Volume 37 No 9 - September 2023

Backtrack

Britain's Leading Historical Railway Journal

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Editorial
Back Track RECORDING THE HISTORY OF BRITAIN'S RAILWAYS Vol. 37. No. 9 No. 389 SEPTEMBER 2023 It had been a little while since I made a journey by rail on a regular service train when I presented myself at York station early in July to do just that. M
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Tartan Cramptons
General Pasley, for the Board of Trade, when he inspected the Dundee & Newtyle on behalf of the Railway Department in 1842, in his report commented disparagingly on the tight ‘S'-bend near Baldovan. It was present, he wrote, because “the projector of
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Milk Traffic Memories Part Two
PART TWO British Rail (BR) ceased handling milk on a regular basis in 1980 when the ‘Western Agreement’ contract with the Milk Marketing Board (MMB) expired; the MMB had made the decision to concentrate all of its distribution needs on road transport
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The Five Railway Stations Of Oldham
The author has a vague recollection of his student days when the following title of a fellow student's dissertation included the words, ‘Oldham – the Town on a Hill’. This student had realised that Oldham was not only seven miles to the north east of
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The North Staffordshiree ‘New L’ Class
The ‘New L’ Class 0-6-2 tanks were the last locomotives to be built by the North Staffordshire Railway at its Stoke Works one hundred years ago in 1923 and it is therefore fitting that NSR No.2, now resident at the Foxfield Railway, is the last survi
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‘Coal Engines’ And ‘Coal Tanks’
On the London & North Western Railway F. W. Webb's first new locomotive was a basic 0-6-0 goods engine in 1873 and over the years to 1892 no fewer than 499 were built. They earned themselves the name ‘Coal Engines’, that slow-moving commodity constit
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Moretonhampstead And The teign Valley Railway
Moretonhampstead, in the county of Devon is, in the words of its Town Council, “a busy and picturesque town nestled in Dartmoor National Park, fifteen miles west of Exeter”. Today the commonest association with the name ‘Moretonhampstead’, or ‘Moreto
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Spoilt For Choice
Sadly, whole swathes of architectural gems are barely noticed by the average member of the travelling public. As for London Underground, invariably, having been jammed into trains, most people are far more concerned with getting to work on time. Then
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PAY AS YOU GO THE STOCKTON & DARLINGTON RAILWAY PAY BILLS
Te National Archive at Kew has the look of a 1960s university campus minus the hippies. A concrete prefabricated building set in landscaped grounds with an ornamental lake, where ducks and geese are the only sounds to disturb the researcher slaving a
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Kippering In Oban
How many readers of this magazine have the good fortune to live in a house which directly looks on to a railway line? Back in 1911 and 1912 a number of residents of the town of Oban had probably considered themselves fortunate in that their propertie
Backtrack6 min readArchitecture
A Look At Some Great Central Railway Signal Boxes
This article takes a brief photographic look at some of the different designs of signal boxes once found on the former Great Central Railway and its predecessor – the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. The Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnsh
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A Minor Collision!
I came across some images amongst others which looked interesting, as they featured some Morris Minor vehicles, for sale on the Ebay auction site in March 2022. I put in my bid and waited several ays for the auction to end with the usual suspense as
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BookReviews
Excellent Very Good Good Fair Poor Festiniog Law – The shaping of a pioneering railway By Stephen Murfitt. Published by the Railway & Canal Historical Society. ISBN 978-0-901461-74-2. Hardback, 152pp, £27.50. Just when it might be thought that nothin
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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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