Rolleston in the Rain

 

Well OK, only light rain - just spitting, really. At Rolleston in time for a Plasser & Theurer tamping thingy from Leicester to York passing a 3-car Turbostar Class 170 in East Midlands Railway livery - presumably on a crew training run and unlikely to be heading for Glasgow Queen Street, as indicated - on its way back to Nottingham Eastcroft this morning. Persistent drizzle all the way home followed by a nice warm shower - hard core cycling with a mission.

A Tug and a Shed

This light engine movement from Toton to Immingham on Monday morning saw Class 60 No. 60020 The Willows ahead of Class 66 No. 66039. They are seen passing through Fiskerton on the Castle Line, twenty minutes behind time.

Sign of the Times on the SVR

No autumn gala and no Railart exhibition this year, either, but trains are running again on the SVR. We joined the Adventurer at Bridgnorth for a relaxing day back behind steam, and very welcome it was, too, after such a long period of largely self-imposed restraint. The SVR was very thorough in the arrangements it had made to reopen as safely as possible.

We were hauled by the Hawksworth tank No. 1501, introduced to the world in the same year as I was. This small class of locomotives was best known for removing empty stock from the platforms after the arrival of expresses at London Paddington.

The company of good friends, a lovely valley to travel through, a leisurely timetable to stick to, a Great Western panier tank up ahead to provide the beat and a bright and breezy September day to light up the way, all gave me a timely fix of positivity and optimism. There will be more of these days. In the meantime, we must continue to be cautious and patient, and to keep our nerve.

 

A bit of variety

 

Colas Rail Freight Class 56 No. 56096 was light engine on the Castle Line through Fiskerton station yesterday, on its way from Doncaster to Nottingham. At least, it offered a bit of variety to the normal diet.

 

The Jubilees

Jubs [not Jubes] were always welcome at the platform end. For a start, they were all namers and there were plenty of them to see. There were 186 of them, in fact, at the time of my summer 1962 combined volume. No. 45637 Windward Islands had been scrapped following the disaster at Harrow in 1952. No. 45609 Gilbert and Ellice Islands was withdrawn from service and scrapped in 1960, and No. 45616 Malta GC was cut up at Crewe works in 1961, as were No. 45619 Nigeria and No. 45630 Swaziland.

I got to see most of them, though 28 had eluded me by the time it had all finished. Four examples escaped for preservation, one of which is currently masquerading as No. 45562 Alberta, which was a massive stink as a relatively late survivor that always seemed to make an appearance wherever we went. No 45574 India was another Jub that followed us around a lot. Preston was great for Jubs, where the L&YR route to Blackpool crossed the WCML.

Here are some of John Dyer’s pictures of the Jubilee Class. Thanks are due to John once more for allowing me to use his archive in my blogs. No. 45577 was at Shrewsbury in 1964, No. 45600 Bermuda was at Manchester Exchange in 1962, No. 45608 Gibraltar was at Crewe in 1963, No. 45641 Sandwich at Derby in 1962 and No. 45697 Achilles at Chester in 1964.     

[I included No '600 to mark this 600th blog today - 600 for heaven's sake!]

Carriage prints that feature railway content

It might have been reasonable to expect that carriage prints - fixed above the seats and below the luggage racks in British Railways compartment coaches - would have featured views of trains with some regularity. However, most of the leading artists of the day who were commissioned to provide artwork for carriage prints seemed to have largely avoided views of the railway itself. As with the poster artists, they were mainly aiming to show off the natural landscape and cultural Britain at their best. The railway helped people make the connection, but was not going to spoil the view once they were there.

However, Hamilton Ellis produced twenty-four views that were very specifically of trains for the LMR Travel in…. series and some of the oldest of all railway pictures made up the LMS Travel on the Liverpool-Manchester Railway series, comprising of two prints by Isaac Shaw, each with two broadsides indicating possible arrangements for a variety of passenger and freight vehicles.

Other exceptions concentrated on bridges and viaducts, most notably the LMR railway architecture series of sixteen images provided by Claude Buckle and Kenneth Steele. Leonard Squirrel’s Stowmarket is the only other station building to form the main subject of a carriage print. A section of track makes it into the foreground of Lance Catermole’s River Dee at Cambus O’May, Aberdeenshire, though the artist did not wait long enough for a train to appear. Similarly, a nearby signal and signalbox are somewhat dwarfed by F Donald Blake’s Ben Nevis from Corpach, West Highlands. Kenneth Steele is the railway bridge specialist, with images of the Forth Bridge, King Edward Bridge at Newcastle, as well as Waterloo Bridge and Lambeth Bridge in London. S R Badmin is the viaduct expert, with Croxdale, Alnmouth [Northumberland], Berwick-on-Tweed and Welwyn all represented. 

Though railway bridges and viaducts appear fairly frequently, trains themselves are often not included, as in Holding’s Sunderland and F W Baldwin’s Beccles, amongst others. In some cases, like McDonald Patrick’s Tay Bridge, Jack Merriott’s Sandsend and Squirrel’s Colne Valley Viaduct, trains are included but observed from a distance, so that the type of motive power is not always easily discernible.

This leaves us with the very few carriage prints in which the train is a substantial part of the picture.  Cyril Barraud’s Class D49 locomotive, heading a train bound for Scarborough over the River Ouse at York in the LNER Original Etching Series, is closer to the artist, but is not the focal point of the picture. This leaves the work of just three carriage print artists, who have put the train at centre stage. John Greene shows an English Electric Type Four diesel at the head of a passenger train threading its way south along the West Coast Main Line in the Lune Valley and Reginald Lander depicts another modern image - this time of a diesel multiple unit - in the equally picturesque setting of the Lledr Valley, North Wales, though in both cases the train is very much part of the wider landscape.

Without doubt, though, the prize in this particular section of railway art goes to Richard Ward for his contributions to the Southern Region [B] Series, namely, Direct Electric Services, Golden Arrow, Atlantic Coast Express and perhaps his most easily recognisable and pleasing railway painting, Ocean Liner Express. The un-rebuilt West Country Pacific gingerly rounds the sharp curve as it exits Southampton docks bound for London Waterloo, sharing the frame with two equally impressive Cunard liners.