Time Travelling

We were in Nailsea near Bristol for relations’ birthday celebrations. The three cousins’ combined ages added up to nearly two hundred years, but the venue, the beautifully restored Nailsea tithe barn, goes much further back.

Backwell and Nailsea station lies between those two settlements and was opened by the Bristol and Exeter Railway in 1841, by which time the tithe barn was already 360 years old. As stations go, it’s a bit of a disappointment. The road connecting town and the village threads its way beneath a narrow bridge at this point - but it no doubt provided more than enough room for a horse and cart at the time. High above, the GWR crosses the valley on a substantial embankment.

Up the steps, the original station buildings survived until the 1970s to be replaced by cheap and flimsy-looking “bus shelters”. The authorities obviously did not have the same foresight as those who have kept a watchful eye on the tithe barn. All is not lost. The elder birthday boy is also a local councillor. I have a hunch that he may include the upgrading of the station facilities and improved road/rail links on his “to do” list. Tempus may well continue to fugit, but it is always reassuring to know that there are concerned members of the community on the look out to preserve the best of the past and at the same time cater properly for the future. Thanks for the tea party and happy birthday all round.  

Playing Through the Lines

I love the way the pundits try to make football a more complicated game than it really is by regularly inventing new phrases to describe stuff that all good teams have always done as a matter of course. Last year it was “pressing” that was dropped into every possible conversation, and this year its “playing through the lines”, which we were already referring to as a through ball, fifty years ago.

Computer graphics now allow all sorts of measurements of patterns and performance, including those lines that connect encircled back-four players “look at the straight line across the back - playing as a unit”. We used to refer to it as pushing up together to catch opponents offside. I don’t think that anything much has really changed, in spite of the technology now used to illustrate it. It’s a simple game, however you want to dress it up. Some of this over-analysis enabled by fancy graphics belongs in Pseud’s Corner.

Playing through the lines was what we were doing at the engine sheds. They were dangerous places, though we never took unnecessary extra risks. We could, however, have easily been undone by a momentary lack of concentration, such was the buzz that those places offered, so you had to concentrate on what you were doing. We approached them with the happy confidence of youth. Now, concentration and confidence are things that makes a difference - in football, too!     

Full of Surprises

The Contemporary Art Gallery in Nottingham overlooks the tell-tale blue brick retaining walls of the former Great Central Railway, at the point that expresses bound for London Marylebone burst out of the tunnel mouth and straight onto the junction at Weekday Cross.

The Contemporary, itself, likes to surprise - even to shock - with its rapid turn-over of modern art. Some of it is bewildering and some amusing. Sometimes it is challenging and quite upsetting, and occasionally it seems banal beyond belief. It is always different - though not necessarily refreshingly so.

I’m always up for giving it a go, and I find little gems that take my attention from time to time, as was the case last week within an exhibition entitled Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus. This time, it was in the form of three London Underground posters designed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s.  

The Manchester Club Trains

The club trains were initially provided by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and the London North Western Railway to carry businessmen commuters to their office jobs and back - to Blackpool, Southport, Windermere and Llandudno. They each provided a special saloon carriage that offered comfort and privacy for those paying a supplement to join the club. They continued to operate under the London Midland and Scottish Railway between the wars, but were discontinued during World War Two and not resurrected after it.

However, the fast, early trains and their return workings would have still carried on into British Railways days and its not difficult to imagine that the club mentality [especially for those who were “in the know”] lived on amongst many of the commuters whose lengthy daily journeys were the cost of working in the big city and living by the sea, much as it does in many other parts of the country today.

John Harrison’s atmospheric watercolour painting of the North Wales Club Train shows the southbound evening train heading back to North Wales through Warrington Bank Quay behind a Black Five. She would only be on the west coast main line for a short time before taking the Chester line south of the town.

Warrington BQ was one of the first locations we visited with our school railway society, probably in late 1960. We walked up the approach road from Warrington Central to see 46223 Princess Alice at the head of an express for the north. The club train would have already passed through without stopping by then and we would have left for home and our tea before she returned.  

Port at War - Liverpool 1939-1945

I recently rediscovered this book, left to me by my Dad. It was written in 1946 by TJ Buckley on behalf of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. It includes photographs showing what the Luftwaffe did to Liverpool during the blitz, but concentrates on the endeavours made to keep the port operational in response to aggression.

The three railway related contributions are of USA locomotives being unloaded in Birkenhead docks and of British and foreign troops at Riverside station, which I regretfully gave little attention to prior to its closure in 1971.

Gedling Country Park

The local borough council have transformed the old Gedling colliery site into an excellent country park. In the café is a wall display that points out some of the links with the past, including this reference to Colwick marshalling yards on the Trent floodplain at the bottom of the hill.

Better known to us as Colwick sheds, the photo shows Class A3 No. 60048 Doncaster, and although Pacifics received attention there it was with freight engines that is was perhaps more usually associated.

   

And Marie’s the Name

Just one of the things that the internet is useful for is gradually putting me right over the words of songs that I’ve got wrong for decades. I suppose we really only had the song itself to go on, unless you were going to go out and buy sheet music, which would have never crossed my mind. It’s just too embarrassing for words to recount what I have sung to myself since 1961 instead of “And Marie’s the Name” - a phrase which was even more obvious, as I see it now as the bracketed prefix to the title of “His Latest Flame”.

I suppose it reflects the fact that I wasn’t too bothered about lyrics at all in the old days, which was itself a topic of some heated discussions, I seem to remember. It was the tune that mattered most - and the exhilaration of that combination of notes that filled your consciousness along with the mood that the tune brought along in its wake.

The internet brings so much information so quickly that its revolutionised the potential for railway enthusiasm as well. www.realtimetrains.co.uk provides spotters with the information they need on the platform via their phones. www.prorail.co.uk keeps tabs on the railwayana scene and now www.railadvent.co.uk keeps me posted - by the minute almost, though I don’t remember asking it to, about every occurrence out there on the network, or so it seems. My life has changed in so many ways, or more accurately, my life has changed in oh so many ways.