Backtrack

Larry Crossier, a fellow Plymouthian and great friend, was surely born to be a signalman. For nearly seven decades or so, nothing pleased him more than talking about signalling, signalmen and their boxes. With the contraction of semaphores throughout

The years 1949-1953 marked the end of an era for the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway. In 1949 the railway became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Keswick Granite Company. In the same year the Granite Company oversaw a major blasting operation at the Bec

FROM THE PENDRAGON ARCHIVES ■

The spring 1988 edition of The Wyvern contained an article in which the authors had compiled a list of surviving Midland Railway (MR) signal boxes. In summer 1986 there had been 110, but by the end of 1987 the total was 83. These were the boxes still

It’s an ill wind that blows no good and this was never truer than in 1912 for the London & South Western Railway. Its Chief Mechanical Engineer, the fiery and obstinate Scot, Dugald Drummond, had embarked upon an ill-fated project to supply the LSWR

Port Sunlight station is located on what is now part of the Merseyrail network in the Wirral Peninsula, formerly in Cheshire. It is surrounded by hamlets and villages with names ending in the Saxon ‘ton’ and ‘ham’ such as Bebington and Eastham. If yo

The cross-country Great Western Railway line between Cheltenham and Banbury (joining the Birmingham main line just south of the latter at King’s Sutton) served mines in the Oxfordshire ironstone field and for some years even hosted a significant thro

Those many of us who bewail the loss of goods traffic in any local sense on railways of the UK will recall former centres of enormous area packed with traffic, track and activity, that have been reduced to no more than plain line, double track at bes

The Great Western Railway’s ‘Manor’ Class 4-6-0s played a prominent role on the former Cambrian Railways ‘main’ line to Aberystwyth and along the coast to Pwllheli. On 30th May 1964 GAVIN MORRISON found No.7803 Barcote Manor working the ‘Cambrian Coa

This collection of photographs depicts men in the employ of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Company at their place of work. The presence of an official photographer, possibly an employee of the company, or an amateur photographer, setting up a gla

There was an article in Backtrack 33/6 (June 2019) about fraudulent promotion of shares in the Mersey Railway and it has to be said that this was not a new phenomenon for the earlier ‘Railway Mania’ had produced a fair crop of both fraudulent and inc

The London Midland & Scottish Railway’s quest for a middle-range express passenger locomotive was pursued after the arrival of the ‘Royal Scot’ and addressed in 1930 by combining the chassis of the latter with the larger boilers of a couple of rebuil

The 4-6-2T or Pacific tank locomotive was used by some railways in Britain but this wheel arrangement was rare in Ireland. There were no steam locomotives of the Pacific tender type to be found on any of the 5ft 3in railways of Ireland. On the narrow