Railway Blogger is a light-hearted series of articles representing the highlights from a decade of blogs first posted on this site. It contains over 200 blogs and is well illustrated with both colour and monochrome images. There are 219 pages and it retails at £10.00.
Its some time since we had last been in France. Staying on a French campsite was something we did a lot of in times past, but a generation on, we were now back again. Although we had driven down to Aquitaine, thoughts naturally turned to our nearest railway line. This was the overhead electrified single line up the peninsula from Bordeaux to Pointe de Grave, which is the ferry port for Royan across the mouth of the Gironde estuary. Modern, colourful, 3-car EMUs brought part of the family to meet us at our local station of Soulac sur Mer. The next station north from here was at Le Verdun. Former freight branch lines peeled off from here to the nearby harbourside, as well as to the inner estuary, but the abundance of rusty rails suggested a serious lack of use in recent times.
Art UK recently ran a competition with Railway 200 to celebrate the best artistic depictions of the railway. They scoured the resources at the NRM and provincial art galleries nationwide to come up with their top two hundred entries. These were then whittled down to a top 20 by public vote and subsequently the winners were announced after further voting from the shortlist. The winner was Train Landscape by Eric Ravilious. Second was Rain Steam and Speed by JMW Turner and in third place was David Shepherd’s Service by Night.
Art UK do a great job in bringing a vast array of original
artwork to the public view via their website and many artists have given permission
their work to be included there. However, in this instance its worth mentioning
that a lot of extremely good railway artwork was presumably excluded from the
process because it is not on public display or owned by galleries around the
country. Consequently, contemporary work of high order by Barry Price, Don
Breckon, Rob Rowland and Barry Freeman does not feature, and even some
reputable historical figures like James Tissot have been overlooked.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed sifting through the list and finding
artists who were new to me and some attractive paintings that I would otherwise
be unlikely to have come across. As for the winner, the back story is
fascinating and can be followed online. If you want to see the real thing you
need to go to Aberdeen Art Gallery, where, UK Art added on their web page, “it has
now been placed on public display”, suggesting that maybe it had been
languishing in a vault somewhere until the spotlight had suddenly descended on
the Granite City - but perhaps I’m doing them a dis-service here.
Not yet, anyway! Primarily this time for Neil Young at Hyde Park, and after escaping from the heat outside with JMW Turner at Tate Britain the next day, we ended up at the redeveloped landscape behind Kings Cross and St Pancras stations. I never got to 34A Kings Cross sheds, nor the portals of Copenhagen tunnel and its surrounding streets where the Ealing Comedy, The Ladykillers, was filmed. It’s also taken us some time to get there after renewal, though I’d been told it was well worth a visit.
The land north of and between the approaches to Kings Cross
and St Pancras had been railway land since the mid-nineteenth century. The
goods yards and sidings of the Great Northern Railway included warehouses,
gasometers and coal drops, where goods trains arrived from the Yorkshire
collieries on the upper levels and dumped their coal onto the carts [and later
the lorries] below. Coal also went to make coal gas, which was stored in grey, cylindrical
gasometers, once a common feature of most towns and cities. Coal was also
distributed along the Regents Canal, connected to the Grand Union Canal at
Little Venice, beyond Paddington station.
In a major renewal programme begun at the start of the present century, the old has been impressively incorporated into the new in a series of imaginative designs. The canal provides a leisure walkway and barge rides, the gasometer frames are now wrapped around modern apartments, high-tech’ office blocks provide employment, and the coal drops, themselves, have been preserved and adapted to attract top-end retailers, bars and restaurants. The tree-lined square that sits between the canal bridge and these redevelopments has plentiful seating, an outsize TV screen [showing an embarrassingly one-way Wimbledon ladies final on the afternoon that we were there], paved areas with fountains to the delight of the children getting thoroughly soaked on a hot summer’s day, outdoor art displays – currently a summer seaside photographic exhibition, and all surrounded by lively bars and cafes. I found the whole scene most uplifting. What a triumph it is, showing just what can be done where there is a determination to retain important elements of our built history and at the same time bringing new opportunities to formerly run-down inner urban areas and successfully breathing new life into forgotten corners of our old cities.
In April 1969, we called in at Colwick on our way home from overnights at youth hostels in Lincoln and Grantham. If my memory serves me, there was nothing on the sheds except one diesel shunter. The former sprawling yards that had been a hive of activity in the days of steam just a few years beforehand were silent and deserted. Many of the former sidings were then replaced with a retail park and the old shed site is now a Lidl. A couple of years ago, however, Boden Rail Engineering developed a facility adjacent to the Netherfield lagoons wildlife reserve, at the end of a spur connecting the new sheds to the Nottingham to Grantham line just before the Trent crossing. Railway maintenance had returned to Colwick. As with Leeds Midland Road depot, as a visitor one is hardly made to feel welcome. The same warning signs, gates and robust high fencing surround the site, which is also physically closed off at its single track access point on the spur. Boden Rail looks after Colas locomotives from classes 37, 56 and 70. Two superfluous Class 60s, Nos. 60057 and 60075, are also parked up there. Nos. 37099 and 56087 were also visible on recent visits.
They really don’t want you at the sheds these days. The resolutely high and sturdy fencing, the closed and locked gates, the no parking zones, the CCTV cameras, the warning notices and the double-yellows on the road round about the entrance, all serve to make you feel like an intruder, as your eyes search for convenient gaps in the fence big enough to take a picture through. It’s a world away from a leisurely visit to the sheds as it was in the sixties, when part of the fun was to get round without getting caught, ticked off or thrown out - a necessary game to be played in the quest for numbers. It’s a non-starter these days. These places are secure fortresses today sealed off from the world outside, as those inside protect their assets from graffiti artists, vandals and thieves. It’s sad that its necessary, of course, but I get where they’re coming from. The world has changed but we have lost something along the way. The innocent spotter and photographer has become a figure of suspicion. It makes you feel almost guilty to be there, at all, snooping around on the periphery at the weekend, where it appears from the outside that 7-day working is largely also a thing of the past. At least you could park the car near the entrance to Leeds Freightliner depot. There was no sign of life through the bars, but the stored Class 70s that had prompted my visit were there and a line of them could just about be viewed from the other side of the bridge after a short walk through the rain on an overgrown footpath strewn with rubbish as far as a brief gap in the foliage. Even with binoculars I couldn’t make out the numbers I was separated from by two sets of railings. I’m assuming that one of those in the middle distance was No. 70013, which according to other peoples’ online records has been parked up there for years, even though its place in the line has changed from time to time. Confirmation from elsewhere that I actually saw 70013 yesterday would help me rescue an otherwise rather depressing sojourn.
Rather quiet outside UKRL at Leicester this morning. Class 69 No. 69010 lurking round the back and 57 No. 57303 leaving the depot light engine going south.
