Letters

Nick Hodges raises a very valid point in his letter in issue 237. Diesel locomotives have to be attached to steam-hauled trains for the following purposes: 1: To provide electric heating to the train. 2: When the train is vacuum braked, to provide assistance in the event of the steam locomotive becoming a failure en…

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I wonder if you are aware of the carriage that stands at the platform at Rayne on the disused Bishop’s Stortford to Braintree branch? Since 2014 this Mk.2 carriage has been home to a small museum under the auspices of The Friends of The Flitch Way and includes a working model of Rayne station as…

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Page 14 of Heritage Railway issue 235 shows a young locomotive crew with a combined age of 43 years on the Bodmin & Wenford Railway, querying if this is the youngest crew ever. On October 24, 2016 on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, driver Robson Hewitson, aged 21 and fireman Phil Akester, aged 19, crewed…

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Issue 233 of Heritage Railway was a real treat – and not least the Platform section. Three very noticeable aspects of railway preservation became very obvious from the letters. First was the issue regarding the lengthening of heritage lines so that they do, indeed go, as Clive Thompson so eloquently put it, from “somewhere to…

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Eighty years ago, the old Welsh Highland Railway closed. Rebuilding the line has been a tremendous achievement, however, there is one thing missing. The iconic locomotive Russell from the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway, the only surviving locomotive of the original Welsh Highland, is barred from working on its former line to Beddgelert. In railway term,s…

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The reference to LNER A3 No. 60049 Galtee More in Geoff Courtney’s railwayana column in issue 232 brought back to me memories of the Pacific in about 1959, when I was a fireman at King’s Cross shed. The loco was turned on the triangle at Grantham for a run back to London, and we went…

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I was a student in Leeds in the mid-1960s, and read with great interest your account of the final months of the Jubilee class in BR operation. However, let me fill in a couple of blanks. I was surprised that there was nothing about what I believe to be the last working of the class…

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As an enthusiastic trainspotter during the BR steam/diesel ‘crossover’ era of the late 1950s and early 1960s, I was interested to read Geoff Courtney’s article in last month’s issue about the little-publicised evaluation trials of Stratford-allocated Class 31 D5511 in Scotland during the summer of 1958. It prompted me to carry out some research of…

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EYEBROWS have been raised at the latest decision by the National Railway Museum to give one of its star exhibits, GWR heavy freight locomotive No. 2818, to Swindon Borough Council’s STEAM museum, as reported in issue 231. It follows the donation of North Staffordshire Railway 0-6-2T No. 2 to the Foxfield Railway and the LSWR…

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The article by Geoff Courtney in last month’s issue on the Kent & East Sussex Railway’s hop-pickers’ gala in September brought back memories of when I went down to Kent for many years as a youngster in the early 1950s. From the age of six to around 11, when I lived in Walworth, I travelled…

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