Good viewing at Quorn and Woodhouse yesterday during the winter steam gala. Guest engines, the home fleet, including the 3-car DMU, the windcutter set and a freight train of closed wagons all contributed variety to the rapid-fire comings and goings. They certainly know how to put on a good show.
I drove to Burton-on-Trent station. I found it perched on top of a hump-back bridge. It looked like someone’s fairly substantial brick-built shed. I had seen online that there was a station car park, but where was it? It was not visible from the station. Limited parking either side of the hut appeared to be for staff only. There was just one space prominently marked out for a person in possession of a disabled sticker for their car. I wandered off past plenty of dowdy, closed-down former shops and tried to extricate myself from one-way streets and bus-only lanes in search of some on-street parking within comfortable walking distance of the station for someone with two bad knees and a bad back but no disabled sticker.
The train, a now ubiquitous Class 170 unit, was too busy for
comfort so I stood next to the door for the 11-minute journey on the 11.21 to
Tamworth, at a cost of £5.00 with a railcard. The lady opposite had the same
idea for keeping her distance. She commented on the sunshine, contrasting it
with the last two unremittingly heavy grey days that had preceded it – the
weather that had prompted Bill Bryson to once compare being in Britain to
living in a Tupperware box.
“I’m changing at the next stop”, she offered, adding, “I
avoid Birmingham at all costs”. I wondered what Birmingham might have done to
upset her, but am not tempted to ask. Maybe she just doesn’t like crowded,
narrow, sub-terranean platforms with an uncomfortably low roof, in which case I
think she had a point. Her distaste for Birmingham meant that she was
travelling from Burton to Northampton, via Tamworth and Rugby. I fought for a
moment with my mental map of the Midland railway network, before concluding
that that was probably a logical solution, and that perhaps Birmingham
shouldn’t even have been part of the equation in the first place.
I got off at the next stop, too, and made my way downstairs
to the down platform on the West Coast Main Line. I stood at the London end
with the sun on my back and decided it was warm enough to do without a hat and chose
vitamin D instead. There were three young spotters sharing the space with me. Directly
behind us all was the famous old patch, where spotters just like them had stood
and watched as we were now doing, some sixty years ago and probably many more. What
struck me most, apart from their undoubted enthusiasm, was their depth of
knowledge about the current system. I was marginalised to the fringes of the
conversation in no time. They are managing very well without me and I thought
I’d only embarrass myself if I got something wrong, so I just let them get on
with it and wandered off.
Tamworth station is awful, aesthetically. I was unable to
find any redeeming features. The platforms are narrow and you are only allowed
to walk on an even thinner strip on the landward side of the bold yellow line,
lest you are swept away to your doom by the turbulence caused by a fast train. The
buildings are in the form of a series of boxes - lifts, stairs, waiting rooms
and concourse. I went outside but could not find an elevated position of safety
to try to take a photo of its best side. It doesn’t have one. The main entrance
has a corrugated iron roof, pitched at a shallow angle, that makes it look like
a factory unit.
Pendolinos, some with very colourful paint schemes, whizzed by, north and south, and an elderly preserved Class 86 made its way from Lichfield to Rugby, between rail tours. Local services on the WCML were provided by London Northwestern Railway Class 350s, including No. 350253 heading south from Crewe. I had soon had enough of modern Tamworth. The train back to Burton was also sufficiently well used for me to feel obliged to stand next to the door again. I reached my car, parked between the bolted doors of the town hall and an imposing church, opposite. Two men were standing at the road side, one on each side of the corner, as I crossed. “What are you doing over there, Dave? He shouted. “Standing in the sun, keeping warm”, replied the man carrying one of those very flimsy looking blue plastic bags with not much in it. I got the impression that standing around and avoiding the shadows, or maybe mooching around Burton’s streets was something they were fairly used to doing. Eight degrees, a light breeze and bright sunshine in mid-January was not to be sniffed at, as I’d already discovered. As I finally dropped down into the shallow valley in which our village snugly sits, with no derelict factories or boarded up shops, I was reminded how lucky I am to live here. I can feed myself as I wish, don’t have to worry too much about increasing energy bills, and I’m still able to waltz around the country like this amusing myself, on a whim. When it clouded over later in the same afternoon, I wondered what Dave and his mate might be doing next, now that the sun had gone in.
I had been reminded how quickly railway landscapes can change on my recent return to Worksop. So, it was again today at Nottingham. What I had previously observed to be a modest stabling and refuelling point east of the station at Eastcroft has become a much more substantial affair with comparatively recent buildings for maintaining East Midlands Railway’s DMU fleet. Next door is another new development including further under-cover provision where Boden Rail now service Colas Rail Class 37, 56 and 70 locomotives.
Class 56 No. 56081 duly pulled up on time alongside platform 2 at Worksop this afternoon with a new Class 720 Aventra electric multiple unit, No. 720544, fresh from the Old Dolby test track and marked up for Greater Anglia.
The mid-morning temperature had surged from minus one to zero degrees Celsius by the time I left the house for Fiskerton station. Bright sunlight had given way to mist by Southwell and it was decidedly foggy another three miles further on into the Trent valley. When I had tried this trip on a sunny day earlier in the week, I had discovered that the road was closed off at both ends of the station car park while Severn Trent Water dug a big hole, so I went back home. What else could possibly go wrong this time? I found out later that the coal train from Immingham docks that I’d hoped to photograph was two hours late leaving the port, explaining its no-show at lunchtime in Newark.
I’d been meaning to go back to Worksop for ages. My 3-car
Class 170 unit arrived 6 minutes late at Whitwell station for the 12-minute
journey into town. Warm, air-conditioned and comfortable, it was carrying very
few passengers, which suited me fine. The 170s are a distinct improvement on what
went before on this line, even though this example of cascading downwards from
other routes, as new stock is added to the overall fleet, was looking rather
tired and worn as far as its upholstery and fitments were concerned, but at
least it looked and felt fairly clean.
I had actually postponed this trip many times during the
autumn. I’d been on the look-out on the very useful Real Time Trains website for
a freight train through Worksop at a reasonable time of the day that I could go
and photograph. To cut a long story short, where they were once plentiful, they
are now few and far between. When I was visiting Worksop station regularly - a
decade ago now - as well as frequent passenger trains to Nottingham, Sheffield
and Lincoln, there was the regular rumble of Class 66 hauled coal, limestone
and gypsum traffic and their returning empties. They really were quite a common
site, reminding me how much the energy market has changed again in such a short
time. Megawatt Valley, the name sometimes given to the series of coal-fired
power stations along the Trent, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, with
only two left at the time of this latest visit. West Burton will finish
production in 2022, followed by Ratcliffe-on-Soar two years later.
As we swung off the ex-Midland Railway’s metals to join the
former Great Central Railway route at Shireoaks South Junction, the recent
transformation of this area becomes apparent. Where there were once rows of graffitied
coal hoppers, there are now lines upon lines of withdrawn passenger stock and
in amongst them, Class 47 No. 47715 in Network South East livery, which is apparently
retained for train heating purposes, or perhaps more accurately for periodic
train airing. By the time we had joined the line for Sheffield at Shireoaks
East Junction, the impact that investment from Harry Needle Railroad Company is
having on the town and its landscape was perfectly clear. Sidings on both sides
of the line are packed with displaced stock, stored stock, brand new stock and
locomotives and passenger stock being maintained and repaired. New buildings
have been constructed and the place is a hive of activity. Some deliveries of
rolling stock to HNRC also come in by road. Their website also makes it abundantly
clear that this is a secure site, safe from unwelcome visitors, whatever their intentions.
I noticed the body shells, minus chassis, for Class 92 Nos. 92021/40 and 45 at
the Worksop station end of the site and also a Pacer unit and a number of Class
08 shunters.
Our train crossed over to platform 2, where it had two minutes left of its intended stopover time, before it was due to head out back to Nottingham, as the 15.39. I had time to take a picture of No. 170419 while the drivers changed shifts, having enjoyed the briefest of chats half-way along the platform. There was no time for me to revisit the cafĂ© or take a photo of the station frontage, as I’d planned to do.
Worksop station was opened in 1849 by the Sheffield and
Lincolnshire Junction Railway, itself part of the Manchester, Sheffield and
Lincolnshire Railway. This in turn became the Great Central Railway in time for
the station extensions and new buildings that were added in 1900. The pedestrian
bridge and the level crossing of Carlton Road at the platform edge, as well as
the Grade II listed Worksop East signalbox, all give the eastern end of the
station its distinctive character, along with the impressive station frontage and
side elevation behind platform one. It is built of local stone, with Dutch
influenced gable ends an added attraction. It has a rather splendid and
extensive frontage, which faces onto a spacious car park.
I took my seat in a deserted section of the front carriage. I had thought it wise to avoid the rush hour and so I enjoyed a further 9 minutes of solitude, staring out into the early dusk of a dismally dark and drizzly December afternoon. No worries, though, because I was back on track and I’d just got one in, as I’d hoped to, before the end of this second, very strange year.
On 23/5/70, the SVR ran its first official train as a newly revived heritage railway on the section between Bridgnorth and Hampton Loade. I don’t have exact dates for our first visit there but we must have called in very soon after the Light Railway Order had been granted. This meant that the first passenger carrying and revenue earning trains could then be operated. Trains on the day we visited were hauled by No. 43106 and No. 3205. The photos give the feel of an early open day or gala day, but I don’t remember if it was an inaugural event. It felt like you could walk wherever you wanted to as long as you did not get directly in the way of a moving train.
I took quite a lot of colour slides to mark the occasion.
Some will remember the lengthy scenario involved. You bought a 24 or 36
exposure reel of Kodachrome II film at the chemist. After use, you put it into the
pre-prepared envelope that had been enclosed with the initial purchase and sent
it off to a film processing laboratory, carefully marked with your own name and
address. If you had been careful winding the film onto and off the spool in the
camera, you might be rewarded with a free 37th card-mounted image in
the yellow plastic slide box, when it arrived through the letterbox a few days
later. This differed from the processing arrangements for black and white or
colour prints, and the latter were still much more expensive. For both these
options, completed films were also wound back from the spool and into the film
casing manually, but were then taken back to the chemist. Your prints were then
picked up from the shop after an interval of a few days to allow for the developing
time. I took my first slides in 1965, but I still alternated with b/w prints thereafter,
right through to the end of steam in 1968.
Our first SVR visit is on a colour slide film developed in July 1970. I had always thought previously that we had gone there in April of that year, though the SVR’s own website suggests it was likely to have been May onwards. The ex-GWR panier tank, spotless and in authentic livery but without a number plate, was Class 57xx No. 5786, acquired the year before by the Worcester Locomotive Society and shortly due to be on its way to Bulmer’s siding at Hereford.
...and thank you for taking a look at some of the now 750 blogs over the last 5 years and with over 50,000 visits made to the site. More photos from the SVR in 1970 up next.
