Love Her

When the death of Scott Walker was announced this week, "Love Her" filled my head again, just as it had done in 1965 and for some considerable time afterwards. It is not their best-known hit but it remains my favourite. It is tender, sad and haunting and it suited my circumstances just fine that summer.

It filled my head because that was what it was intended to do. It was a Phil Spector inspired, “Wall of Sound” number, like the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’”, and it just had to be played loud. Written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, it peaked at number 20 in the singles chart in June 1965. I only ever bought a handful of singles before moving on to LPs, but that one got played as much as The Animals’ “Don’t Bring Me Down” and Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over”.

You may have noticed a certain melancholy setting in here that’s not entirely coincidental. However, if it wasn’t going too well in that department, there was always football and, of course, trains - by bike on Sunday mornings to Birkenhead sheds. I could put my emotions on hold for an hour, or so, in this sulphurous fog. Railways softened the blow from disappointment elsewhere.

I picked up the Walker Brothers CD yesterday to play in the car. I opened the case, inserted the disc and pressed play. Christmas Carols!!! My grandson of two years has been kindly tidying away my CDs again. I’ll find it soon. Then I’ll thank Scott Walker once more for his rich and tuneful voice, his choice of material and his timely intervention during my youth.

The Spice of Life

Turning into Newark showground for a Talisman railwayana auction, I wondered what else was going on at the venue today? Midlands Wood Working and Power Tools were giving demonstrations. Perhaps Garden Furniture Sales could have sold the results of the power tools’ endeavours. The Photo Club was on hand to snap the freshly constructed chairs and tables.

There was also a Flyball Event. I had to look it up. It’s a sport for dogs, so now I know. www.flyball.org.uk will gladly fill in the gaps. There quite often seems to be some background yelping going on at Newark Showground.

The pick of the runners at the auction was an LMS framed poster board with shaded gilt lettering, containing a glazed double royal poster. Bryan de Grineau’s Travel LMS Speed Comfort of 1934 is a recognisable image and a classic poster. An original LMS label on the back shows that it had been delivered for display at Chester station.

The image might benefit from some a small amount of delicate restorative work. The woodwork on the rear of the frame needs a little attention, as well, but I’m not sure that Midlands Wood Working and Power Tools should necessarily be the first port of call.

Nicked

I won’t be taking my bike on the train for a bit. In fact, I won’t be taking it anywhere because it’s been nicked. I left it on a grass verge while I was litter-picking. When I returned to the spot it had disappeared. No-one had passed me on foot. A few proper cyclists in proper cyclists’ gear came past but they all had their own bikes. Someone in a van or a lorry must have stopped and picked it up.

Anyone driving along the road would also have seen me. There are no intermediate road junctions, so they would have passed me as well as my bike within, at most, a few hundred yards. I was in a high-viz vest, with a black bin liner and a picking stick. It would have been perfectly obvious who the bike belonged to. So, there you go. I appear to be between bikes.

Stop Go

The temporary traffic lights outside the village are not working again. This time they are on a bend so you can’t see to the other end of the restriction. I sit and wait. Nothing is coming the other way. I put the car in gear and edge forward. A car is suddenly in front of me. I slam on the brakes. I wait again. A car pulls up behind me. Oh heck, more pressure. I try again. Just as I decide to go, a red light appears. So, its just the green light that is out, then. The red light disappears and I make a dash for it. I look back at the other set of lights in my mirror. No lights are showing at all. Very temporary, temporary traffic lights and not fit for purpose.  

Rather than risk the roads again yesterday - to G&W Railwayana Auction at Pershore - I was home alone. This auction house has an advantage over other similar venues. It is available live via The Saleroom, the online auction site. I know that for most people, spending a day at a railwayana auction would be nowhere near the top of their list of potentially exciting days out. I would guess, therefore, that keeping up with the “action” online might be only marginally more attractive than watching paint dry. If it was Farrow and Ball that would obviously swing it in favour of fresh paint.

Undeterred, I settled in for the long haul. You can, of course, bid online as well as just watching. You could spend an awful lot of money by accident if you were hovering over the danger area with the cursor. A slip of the finger during the proceedings yesterday could have secured a locomotive nameplate for £18.6K, a manufacturer’s plate for a diesel locomotive at £6.6K, a platform vending machine for £1.3K or a poster of Bournemouth for £2.2K

You could probably buy yourself a complete set of temporary traffic lights in full working order for that sort of money. At least you would then be able to move around your immediate environment without any extra stress.

Something Missing

I’ve finally finished reading Simon Bradley’s wonderful journey through Britain’s railway history, The Railways - Nation, Network & People. Authoritative, it certainly is, as well as thoroughly entertaining and well-written. The summary sections at the end of each chapter, where true feelings show through to add to otherwise impressive objectivity, are especially appealing.

I have just one grumble. Railway art does not just take a back seat. It misses the train altogether. Turner get a mention and so does E. Hamilton Ellis, but even he is included for his work as a railway historian and not as an artist. Frith, Solomon, Bury and Forbes provide early illustrations. E. McKnight Kauffer’s work for the London Underground is highlighted. That’s it.

In the concluding section, entitled Enthusiasm, every other conceivable interest group is dealt with, including promotions by the railway companies and British Railways themselves - for example by naming locomotives and the use of poster advertising, the trainspotting phenomenon, literature - from Thomas the Tank Engine and Ian Allan to the multiplicity of railway magazine titles and academia, poetry, film, Peter Handford’s sound recordings of steam, measuring locomotive performance through train-timings, railway clubs, railway antiques and collecting railwayana, photography, railway modelling, the mushrooming of the heritage lines and its army of volunteers and the string of new-build steam locomotives being developed to replace defunct classes.

The Guild of Railway Artists does not get a mention. Perhaps more surprisingly, neither does the contribution made by any of its leading lights, past or present - no Cuneo, Breckon or Shepherd, indeed, no railway paintings of the post-war period, at all.

         

What a load of rubbish

Bins on the railway have changed over time with both security and recycling in mind. From concealed “catch-all” containers, we moved firstly to a “no bins at all, take it home with you” policy and then to separate landfill and recycling “see-through” suspended bags. It’s now quite evident when the wrong stuff is put in the wrong bin and that’s even before a “how soiled has potential recycling stuff got to be before it becomes landfill?” decision. At least the intentions are on the right track.

I’m lucky enough to live in a nice village. Its so nice that planners and developers are busy trying their best to make it into a town. Longland Lane is an “L”-shaped road with a straight stretch of about a mile, providing a picturesque entry point to the settlement from the south. At the dog-leg, after about half a mile from the village, the road crosses the site of a Roman temporary or marching camp. There is now evidence that the road connected directly to Hexgreave, north of Farnsfield, indicating that it has been in existence for at least 2,000 years. To celebrate the millennium, daffodils were planted along the grass verge on both sides of the road for some distance. We always come this way after dusk on the look-out for barn owls.

In the day-time, too, with the woods to the right, fields on both sides and the church steeple rising into view on the approach, it is a pretty sight - except for the litter. I have got so fed up with looking at the rubbish thrown from passing cars that I acquired a pick-up stick, and yesterday, for the first time, I went off with plastic bags and a high-viz vest and started to clear it up.

I quite enjoyed myself. It was breezy and bright and the skylarks were making the most of it. There used to be corn buntings here, too. You could hear their jangling song through the open car window in summer, but they have since moved on.

I picked up a lot of what you would expect to find, dominated by take-away food and drink containers, cigarette packets, foil, and sweet wrappings. I also came across two pairs of surgical gloves, a pair of trainers [one on each side of the road] and bits of plastic car bumper.

The big surprise for me was the amount of packaging for pain killers, both empty packets and the plastic push-out strips that the pills come in. I can see that after all that fast food you might need something for your tummy, but there must also have been a lot of people driving around with a headache. Maybe it was brought on by guilt, having heaved every superfluous item that they own out of the window to spoil an otherwise carefully tended rural landscape.

A room with a view

I read recently that Cardiff was one of only a few major cities not to get its own railway company hotel, when they were in vogue. By chance, we found ourselves last week at the Clayton with a grandstand view over the approach to Cardiff Central station that any railway hotel of the Victorian era would have been proud of.

A Grade II listed building, Cardiff Central station was rebuilt in the 1930s and is now undergoing further refurbishment, as the scaffolding testifies. Flanking the station approach road, now a pedestrianised area, are a series of mosaics by Rob Turner based on railway themes. They occupy four panels of the outside wall of the former Dragon’s Bar. The mosaics were commissioned by Network Rail to highlight Cardiff’s long association with the railways as part of the station’s regeneration programme.  

Where there's muck

The National Museum Cardiff has a splendid art gallery. This is largely due to its Victorian benefactors, the Davies sisters, Gwendoline and Margaret. They eventually inherited substantial amounts of disposable cash that had been accrued by their grandfather, David Davies, and they spent a proportion of it buying quality art work, which they left to the gallery.

David Davies was a Victorian railway pioneer. He built a succession of new routes throughout Wales, including the Vale of Clwyd Railway, the Oswestry and Newport Railway, the Newtown and Machynlleth Railway and the Pembroke and Tenby Railway, and he was responsible for the construction of Barry Docks.

Amongst the treasures on display in the gallery, is this 1902 painting by Claude Monet. Charing Cross Bridge is one of those bequeathed to the museum by Margaret Davies, in 1963. Monet was so attracted by the light conditions at this location that he painted it over thirty-five times. It is thought that industrial pollution made a significant contribution to the atmospheric conditions he found so appealing – especially so in winter. Monet obviously saw this as a bonus rather than a problem. The steam train crossing the bridge in this version would simply, therefore, be adding to the mix.

“I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello”

The British India Shipping Line was founded in 1856. It became part of Peninsula and Orient [P&O] in 1972. Merchant Navy Class No 35018 British India Line was built by the Southern Railway at Eastleigh in 1945. She was withdrawn in 1964 and sent to Woodham’s yard at Barry the following year. 35018 was rescued from the scrap line in 1980 and finally restored to steam at Carnforth in 2017.

When we trooped round Barry docks and walked past the rotting hulk of 35018 on the last day of 1967, the thought that she would haul us over Shap and Ais Gill more than fifty years later would have been the last thing on our minds.

Our more immediate concerns were more likely to have been:

Would we find a Wimpy bar easily on our way home by car, in order to purchase a cheese-burger lunch?

Would the foot and mouth outbreak mean detours because of road closures in the Welsh marches or would there just be intermittent layers of disinfected straw on the tarmac for car tyres to pass over?

Would Everton beat Wolves away on the following Saturday?

Would the Beatles still be number one with Hello Goodbye, on that tea-time’s Pick of the Pops with Alan Freeman on Radio 1?

Would we get home in good time to meet the girls for that evening’s New Year celebrations?

Lowdham - a local station for local people

The Midland Railway’s Nottingham to Lincoln line was engineered by George Stephenson and opened in 1846. Lowdham station is a Grade II listed building which passed into private ownership in 1990. Many original features remain and some have been restored since then.

The wooden, Midland Railway poster board, complete with header board, must be about 100 years old, though it looks as though it might have had some attention more recently. It appears to be double crown size [20x30 inches] rather than the more usual standard sized double royal, at 25x40 inches. As a means of communicating information to the travelling public, it provides a stark contrast to the modern Help Point post that has recently been erected on the platform, powered by sunlight.

Partially hidden behind modern fencing, the running-in board - announcing to passengers that they have arrived at Lowdham - has not been refurbished. Its frame has gradually decayed and dropped off, it would seem, but the British Railways [Eastern Region] dark blue background is still visible, though faded. It, too, has been superseded by the modern version of station signage alongside it.