the forefront of his thinking, the fact that the first stirrings in the evolution of an LMS Garratt should take place at Horwich, and as part of a standard range, rather suggests that Hughes had a wider sphere of operation in mind, at least initially. Not that this matters; within a year or so the strange dynamics of dynasty change and its unexpected consequences meant the Garratt solution was indeed applied to a strictly Midland problem. There were practical reasons too, why it was the Midland main line and no other; it has to be borne in mind (shades of the Mikados on the GN main line) that the operation of long freights was not determined solely by the capacity of the locomotive. Short block sections and refuge sidings hamper and inhibit such workings but the Midland between Toton and Brent was more suited than most, where extensive use was made of the permissive block. Two of the four lines were designated goods and under permissive block trains could back up one behind the other if necessary. There are many references to this sort of working in The Book of the 9F 2-10-0s (Irwell Press 2006). The 9Fs of course, were the successors to the Garratts on this work.
The thirty years of the Kirtley era, 1844-73, are a long time ago now. It was a period of rapid change and one of considerable complexity for the historian. Many of the earlier engines did not have long lives, but those built in the last ten years, with a few exceptions, were very long-lived. Their sturdy construction and ready adaptability to accept later and larger boilers resulted in examples of both passenger and goods engines still in use after the Second World War. In this way the more senior members of our enthusiast fraternity have a ready recollection of these ancient engines and form a link with those early days long gone. Indeed, nobody was Anybody in the late 1940s if they had not been to Bournville to see the last of the double frame 0-6-0s gathered there. No.22834 was the ultimate icon. With Johnson pattern boiler, the cab displaying a brass class 1 power class numeral and that amazing horseshoe tank layout of its tender, it was, even in those days, held in some awe as a relic of the distant past. The fact that the Ian Allan ABC said it was class 2 (which was true) and that its tender plate bore the date 1867 (the book said ‘introduced 1868’) only increased the fascination. Such little items formed the stimulus for research ‘to sort it out’, ultimately to result in this volume.
The history of Carlisle as a major railway centre has been well documented over the years, the seven different railway companies that served the city prior to the 1923 Grouping leaving a legacy that lasted well into the 1960s. This book, although not intended to give an historical account of the subject, provides a photographic record from 1951 until the demise of steam operations in the city on 31st December 1967. It also includes a look at two of the lines with summits most associated with Carlisle, Shap and Ais Gill, both of which saw steam activities end on the same date.
Crewe. What thoughts this name conjures up in the enthusiast mind: ‘Oh Mr Porter what can I do, I wanted to go to Birmingham and they took me on to Crewe’. Alan Baker’s associations with this railway Mecca go back well into childhood days. He lived in Newcastle-under-Lyme and his Dad used to take him there on Saturday mornings, by train of course, from his local station at Etruria, for a morning’s ‘train spotting’. He bought him his first Ian Allan ABC at the bookstall on the old Platform 5, the 1955 56 Winter Edition for the London Midland Region, and he has it still. The life and times of a railwayman at Crewe explained and illustrated in exquisite detail.
Compiled from detailed notes taken since 1941, this slice of Glasgow life is the perfect companion to the popular Illustrated History of Glasgow s Railways, by the same authors. Very much personal observations, this is not just a close-up view of Glasgow trains but a look at life in the city from wartime to the end of steam in 1967.
Open up the layers of this chocolate box and you might even have George Lazonby leaving his Milk Tray for you. Not only chocolates on offer but the Bournville railway story and a fascinating tale it is too.
