Tabla de contenidos para Volume 39 No 8 - August 2025 en Backtrack

Steam plumes and bleeder flames on the top of massive coke retorts could be seen from the M1 motorway between Chapel Town and Sheffield. I’d travelled along that part of the M1 gagging from the smell of rotten eggs and wondering whether this large environmental disaster called Smithywood Coke Ovens was capable of sustaining working steam locomotives. At the time I was a graduate trainee working at Granada Television in Manchester on a series called The Wheel Tappers and Shunters Club, a variety show compered by Bernard Manning. The show was recorded in the evenings and gave me a day off during the working week as compensation. So on a wet cold Tuesday morning in November 1975 I headed east on a 40-mile adventure to Smithywood with a copy of…

The fact that British Rail (BR), and rail transport in general, has been trusted to move significant tonnages of hazardous chemicals and flammable liquids for considerable distances across the country, including to and from mainland Europe via the Dover and Harwich train ferry operations, and through major conurbations, is a testament of the railway’s excellent safety case record. Yes, accidents do occasionally happen, but rail was always the preferred transport mode, where possible, when it came to such movements and especially so when consignments were significant enough in volume to be handled by means of running block train services direct between manufacturer and customer. Although not exactly measuring up to the bulk trainload model visually, as such, because of their comparatively short train length (see below), the deadliest traffic entrusted…

From its humble origins as a mineral line for the transport of local supplies of iron ore and slate from the West Cumberland quarries to South Wales, the Furness Railway grew into a thriving company which controlled not only the region’s railways but also the vast docks, shipyards and industries around Barrow which in the early 1840s was only a small hamlet surrounding a sheltered harbour. The Furness district of Lancashire, now part of Cumbria, is one of the country’s most isolated regions bounded by the Lake District in the north and extending to the west coast at Morecambe Bay. The area’s rugged landscape prevented the rapid growth of the railway’s major trade routes. The first section of the Furness Railway was authorised in May 1844 to run from Kirkby-in-Furness…

In early 1901 the Yeomanry and the Volunteer companies began to return to England from South Africa, having completed their one year’s active service, and in some cases they were replaced by further drafts of Volunteers and Yeomanry. By now public support for the war was slowly diminishing – it was to drag on to May 1902 – and it wasn’t as easy to find enough men prepared to volunteer as it had been in the early months of the war. The public send-offs tended to become more muted, but not so the displays of enthusiasm on the return of the active service volunteers. Refreshments (2) In early October 1900 Lord Wolseley, the retiring Commander-in-Chief of the Army, issued an appeal to the country that the return of British troops…

I had only once ever visited Southport until employment at the town’s art college took me to live there in January 1964. I certainly knew it as being in the top two of Lancashire seaside resorts with all that implied in terms of railway provision. Therefore I was more than a little taken aback, on enquiring at Chapel Street, the principal of the many stations serving the town, just how many trains there were each day connecting it with London, to be told “Two”. And later I discovered that these each consisted of a mere two carriages, attached to and from a Euston to Liverpool express at Edge Hill. But surely, I thought, so important a holiday resort warrants a regular service, if not an hourly one, of full length,…

Three railways, two continents, one year The first day of the year 1830 was Friday 1st January. When the year opened, the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR) was not quite five years old. While it may not have been the only public railway in operation in the United Kingdom on that day – for example, the Surrey Iron Railway still had sixteen years of operation before its abandonment – it was arguably the most significant operation in existence that day. As the year opened on New Year’s Day, there were around 90 miles (145km) of railways in the United Kingdom. Around a quarter of this length was the S&DR lines. In the United States on that day, while a small number of early private railways existed, by modern standards there…

How would you like to spend your Saturday morning? As a railway enthusiast you might opt for some lineside observations although services on a winter Saturday might not match those provided from Monday to Friday, or in the summer peak in some instances. On today’s railway what works a particular service is usually highly predictable by class although the time the train passes may be less so. The chances are that the number of passenger trains you might see would exceed those experienced 60 years ago whilst freight provision could have seriously deteriorated, although even 60 years ago freight trains on Saturdays were usually less frequent that seen on weekdays. Let me take you to Summer Lane. Perhaps not a destination you would be familiar with, suffice to say that…