Tabla de contenidos para March/April 2022 en Traction

Welcome Welcome to the March/April issue of TRACTION. We start with two articles about military traffic, the first being about the movement of MOD stores after the ending of the Speedlink network in 1991. Accompanying this is a portrait of the Gosport branch in the late 1980s when naval stores were carried by rail. Moving to a line that has in recent years seen a great improvement in its fortunes we look at the former Great Western & Great Central Joint Line and the ‘Bicester Cut-Off’ during the 1980s when the line carried only minimal traffic. Despite that there was interesting locomotive haulage of passenger trains. For Network SouthEast fans we take a look at the end of the EPB era on the lines around Horsham and Dorking In our…

Living between the lines Dave Allen looks back at the time, in the early 1980s, when he was living in Aylesbury and if he wanted to see a bit of main line action it was either a case of heading east, for the West Coast Main Line or, as he preferred, west - for the ex-Great Western & Great Central Joint Line and ‘Bicester Cut-Off’. September 1966 sounded the death knell for the former Great Central Railway when the line closed between Claydon Junction, north of Aylesbury, and Rugby. Express trains had ceased to run six years before, but a few semi-fasts kept the rails bright between Marylebone, Rugby, Leicester and Nottingham, until the inevitable demise. When I arrived in Aylesbury, fourteen years or so later, passenger trains to and…

TRACTION MODELLING Heljan Class 47 Words: Howard Smith Photography: Tony Wright Until 2005, the British O gauge RTR market was largely docile, but this was revolutionised when Heljan revealed plans to produce its first diesel/hydraulic, the Class 35 ‘Hymek’. Much water has since passed under the proverbial O gauge bridge, and modellers in the scale became accustomed – and thirsty – for new announcements, often at Warley NEC shows. The fact that new RTR announcements in the scale carry less of a ‘shock’ factor is a testament to the great strides it has made in making quality models accessible to a wider audience. Kindly sent for review by Heljan is a sample of its 47/4 in Parcels Sector grey and red. For its early version with as-built headcode panels, suitable…

Bristol Model Railway Exhibition under new management Warners Group Publications has announced that it has taken over the management of the Bristol Model Railway Exhibition, which will take place in Spring. Already managing two of the country’s biggest model railway exhibitions – The Festival of British Railway Modelling in Doncaster andThe London Festival of Railway Modelling at Alexandra Palace – Warners sees a show in the West of England as a great addition to its events portfolio. It will continue to work in close partnership with the Association of Model Railway Clubs Wales & West of England to ensure the show remains one the country’s best. The 2022 exhibition is confirmed for April 29, 30 and May 1 and will take place at Thornbury Leisure Centre, Alveston Hill, Thornbury, Bristol,…

Brookhouse Spotting Memories People often say that the gift of a camera at an early age sparked a lifetime’s interest in photography but for Chris Lenton this wasn’t quite true. For my eighth birthday, in 1972, I received a Kodak Instamatic 25 along with a 12 exposure black and white 126 film, which was duly loaded and rapidly exposed. After that, the camera was rarely used, probably owing to the obstacle of having to buy film for it. The camera arrived at the very beginning of my railway interest. At that time, the nearest place for us (Dad, younger brother and me) to watch trains was Brookhouse Colliery, which was a short, down-hill walk from home. A handy iron bridge over the Sheffield to Lincoln line, midway between Wood-house and…

6X73 AND AUTOMOTIVE TRAFFIC Driver Jason Hickling’s article in TRACTION 266 was an interesting account of his time spent working freights between Birmingham and Crewe. I have often been intrigued as to why this train, and various other automotive trains that ran during the post-BR privatisation era, often ran with the letter ‘X’ in the headcode? The normal headcode for workings operating within the LMR to Merseyside back in BR days would have been to run with the letter ‘F’, as the use of an ‘X’ back then implied an exceptional load, which I believe could also include something ‘out-of-gauge’. Could Jason, or perhaps someone else, please enlighten us as to why certain automotive trains in the privatised era warranted the use of the letter ‘X’ in the headcode? Two…

Remembering the MoD Trains: Part 1 David J. Hayes goes on military manoeuvres by examining the movements of Government Stores for the Ministry of Defence after the end of Speedlink in 1991 Following the demise of the Speedlink wagonload network in July 1991, the Railfreight Distribution (RfD) business arm of British Rail introduced a series of ‘ContractTrains’ to cater for former Speedlink flows, thus enabling many less than trainload customers to remain on rail. Depending on volumes, such workings could run weekly, twice-weekly, thrice-weekly or even each weekday and included UK Contract Services for the Chemicals & Industrial Minerals division, which, in addition to chemical flows, such as the long distance weekly movement of sodium tripolyphosphate between Cumbria and Essex, also included the long standing Monday to Friday movement of…

The end of the EPB era on the Horsham/Dorking route By Phil Barnes The first EPB to grace the rails of the new British Railways in 1951 was 4 car unit number 5001; over the years different batches of EPB were built, totalling 283 4 EPBs and 114 2 EPBs. Around half of these vehicles were built on recycled underframes, and the batch of 2 EPBs that worked down to my home town of Horsham in the early 1990s were of this breed. With the writing on the wall for the EPBs on the Horsham to Dorking and London Victoria services, I decided to photograph them at the southern end of their route, i.e. either side of the Surrey/Sussex border. By this time the service was worked by the refurbished…

NEWS TRACTION MODELLING in partnership with BRM Heljan 2022/23 announcements Heljan’s 2022 UK products catalogue is available from stockists and contains details of all Heljan products now available, or due for release in 2022/23, in OO9, OO and O gauge. All-new tooling announced by the manufacturer this year includes a Class 37/0 and Class 55 in O gauge. The Class 37/0 will be offered in post-1970s form with cutaway bufferbeam cowlings, cast or fabricated bogies and a choice of nose end arrangements, including end doors/plated ends, highintensity headlights and plated headcode panels. Its first batch will feature the much-requested split headcode variant in eight liveries. Its Class 55 is to be offered in late BR condition 1976-82 and preserved main line condition with high-intensity headlight in a number of liveries…

Early Belgian electrics Part 1 Colin Boocock first visited Belgium in 1957 and was interested to see electric locomotives that all looked the same but with a variety of class numbers! Here he explains why, and looks at a few later developments, too. I have to thank the Eastleigh & District Engineering Society in the 1950s for its practice of organising annual long-weekend trips to the nearby continent. These enabled me, as an impecunious engineering apprentice, to afford occasional rail travel to destinations such as Paris and Brussels, and to begin to enjoy the fun of seeing how other countries’ railways did things differently from ours. My second such outing was in October 1957. Our group assembled at London’s Victoria station to catch the boat train that connected with the…

A Mixed Bag David Ratcliffe looks at Bagnall industrial locomotives…

UKF FERTILISER TRAINS I read with interest the articles in Traction on UKF fertiliser trains, in particular the trip to Horsham on Saturdays. As usual I didn’t take many photos of this train as it would of course always be there wouldn’t it? It was one of those trains that had a Class 33 or 73 depending what was available. I remember being called to Selhurst station at the end of a Friday night shift to fix a problem with 73006 on this train which then provided me with my ‘taxi’ to East Croydon then my home town. The photo shows 33104 on the train at Redhill in 1984. I probably took the photo because it was relatively unusual at that time to see a 33/1 on the Central Division,…

The Gosport branch remembered by Steve Stubbs Gosport in Hampshire, like Daventry and Dunstable, shares the unenviable accolade of currently being one of the largest towns in the UK that is not served by a railway station in the 21st Century. However, this was not always the case. Gosport is a seafaring town that lies on a peninsular of land opposite Portsea Island. This is where the city of Portsmouth can be found with its large naval base and historic dockyard that are still very much active today. The former railway to the terminus at Gosport lost its passenger service on 8th June 1953, the last train having run two days earlier. Goods traffic continued to serve the docks and former station area and associated yard for goods traffic until…

TRACTION MODELLING in partnership with BRM ALDERFORD This impressive layout draws its inspiration from Carl Bowden’s home territory - the electrified lines of the North West in the late 1980s. Photography by Andy York While on the lookout for ideas on a new layout, and having some criteria in mind (a terminus station and overhead electrification to name two), Carl Bowden came across an article in theTraction Annual 2009/10, featuring ‘Liverpool Lime Street’ in the years of 1985/86. The idea that came from reading this article and studying the photographs was to model the operation methods of Lime Street, but within the confines of a station with only five platforms, and from this, the seeds for ‘Alderford’ were sown. Buildings and structures on ‘Alderford’ are a mixed bag of scratch-built,…

Gaugemaster expands scenic range Model retailer Gaugemaster has produced an extensive range of new detailed scenic accessories to its own designs. 3D-printed and painted, the new models join its existing Kestrel Designs range and are available in 2mm:1ft (N) and 4mm:1ft (OO) scales. Included as part of this release are black metal-type litter bins, metal dustbins – a common sight outside houses prior to wheelie bins – yellow grit boxes, a telephone box, letterboxes, lineside cabinets, round concrete bollards, a pack of orange skips, wheelie bins and oil drums in red, green and blue colours. Accessories manufactured span the popular transitional era of the late-1950s and 1960s to the present day, covering the needs of most modellers. Those pictured are its 4mm:1ft scale variants, with the exception of the lineside…

Shap Summit to Lancaster In TRACTION 267 Gavin Morrison presented some of his photographs taken in pre-electrification days on the northern approach to Shap from Carlisle. This time he heads south from the summit towards Lancaster.…

Letters NORTON COLLIERY I thought the Norton Colliery Branch article in TRACTION 268 made for an interesting feature. Mention was made of all coal output going to Meaford Power Station, which was probably true by the time the colliery closed in 1977, but there was also coal traffic to Ironbridge Power Station using the MGR concept prior to Norton’s closure. Table One accompanying Part One of my Ironbridge Coal article in TRACTION 263 shows, for October 1975, an MGR departure from Ford Green (coal ex-Norton) running as 6G42, the 07:13 SO/09:10 SSuX to Ironbridge formed of 25 HAA hoppers. However, by October 1976, the Saturday train had ceased and, in March of 1977, the weekday departure was amended to start from Trentham Junction (dep. 10:27 SSuX), now laden with coal…