Volume 38 No 4 - April 2024

Backtrack

Britain's Leading Historical Railway Journal

Backtrack4 min read
Editorial
Industrial railways have perhaps been rather looked down upon by some: they do undeniably lack the allure of the main lines with their famous locomotives, express trains, passenger carriages and all the other trimmings associated with them. But their
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Backtrack
Publisher and Editor MICHAEL BLAKEMORE • E-Mail pendragonpublishing@btinternet.com • Tel 01347 824397 [Mon.-Fri. 9.00am-5.00pm] Trade Account Manager Ann Williams Design + Repro Barnabus Design in Print • Typesetting Melinda Trevivian • IT Consultant
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The Princetown Branch
Princetown is a village of about 1,500 souls in the county of Devon. Set 1,400ft above sea level in the centre of the Dartmoor National Park, it was founded in 1785 by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt who was at the time Secretary to the Prince of Wales (Duke of
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The Good, The Bad And the Others british Diesel Locomotives in Australia
The overwhelming majority of the diesel locomotives at work in Australia today were built either in Australia or in the USA, but when Australia’s railways began the transition from steam to diesel after World War II they purchased many of their new l
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Caught By The Camera
I wonder how many Backtrack readers regularly perusing the plethora of railway photographs published in the magazine’s pages each month pause to look not only at the infrastructure, the locomotives and the trains, but also at the people frequently de
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Rhapsodies In Blue
Out of the 1950s Modernisation Plan came a desire by British Railways to update the image of Pullman travel, based around ‘traditional’ Pullman cars of the 1920s/’30s, and the result was five sets of 2,000hp diesel-electric units built by Metropolita
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Completing The Triangle At Shipley
The triangular junction at Shipley linking the Leeds, Bradford and Skipton routes was the subject of a colour feature in the February issue. This month we take the story forward to the establishment of platforms on all three sides of the layout, elec
Backtrack24 min read
The Decline Of The Manchester Ship Canal Railway salford Docks And Trafford park part One
Opened in 1894 the Manchester Ship Canal was one of the great engineering achievements of the Victorian age and, in addition to the 36-milelong waterway linking Manchester with the sea, the Manchester Ship Canal Company also operated its own extensiv
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Closure Of The Newport Railway
In a previous article (Backtrack Vol.38 No.2) we saw how an original portion of the East Coast Main Line had become so run down that there could be no justification for its retention for either the minimal passenger or goods traffic which it carried
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Arkwright Street And The Newspapers
New Year’s Day 1902 was an auspicious date in the annals of the Great Central Railway for it was then that one Sam Fay took up his appointment as General Manager of the company, a railway whose new and expensive line from the East Midlands southwards
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Readers'Forum
At the age of nineteen, I joined the Midland Bank at Bramley branch in Leeds. The main branch was in Town Street, Bramley, and it had two subbranches to each of which a clerk and guard were sent each day. The sub branch in Station Parade was on the m
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BookReviews
Excellent Very Good Good Fair Poor By Peter Tuffrey., Published by Great Northern, hardback, 160 pages, priced £27.50. ISBN 978-1-914227-53-0 If your reviewer had ‘favourite’ class of locomotive from his trainspotting days then that class would proba

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