Vol 36 No 8 - August 2022

Backtrack

Britain's Leading Historical Railway Journal

Backtrack4 min read
Editorial
The ‘Euston Arch’ features as a subject in this month’s magazine... ‘Iconic’ is an adjective overused – and maybe misused – nowadays but perhaps it is appropriate for the ‘Euston Arch’, not just in its own right but for what it came to represent in a
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Backtrack
Publisher and Editor MICHAEL BLAKEMORE Trade Account Manager Ann Williams Design + Repro Barnabus Design in Print • Typesetting Melinda Trevivian • IT Consultant Derek Gillibrand ■
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Princes Street Station Edinburgh’s ‘Underrated’ Terminus
It was in January 1923 that Edinburgh’s Waverley passed into the ownership of the London & North Eastern Railway, becoming the company’s biggest station. Six months later, the London Midland & Scottish Railway took over the Princes Street terminus fr
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The Impact Of The Great War On The Railways Of Gelligaer Parish And Adjoining Areas
At 11.00pm on Tuesday 4th August 1914, following August Bank Holiday, the British Government, having received no response to its ultimatum from the Imperial Government of Germany, declared that a state of war existed between the two countries. So beg
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The Long Shadow Of The Arch The Troubled Road To The New Euston
A ‘Brobdingnagian Absurdity’ the waspish Victorian critic and architect Augustus Welby Pugin called it when new and it has been praised or neglected ever since. But except for the Forth Bridge the ‘Euston Arch’, the ceremonial portal to the world’s f
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‘Tadpole’ Tales
Terry Penfold rode the Reading to Tonbridge line in the 1970s. Ffty years ago I started work in the Productivity Section of the Central Division Manager’s Office in Croydon. The work was mainly one-off projects but we did have some recurring tasks, i
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BIDSTON SHED WESTERN OUTPOST OF THE GREAT CENTRAL AND THE LONDON & NORTH EASTERN
The Manchester, Sheffield & L:incolnshire Railway had reached Birkenhead by 1871 as a member of the Cheshire Lines Committee along with the Great Northern Railway and the Midland Railway. The CLC had opened a goods depot at Shore Road on the south si
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Walnut Rede The Mysteries Of Railway Telegram Codes
Please note the convention used in this article: telegram codes are rendered in the upper case as they always were, and their interpretations in italics – for example, ACK means Acknowledge receipt by wire. This avoids a proliferation of quotation ma
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Saving The 2.17 From Braintree Challenging The ‘Beeching Axe’ In Rural Essex – The Inside Story!
The three of us – Bob, Chris and me, trainspotters extraordinaire, caught our usual train for an afternoon’s spotting at Witham on the main London line departing Braintree at 2.17pm, arriving Witham 2.34pm having called at the tiny intermediate stati
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Merry-go-round A Non-stop Service
My career as an illustrator has taken me into a variety of industries with railway associations; from underground mining locomotives to the ‘APT’, I would frequently be found creating artist’s impressions of proposed new rolling stock or preparing in
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Readers’Forum
Letters intended for publication should ideally add extra detail to our articles (or offer corrections of course!) and not be too long, consistent with the detail they offer. As always, we are sorry that space and time prevent us from printing them a
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Book Reviews
★ ★★★★ Excellent| ★★★★ Very Good| ★★★ Good|★★ Fair|★ Poor| Scotland’s Lost Branch Lines: Where Beeching got it wrong By David Spaven. Published by Birlinn, 297 pages, £30.00, Hardback. ISBN 978-1 83983-019-8 In 1962 a Scottish civil servant called Fr

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