Category Archives: Transports of Delight

LMS

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Midland Station, Sheffield

Midland Station, Sheffield

In years gone by, when I booked a taxi and absentmindedly ask for Sheffield’s “Midland Station” the switchboard operators generally hadn’t a clue what I was talking about.  There’s been no reason to call it that ever since Sheffield’s other station, Victoria, closed in 1970.  Yet for years afterwards when I listened to black-cab driver’s radios they still referred to it as “LMS”, though it ceased to belong to the London, Midland & Scottish Railway on the last day of 1947.  Indeed, when I book a private cab in 2024 the text on my phone confirms the destination as ‘LMS’.

Similarly, Sheffield’s trams – and possibly buses – still showed ‘LMS Station’ as a destination until the end of the 1950s.

For practical purposes, it’s now simply Sheffield Station.

It’s not a particularly spectacular building, though it was handsomely refurbished in 2002.  Indeed, the most impressive structure is out of sight – the culvert that takes the River Sheaf (after which Sheffield is supposedly named) underneath the platforms:  www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=5502.

The present frontage dates from 1905, created by Charles Trubshaw who also rebuilt the Midland Railway’s stations in Nottingham and Leicester and designed the Midland Hotel in Manchester.  Trubshaw’s first-class waiting room and the adjacent dining room are now occupied by one of Sheffield’s fine real-ale pubs, the Sheffield Tap [http://www.sheffieldtap.com].

The location of the station was controversial when it was built in the late 1860s as part of the “New Road” rail extension from Grimesthorpe to Chesterfield.  The local landowner, the Duke of Norfolk, insisted on the southern approach being hidden in a tunnel (later removed) so that it was invisible from his residence, The Farm.

At the same time Sheffield Corporation, concerned that the streets to the east where Park Hill Flats now stand would be cut off from the town centre, demanded a right of way across the station footbridge.

That’s an argument that’s still running nearly 150 years later.  The operator, East Midlands Trains, seeks to close the footbridge with ticket-barriers:  http://www.sheffieldtelegraph.co.uk/news/local/station_bridge_breakthrough_1_4302832.

Alan Williams, in an article about Sheffield Station in Modern Railways (June 2012), suggested that the railway obsession with ticket barriers may be less connected with fare-dodging (which according to the four train operators serving Sheffield is no worse on their lines than the national average) and more with national security, because the specification for installing the barriers includes enhanced CCTV with individual personal recognition:  “What better way of ensuring that we all dutifully line up to have our picture taken than in a secure station and gating scheme?”

Farmer’s Bridge

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Birmingham & Fazeley Canal: Farmer's Bridge Locks (1976)

Birmingham & Fazeley Canal: Farmer’s Bridge Locks (1976)

Opposite the National Indoor Arena is a circular island with a signpost in the middle of the canal, for all the world like a waterway roundabout.

It dates back to the Second World War, when LMS Railway engineers installed it to hold stop-planks which would dam the canal in the event of bomb-damage, with the aim of protecting the railway-tunnel below from flooding.  The signpost, beckoning in three directions, to Liverpool and Manchester, Nottingham and Lincoln, and to Coventry and London, is a cross-roads of the English canal-system.

One arm of the junction leads on the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal, which shortly begins the descent of the thirteen Farmer’s Bridge Locks.

This was the eighteenth-century equivalent of the motorway system around Spaghetti Junction.

At one time there were 124 separate wharves and works between Farmer’s Bridge and Aston Junction, and until at least the 1920s the locks were gas-lit in order to operate twenty-four hours a day.  This stretch is a varied and spectacular piece of canal-scape, whether viewed from the towpath or by boat.

The canal plunges beneath the high-rise buildings associated with the 498-foot Telecom Tower (1965-6), which actually straddle Locks 9 and 10.  Locks 12 and 13 are similarly located beneath the bridges of Livery Street, the Great Western Railway approach to Snow Hill Station and Snow Hill itself.

The Farmer’s Bridge flight is a powerful and evocative walk beneath the streets of central Birmingham, the city that boasts it has more canals than Venice.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Gas Street Basin

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Gas Street Basin, Birmingham (1976)

Gas Street Basin, Birmingham (1976)

I first came across Gas Street Basin, the heart of Birmingham’s canal-system in 1976, when it still had the patina of a neglected, workaday industrial site.

The canal basin lies at the end-on junction of the Birmingham Canal and the Worcester & Birmingham Canal, the site of one of the famous absurdities of the waterways system.

From the moment the Worcester & Birmingham gained its Act of Parliament in 1791, the Birmingham Canal refused to share its water supplies, and set up the notorious Worcester Bar, a physical barrier 7ft 3in wide and 84 yards long over which freight had to be craned.

Eventually the Birmingham Canal consented to install a lock in return for heavy compensation when the Worcester & Birmingham line was fully opened in 1815.

The area was riddled with wharves, most of which have been filled in at various times during the twentieth century, and what few warehouses survive have been rehabilitated.

Nowadays Gas Street is positively gentrified, with apartment-blocks, canal-side pubs and restaurants and trip-boats, and the mirror-glass slab of the Hyatt Regency Hotel (Renton Howard Wood Levin 1990) dominates the area.

There’s no point regretting the loss of the scruffy patina.  Decay is destructive.

But I do regret the demolition of the Gothic Unitarian Church of the Messiah (J J Bateman, 1860-2), which stood above the short tunnel at the west end of the basin, a landmark both for street-passengers and boatmen.

It was the place of worship of the enormously significant Chamberlain, Nettlefold, Kenrick and Martineau families, and it contained the memorial of Dr Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the discoverer of oxygen, political radical and victim of the Priestley Riots of 1791.

This monument of Birmingham’s history deserved better than to be obliterated.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Going nowhere anytime soon

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National Tramway Museum, Crich: Derbyshire: Sheffield 189 (running in 1968)

National Tramway Museum, Crich: Derbyshire: Sheffield 189 (running in 1968)

The last time I had a chance to indulge my inner anorak talking to someone from the National Tramway Museum, Crich I made a point of asking why, whenever I visit the museum, I never get the chance to ride on the dignified, elegant Sheffield trams I remember from my childhood.

The superbly restored Sheffield 74 operates quite often, but otherwise the Sheffield vehicles in the collection stay in the depot.

The two Crich volunteers, who themselves happen to come from Sheffield, looked a little shamefaced, and said they were itching to get their hands on repairing and restoring Sheffield’s Last Tram, the Roberts car 510, which had a number of technical defects and needed a complete overhaul:  it has since been beautifully restored and returned to the rails on May 17th 2014:  http://www.tramway.co.uk/events/best-sheffield.

But what, I asked, about the two most representative Sheffield trams, the Standard 189 and the Improved Standard (similar but with curves) 264?

It seems that they both have serious bodywork defects.  The frames are creaking and they aren’t safe to run.

I felt like Dame Edith Evans, who refused to play Lady Macbeth because, she said, there were some pages missing from Shakespeare’s script:  “Why does she go mad?  She was perfectly all right at dinner.”

Both these trams came to Crich in 1960, straight from the streets.  They were perfectly all right when they left Sheffield.

When the museum began running services in 1964, those trams that were already in running order were the mainstay of operations.

Gradually, new restorations joined the fleet, and the Sheffield standard trams were parked up indefinitely.

In fact, the humid climatic conditions at Crich mean that even over a winter, trams stored in the depots attract damaging amounts of damp, and the lower-deck panels of 189 have suffered particularly badly:  http://www.britishtramsonline.co.uk/news/?p=7643.

There’s an additional irony.  264, which always ran in the mid-1930s cream-and-blue livery, has been repainted twice since it reached Crich.  189, on the other hand, has the elaborate, traditional Prussian blue livery that dates back much further.

As such, it was rarely if ever repainted after it was built in 1934.  Once the elaborate lining and lettering had been completed, such trams were given many layers of varnish.  Every few years, the varnish was sanded down and reapplied.

So, my Crich contacts told me, the actual paintwork of 189 is a historical artefact, and as such should be preserved intact.

The fact is that Crich, like almost all museums, has far more exhibits than it can show at once.  But its pioneering raison d’être from the early 1960s onwards was to run as a working line, alongside the early preserved railways like the Talyllyn and the Bluebell.

So I hope that before I become completely doddery I’ll have the chance to catch an orthodox second-generation Sheffield tram, as I used to do when I went to school in the 1950s.

For information about the National Tramway Museum, see http://www.tramway.co.uk.  There is a detailed and richly illustrated history of the museum at http://tramways.blogspot.com/p/crich-1959-1969.html, http://tramways.blogspot.com/p/crich-1970-1979.html and http://tramways.blogspot.com/p/crich-1978-1979.html.

Three new handles and two new heads

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National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Sheffield 74

National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Sheffield 74

As part of its mission to show fully the evolution of British railed street transport, the National Tramway Museum has carried out some remarkable restorations.  Indeed, some of the restorations are almost reconstructions.

One of the oddest-looking stages in the development of the British tramcar from an electrified, railed, double-ended horse bus to a suitable vehicle for speedy, weather-proof mass transportation is illustrated by the impeccable example of Sheffield 74, dating from 1900 but displayed in its late Edwardian condition.

It’s fundamentally a four-wheeled open-top tram, but with the upper deck enclosed in a substantial and shapely top cover.  However, in order to sit in sheltered state upstairs, you have to brave the icy blast climbing up and down the stairs from the platform.

It was a half-way house, dictated by the nervousness of designers and – more significantly – the Board of Trade about the feasibility of extending an upper deck out over the platform.

Fairly quickly those concerns were dealt with, and most British double-deck trams from the First World War onwards had a full-length double deck, commonly fully enclosed by glass:  [see Essentially Victorian Blackpool].

Sheffield 74 went through a number of metamorphoses, including transfer to Gateshead, where it ran until the early 1950s.  It must have looked as we now see it for only a few years.

When I first rode on the restored 74, I asked one of the crew how much was actually original.  The answer was identical to the answer I got when I asked about a tram at the Birkenhead Tramway – only the lower saloon, which in this case survived in Gateshead as a garden shed.

In the restoration of Sheffield 74, the top deck was taken from another Sheffield tram, 218, with parts from a third, 215.  The chassis (in tramway jargon, the truck) is from Leeds and the motors from Blackpool.  Most of the rest is, apparently, a superbly crafted fabrication.

The wizards of the Crich workshops have performed this feat time and time again – Derby 1 (formerly a summer house), Chesterfield 7 (a cottage), Leicester 76 (a cricket pavilion).  Some others, such as the Leeds trams 345 and 399 and the Liverpool Green Goddess 869, stood derelict for so long that they had to be fully rebuilt to be fit for passenger service.

What you see is not always what you got in vehicle restoration:  sometimes the shining monster is back-restored from a later design (like some of the locomotives currently emerging at Didcot) or even built totally from scratch, like the LNER A1 locomotive Tornado.

But up to now, the workshops at Crich and the other British preserved tramways have always ensured that what you see is built round something original, and what you get is at least as good as new.

For information about the National Tramway Museum, see http://www.tramway.co.uk.

“Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?”

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: USA tank 30075

Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: USA tank 30075

I don’t know much about railway locomotives, but I thought I could identify a Southern Railway USA-class 0-6-0 tank locomotive when I saw one.

Wrong.

I spotted a locomotive with the unmistakable American outline at the Barrow Hill Roundhouse, but 30075 isn’t what it seems and its story is interesting.

These USA tank locomotives were mass-produced by the United States Army Transportation Corps in 1942, as part of the preparations for what became D-Day.  382 of these punchy little shunters (which the Americans call “switchers”) were stockpiled in Britain, ready to operate the railways of Europe as they came under Allied occupation.

After the Second World War the Southern Railway bought a batch of fifteen to use in and around Southampton Docks, because they could cope with very sharp curves and yet were powerful enough to haul a full-length boat-train if necessary.

Fourteen were actually used, while the fifteenth was broken up for spare parts.  Under British Railways the fourteen were numbered 30061-30074.  Four of them survived into preservation.

30075 is not one of the fourteen, let alone the four.

Other ex-US Army locos were bought by private railways in Britain;  the Chinese bought some, as did the Egyptians, and some ended up in Israel and Iraq.

The Yugoslav State Railways thought they were so good they bought over a hundred, and then built nearly a hundred more themselves.

One of these, number 62-669, dating from 1962, was purchased from a Slovenian steelworks by the Project 62 Group [http://www.project62.co.uk/background.htm] in 1990.

They brought it to the UK, converted it as closely as possible to the British specification, and gave it the next number in sequence after the fourteen originals.

In 2006 the Group bought another from a steelworks in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and this will in due course become 30076.

In the 1960s we thought steam locomotives, apart from a few museum pieces, would disappear forever.  Fifty years later, preservation is morphing into reconstruction and, in this case, reconstitution.

It’s an interesting and welcome twist on the conventions of museum preservation, and it’s ironic that while many genuine historic locomotives are preserved in aspic, sitting indoors, beautifully maintained, highly polished like works of art, brand new locomotives like Tornado and nearly-new examples like the USA tanks are coming into service.

If it steams, and it moves, and it brings pleasure, I’m in favour.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list has a section on the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Keeping the wheels turning

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: D9009 Alycidon

Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: D9009 Alycidon

Among transport-preservation enterprises, I think the Deltic Preservation Society is particularly admirable.

The Deltics were the first-generation high-powered diesel locomotives that replaced steam on the East Coast expresses between London and Edinburgh in the early 1960s.  In their time they were the most powerful diesel locomotives in the world.

The prototype was named Deltic as an allusion to the marine-pattern Napier engines, which featured a triangular arrangement of cylinders like the Greek letter delta.

Twenty-two production locomotives were built, replacing a roster of 55 express steam locomotives dating back to the 1930s, and ran the East Coast services until the arrival of the High Speed Train in 1978.

They lasted another ten years on other routes, and six of the original twenty-three have been preserved.

They’re much-loved for their size and power, their classic American shape and the distinctive sound of their diesel-electric power units.

Three of these belong to the Deltic Preservation Society [http://thedps.co.uk] and are based in a purpose-built depot at Barrow Hill Roundhouse, Derbyshire.

All three locomotives – D9009 Alycidon, D9015 Tulyar (both named, in the old LNER tradition, after racehorses) and 55019 Royal Highland Fusilier – were purchased as long ago as the 1980s, and they have now been in preservation for more years than they were in public service.

Another Deltic, 55022 Royal Scots Grey, recently made news when it was hired as a working locomotive by GP Railfreight to haul bauxite trains:  [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13592652].

The Society maintains them in working condition so that they can earn their keep on preserved railways and on main-line excursions.  Alycidon and Royal Highland Fusilier are serviceable, and Tulyar is currently under overhaul.

It’s good to see superannuated locomotives in practical use, rather than as frozen-in-time exhibits in a gallery setting.

I applaud the acumen of groups of enthusiasts who have so successfully combined their own enjoyment of maintaining traditional engineering with a commercial business model that brings pleasure to present-day enthusiasts and guarantees a long-term future for these fine locomotives.

A similarly laudible preservation campaign, but at an earlier stage in the process, is the Deltic Preservation Society’s neighbour at Barrow Hill, the 5-BEL Trust’s project to restore an entire train, the Brighton Belle:  http://www.brightonbelle.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=200113.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list features the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Tornado

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: 60163 Tornado

Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: 60163 Tornado

I’d been looking forward to seeing the new A1 locomotive 60163 Tornado, ever since it took to the rails in 2008.  I caught up with it at the Barrow Hill Roundhouse “Fab Four” event in April 2012 – a well-organised facility for connoisseurs of locomotives to stand and stare at them and, in many cases, take photographs.

I happened to find my way to the trackside at the moment when a large, loudly hissing cloud of steam advanced down the line.  By the time it came alongside, anyone with a camera needed to shield their lens against the fog of cool condensation that completely enveloped us.

The cloud turned out to contain 60019 Bittern, one of the glorious streamlined A4 Pacifics now displayed in garter-blue livery.

The next cloud of steam proved to be 61994 The Great Marquess.  It was a damp, cold morning, and each loco was loudly blowing off surplus steam through its safety valves.

It’s an extraordinary sensation to stand within a few feet of a railway line, amply protected by safety fencing, as a hundred and more tons of locomotive glides past, the steam exhaust utterly deafening, the wheels and motion barely audible.

The final cloud of steam was something else.  60163 Tornado snorts and clanks and blows steam in all directions:  it’s intended to speed down long, straight stretches of main line, and doesn’t take particularly kindly to doing a catwalk turn.

Once this procession had reversed back into exhibition position I took an opportunity to look over Tornado closely.  It’s a strange beast:  it makes weird banging noises while sitting doing apparently nothing.

It is indeed a magnificent piece of engineering, built from scratch to fill the gap in the ranks of preserved main-line locomotives that ran the East Coast route in the days of steam, to the original post-war design by Arthur H Peppercorn, the last Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London & North Eastern Railway.

In order to run on present-day main lines the design is necessarily adapted to present-day railway conditions – slightly lower than the original, fabricated with the advantages of modern engineering, equipped with the data recorders and warning protection that modern trains carry, with riding-lights that look like traditional oil lamps but are in fact LED clusters.

In effect Tornado represents the form that the original A1s would have evolved into if steam had continued in Britain after the 1960s, and it carries the “next in class” running number accordingly.  Its name commemorates the RAF Tornado pilots who flew in the first Gulf War.

The first standard-gauge steam locomotive to be built in the British Isles since 1960, Tornado has all the dignity and elegance of original museum pieces, with the added frisson of being virtually brand new.

The very sight of Tornado brought audible expressions of ecstasy from hardened rail enthusiasts.

This must have been how it felt to see Flying Scotsman, Mallard and the rest when they emerged from the workshops between the wars.  Tornado’s website is at http://www.a1steam.com.

It won’t be the last.  Other new builds of lost locomotive designs are on their way, led by a new LMS ‘Patriot’, which will take the last-in-class number 45551 and the name The Unknown Warrior as a national memorial engine, replacing the long-lost, much rebuilt original 1919 London & North Western Railway memorial locomotive, Patriot:  http://www.lms-patriot.org.uk/overview.html.

 

Exploring Sydney: Sydney Tramway Museum

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Sydney Tramway Museum, Loftus, Sydney, Australia

Sydney Tramway Museum, Loftus, Sydney, Australia

I had great difficulty persuading anyone to take my admission money when I checked out the Sydney Tramway Museum.  Eventually, a gentleman dressed as a tram conductor, on the second tram I rode, correctly answered my question “Do you think I look like a concession?” and I decided the operation was simply relaxed.

Similarly, when I made my second visit to the deserted refreshment cabin it was another tram driver who actually provided me with a plastic cup, a teabag and a large carton of milk – and a ceramic mug to dispose of the wet teabag.  The whole experience was very relaxed.

Finding the Museum is a matter of deduction.  There’s virtually no signage:  resting trams can be seen from the platform of Loftus railway station, but it requires navigation to find a way into the site.

Two tram-rides are on offer in opposite directions, out-and-back trips where the entertainment at the outer end is watching the crew reverse the trolley poles.

The display hall has a fascinating collection, not always well displayed.  There are welcome invitations to climb aboard some trams, including the Sydney prison tram, 948, which is difficult to photograph because of the photo display boards propped against its sides.  Displays throughout are copious and labelled in detail.

It’s apparent, though, that a significant proportion of the fleet of trams is off limits to visitors.  It’s a pity there isn’t an escorted tour of the workshops and other storage areas where interesting-looking relics in a variety of liveries lurk.

A huge amount of volunteer effort has gone into this well-resourced museum, and further development is afoot behind a fine Victorian façade beside the track.  In time to come, when there are attractions at the termini and high-quality shop and refreshment facilities, the Museum will provide a magnificent day out.

This is the place to learn about Sydney’s complex, interesting and much lamented tram system.  If you’re passionate about steel wheels on steel rails it’s a must.  At present, though, for a simple outing it’s a bit of an effort.  http://www.sydneytramwaymuseum.com.au.

There is well-edited footage of the final week of Sydney’s tram services in 1961 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SADQyImniSI.

To see the state of Sydney trams that didn’t find a home in the museum, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rozelle_Tram_Depot and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V0dBzsf6eY.

 

Exploring Melbourne: W-class trams

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W-class tram 896, La Trobe Street, Melbourne, Australia

W-class tram 896, La Trobe Street, Melbourne, Australia

The Melbourne attachment to tradition embraces its trams, though the system itself survived partly because it was electrified much later than most.

Melbourne people regard the traditional W-class single-decker as part of the city’s furniture, like Londoners’ attachment to red double-deck buses.

The design dates as far back as 1923, and has been modified repeatedly over the years.  The latest were built in 1956, in time for the Melbourne Olympics.

Street-running trams are ideal for Melbourne’s transport needs, and new, improved vehicles have been introduced up to the present day.

But every time the authorities try to pension off the W-class there is uproar.

When the drivers (“motormen” in Melbourne) complained about the brakes, a media campaign pushed for the brakes to be improved, rather than retire the trams.

Around two hundred cars are in storage, and a much smaller number work the City Circle and a couple of routes where their restricted speed doesn’t conflict with more modern trams, and three are converted for the Colonial Tramcar Restaurant operation.

They are heritage listed, like the San Francisco cable-cars.  Some have been retired to transport museums, and there are several in the USA, but there is now an absolute embargo on exporting them.

Elton John has one in his back garden near Windsor, and Princess Mary and Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark were given one as a wedding present.  (Princess Mary was born and grew up in Tasmania, and worked for a time in Melbourne.)

There’s nothing quite like the Melbourne tram-system, and the operation on the same tracks of the most modern LRTs alongside a ninety-year-old design that won’t retire results from an endearing combination of practicality and public affection.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK_nHt_zh84 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n__ikjBfk6k&feature=related.