Backtrack

You commented favourably on the presentation of an archive photograph instead of an Editorial on several occasions last year, so here we go with another one this month. Dillicar water troughs, south of Tebay, offered welcome refreshment for locomotiv

James Fenwick was the son of Robert and Elizabeth Fenwick who lived at Greystead in remote, rural Northumberland. Greystead was located almost exactly half way between the villages of Bellingham and Falstone in what became part of the North British R

On Thursday 20th January 1983 a colleague and I travelled early to London to collect our copies of the Serpell Report from HMSO in High Holborn, retreating to a nearby café for a preliminary study. Our first impression was of the text itself, dense w

At the turn of the nineteenth century there were many great trunk railways from the North and the West of England to London and these tend to have followed roughly the routes of the great roads which also all converged on the same city. From south of

Kelso is a historic town in the Scottish Borders which was reached by branch lines built by two different companies, from opposite directions. Kelso station featured in two major rail operations 22 years apart, but never fulfilled the dreams of the r

Apioneer Swindon auto train conversion entered traffic on the Great Western Railway less than a year after the first steam railmotors. Deployment in the summer of 1905 was to the Southall-Brentford branch in West London where seating capacity of ‘pow

The summer of 1961 was probably the last opportunity to record the dying embers of the Southern Railway’s classic motive power in main line action. Ruling the roost in the 1930s, the ‘King Arthurs’, ‘Lord Nelsons’ and ‘Schools’ would all be gone by t

“The town of Poulton-le-Fylde is a small, irregular and old fashioned place, on a gentle eminence, with the tower of the church rising midst of its seven streets.” Edward Baines, The History of the County Palatine and Duchy of Lancaster, Vol.2 1870 “

The railway reached Sligo, ‘the second town of Connacht’ on the west coast of Ireland, in December 1862 with the arrival of the Midland, Great Western Railway of Ireland’s ‘principal’ line – the company’s ‘main line’ went to Galway – from Dublin Broa