Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Exploring Melbourne: Under the clocks

Flinders Street Station, Melbourne, Australia

Melbourne people are vehement about their traditions. They don’t take kindly to the prospect of losing time-honoured components of the city’s lifestyle.

Flinders Street Station (opened in 1854, current buildings completed 1910) is a traditional city-centre meeting place. You meet “under the clocks”, in much the same way that New Yorkers meet at the clock in Grand Central Station.

The clocks are an array of clock-faces above the station’s main entrance, giving the times of imminent departures on the various lines served.

From the 1860s until 1983 a man with a pole moved the clock fingers as each train left to show the following departure time.

One day the clocks at the Flinders Street entrance were taken down ready for the installation of digital displays.

The following day the decision was announced to restore them – such was the public outcry about their removal.

Ever since the clocks that everyone meets under have been computer-controlled; the man with the pole is long since retired and everybody’s happy.

Update: Flinders Street Station has hidden architectural treasures, including a much loved and long neglected ballroom, part of the Victoria Railways Institute: http://blogs.cv.vic.gov.au/flinders-street-station/2012/10/30/the-flinders-street-station-ballroom-a-coveted-space.

Man of letters

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Ex-London Transport RM1670, Christchurch, New Zealand (February 2011)

A few years ago my cousin Richard and I dined at the now-defunct Paradiso Inferno on London’s Strand, an Italian restaurant that I understand was a favourite of the late, great journalist, Bill Deedes (1913-2007).

Richard is actually my first cousin once removed, so we’re a generation apart and I’m as fascinated by his understanding of the technological present as he is bemused by my ramblings about the historical past.

I pointed, as a tease, to the succession of red buses that stopped nearby, and mentioned that if you look closely at the destination indicators, the letter ‘l’ curls at the base and the dots of the ‘i’ and ‘j’ characters are actually diamonds.

That’s because the lettering is not Gill Sans but the specific font that London Transport’s chief executive officer, Frank Pick (1878-1941), commissioned from the typographer Edward Johnston (1872-1944).

This formed part of Pick’s campaign to give the capital’s transport system a uniform brand-image at every level from architecture and vehicle livery to poster-design and typography.

Frank Pick is a towering figure in modern marketing, and his legacy continues to colour the streets of London.

After all, though London Transport was broken up in 2000 and its bus-services are now run by a variety of operators, Transport for London still uses a revision of the Johnston font and the trademark roundel, and the buses are still red.

For the whole of our meal on the Strand, Richard and I found ourselves looking up at passing buses to check that the ‘i’s and ‘j’s really did have diamonds for dots and that the ‘l’s were turned up at the base.

Versions of Johnston’s Underground font crop up unexpectedly, even – as in the illustration above – in New Zealand.

An interesting article on Frank Pick, Edward Johnston and the designer of TfL New Johnston, Eiichi Kono, is at Edward Johnston: the man behind London’s lettering | London Transport Museum (ltmuseum.co.uk).

Fab Four

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: Fab Four event, April 13th 2012 – from left to right, 4464 Bittern, 4468 Mallard, 60103 Flying Scotsman, 4771 Green Arrow

My friend Doug, who likes trains nearly as much as he likes buses, tipped me off that the Barrow Hill Roundhouse “Fab Four” event would be good value.

The original intention behind the title, apparently, was to reunite for the first time in preservation examples of the LNER A1, A2, A3 and A4 locomotive classes.

I had to look this up, having discarded my Ian Allan spotting books many years ago.

The A1 Pacific locomotives were all scrapped in the early 1960s, and a brand-new version, 60163 Tornado, has been painstakingly constructed.

The A2 was an updated version of the A1. Its sole survivor is a household name, 60532 Blue Peter, which looks magnificent and only needs half a million pounds spending on its next overhaul.

The only surviving A3 is an even more familiar household name, 60103 Flying Scotsman, saved by the late Alan Pegler, doyen of railway enthusiasts. (His obituary in The Times, March 23rd 2012, relates a life well lived: “When the good Lord calls me to the happy shunting yard in the sky, I shall have no regrets,” he told the Railway Magazine. “I’ve had a great innings.”)

The Fab Four plan came adrift because Flying Scotsman, nearing the end of its latest overhaul, was indisposed, so the Barrow Hill people and their sponsors, Railway Magazine, fielded two examples of the instantly familiar streamlined A4 class, LNER 4464 Bittern, which is in full working order, and the record-breaking 4468 Mallard, which is apparently regarded as so precious a piece of history that it hasn’t steamed since the 1980s.

It was a tremendous show, and drew hordes of visitors, including hard-core railway photographers who carry not only dauntingly huge cameras but also stepladders, like paparazzi.

The implicit thematic intention was to show locomotives that hauled the East Coast main line expresses between London and Edinburgh and beyond.

In addition to the Fab Four, there were other locomotives with an East Coast Route connection.

Great Northern 251, dating from 1902, spun on its own axis on the roundhouse turntable. LNER 4771 Green Arrow, a variant version of Sir Nigel Gresley’s Pacifics, lined up with the Fab Four. 61994 The Great Marquess, a more rugged beast designed for yomping across the Scottish Highlands, pulled trains up and down the Barrow Hill demonstration track.

Barrow Hill is also the home base of the Deltic Preservation Society, which maintains in running order a roster of three of the diesel successors to the steam-powered Fab Four.

It was a fine display, beautifully organised. I warmed to the fact that every Barrow Hill volunteer I spoke to wished me an enjoyable day. They may have been scripted but they clearly meant it. I admired the fact that the carriages hauled by The Great Marquess were immaculately turned out in British Railways maroon on the side that the public sees; the other side is still in the Rail Blue livery that they brought from mainline service.

I had only one complaint about the whole experience. The advertised advance-ticket prices were fictional. It was practically impossible to buy a ticket in advance without paying a “transaction fee” of £1.00.

I don’t at all mind paying £15.00 rather than £14.00 for an entertainment. But I do expect to pay the price on the price-tag. Compulsory add-ons simply make me feel ripped off.

There’s no need for it. It would have cost the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and the Ticket Factory nothing at all to come clean and say the cost is £1 more than they pretended.

To do otherwise leaves a nasty taste.

Round house on the Old Road

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire

To this day, when trains north from Chesterfield turn right towards Barrow Hill and Beighton, rather than take the direct route via Dronfield into Sheffield, railway staff call it the “Old Road”, because it’s the line of the North Midland Railway which opened in 1840. The newer route was opened thirty years later, so has now been new for nearly 150 years.

At the same time that the Midland Railway opened its direct route north into Sheffield, the Barrow Hill locomotive shed was constructed. It has survived to become a unique piece of railway archaeology – the only surviving operational roundhouse locomotive depot in the UK.

There are other British roundhouses, of course: the Roundhouse at Camden Town, in north London is now a celebrated arts venue [Visiting the Roundhouse | Roundhouse], the Derby Roundhouse is a multipurpose conference venue [Derby Roundhouse | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times] and the main hall of the National Railway Museum is built around one of the two turntables of the former York North motive-power depot in Britain.

But only at Barrow Hill can you sense, smell, almost taste the atmosphere of coal and oil and grime that characterised the age of the steam locomotive.

And there, within the roundhouse itself and in the surrounding buildings, the graft of maintaining steam and diesel locomotives continues, thanks to the vision of a group of enthusiasts who realised that when the place closed to operational use by British Rail in 1991 an important piece of railway heritage was in danger.

The Barrow Hill roundhouse is home to a variety of preservation projects, including the Deltic Preservation Society and the Brighton Belle project [http://www.brightonbelle.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=200113].

This is a workaday place. Visitors are welcome, but there’s a healthy preoccupation with getting jobs done. Contemplate the hours of graft that bring back the neglected railway heritage; ask questions and show an interest. It’s places like Barrow Hill that keep the antique wheels on the modern rails.

Didcot Railway Centre has something of the same atmosphere, but is more fully developed as a tourist site.

For details of opening-times and special events at Barrow Hill, see Barrow Hill Roundhouse Museum – Britain’s last surviving working Roundhouse.

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.

Rail museum proceeds with caution

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National Railway Museum, York: Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway signalman training model

It’s an interesting reflection on British culture that, in addition to a National Gallery and a National Portrait Gallery, we have a National Collection of railway vehicles – 280 locomotives and items of rolling stock, most of them distributed between the Science Museum in London, the Locomotion museum at Shildon, Co Durham, and the National Railway Museum in York [http://www.nrm.org.uk/OurCollection/LocomotivesAndRollingStock.aspx?pageNo=1&cat=All&comp=All&ipp=96].

The York museum has something for everyone. I once took a school group there, and discovered the kids enthusiastically tracking the lavatory outlets on the Royal Train carriages.

NRM York, as it’s now called, started in a small way, built around the core collection of historic artefacts that came from the Stockton & Darlington Railway and its successors, the North Eastern and London & North Eastern Railways. Gradually, the other three of the pre-war “Big Four” railways added items which ultimately found a home on the site of the York North locomotive depot, literally across the line from the city’s passenger station.

This location has been repeatedly transformed, in 1975 when the Museum opened celebrating the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, in 1990-2 when the main building was re-roofed to create the Great Hall and in 1999 when the site was extended to create The Works.

There is so much potential in this vast collection of transport memorabilia. I’d particularly like to see the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway’s signalman training model displayed with sufficient space to appreciate fully its scale and complexity.

And the miracle of the NRM and the other great national museums and galleries is that they continue to offer free admission.

For that we should be grateful – and as generous as possible in support.

Thornton Gate

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National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Blackpool locomotive 717

Alongside their sleek new LRT vehicles, Blackpool Tramways has retained some of its previous fleet – a few double-deckers adapted to fit the new disability-compliant boarding platforms and some authentic heritage trams surreptitiously fitted with transponders to operate the new traffic signalling.

In order to rescue some of the others, the Lancastrian Transport Trust is planning a retirement home for superannuated Blackpool trams at Thornton Gate, on the way to Fleetwood: http://www.ltt.org.uk/thornton-gate-project.

This location was last used by the contractors upgrading the line to light rapid-transit standards. Before that it was used as the permanent-way yard for the tramway. Originally it was a coal-delivery yard.

Apparently, to forestall a 1919 plan to build a railway line from Thornton to Cleveleys, Blackpool Corporation Tramways agreed to run railway wagons of coal along the Fleetwood tramway, and acquired an electric locomotive for the purpose.

The coal deliveries started in 1927 but were ultimately unprofitable and ended in 1949.

The locomotive was useful and survived, and now serves as a shunter at the National Tramway Museum at Crich, Derbyshire: http://www.tramway.co.uk.

New Blackpool trams

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Starr Gate Terminus, Blackpool (June 2012)

The new Blackpool trams began operating on April 4th 2012 – sleek, smooth articulated LRTs in a funky purple-and-white colour scheme.

It’s a superb service, all the way from Starr Gate to Fleetwood and back with space, comfort and ease. It cost £100 million.

The demise of the old fleet is regretted by some, but it really was past its sell-by date. Some trams dated back to the 1930s, and many had been rebuilt and patched like the hammer with three new handles and two new heads: [see Essentially Victorian Blackpool and Tram terminus].

The beauty of the promenade tramway, and the reason it survived, is its ability to shift holiday crowds, most of all at the illuminations. Blackpool trams have always been much bigger than buses, and they take up less road space because they mostly run on their own private tracks.

And the new ones, like the old ones, appear to be crewed by committees.

And if you want a nostalgia trip, you can pay buy a day-saver to use the heritage fleet, when it’s running: Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours – Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all: the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside: the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing. To view sample pages click here. 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.

Let the train take the strain

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Replica GWR locomotive 3031 The Queen, as decorated for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, 1897, depicted at Madame Tussauds’ Royalty & Railways exhibition, Windsor & Eton Central Station (1983)

While I was waiting for a book to come up from the stack in Sheffield Reference Library, I came across a reproduction of the first issue of Railway Magazine, a periodical that continues to serve industry professionals, enthusiasts and general-interest readers: http://www.railwaymagazine.co.uk.

In June 1897 the dominant rail news was the construction of the Great Central Railway, then burrowing under Lords Cricket Ground on the approach to its new terminus at London Marylebone.

The lead interview, however, was with Mr Joseph Loftus Wilkinson, the General Manager of the Great Western Railway, who was profiled because the GWR prided itself as the “Royal Railway”, and was about to unveil a new Royal Train in time for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

The magazine duly included a detailed description of the new royal carriages and locomotives, noting that the Queen’s original saloon had been meticulously incorporated into the new coachwork without any alteration whatsoever: it was the only part of the new train that remained oil-lit.

The Chief Mechanical Engineer, William Dean, intimated to the reporter that though Her Majesty insisted on a speed limit of 40mph for her travels, she sometimes unwittingly approached nearer sixty. Presumably she was not expected to read the Railway Magazine.

Mr Wilkinson, in what nowadays would be seen as undisguised PR, remarked that at the Great Western “we firmly believe in speed. In these high-pressure days everybody is in a hurry.”

Crossing the Clifton Gorge

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Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol

The first high-level crossing of the Avon Gorge at Bristol was not, in fact, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s suspension bridge, but a wrought-iron bar, installed in 1836 when bridge-building was about to begin, a thousand feet long and 1½ inches thick, suspended two hundred feet above the River Avon, to carry a basket for transporting materials hung from a roller.

Brunel made the first trip across (after his newly-wed wife, Mary Elizabeth Horsley, declined the opportunity) and got stuck halfway when the bar dipped. He shinned up the suspension ropes to free the pulley and reached the opposite bank without further difficulty.

By 1843, with £45,500 spent, only the piers had been completed, linked by the single iron bar: work stopped – to Brunel’s lifelong disappointment – and the unused suspension chains were sold and incorporated in his railway bridge across the Tamar at Saltash.

L T C Rolt, in his biography Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1957; revised edition with an introduction by Angus Buchanan 1990), reports that when construction of the bridge stopped for lack of funds, the Clifton Bridge Company collected £125 in fares from members of the public who wished to ride across in the bucket.

The bridge as we know it was completed, to a variant of Brunel’s original design, in 1864 using the chains from another of his suspension bridges, across the River Thames at Hungerford.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing. To view sample pages click here. 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.

The Top of the South

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Queen Charlotte Sound, South Island, New Zealand

One of the finest ferry journeys in the world is the 70-kilometre Interislander voyage across New Zealand’s 24-kilometre wide Cook Strait, between the south of the North Island and the north of the South Island. The three-hour trip takes so long because it involves sailing in or out of Wellington Harbour and penetrating the drowned valleys of the Marlborough Sounds. There’s a detailed history of the Cook Strait ferries at http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/cook-strait-ferries.

It’s a fine, relaxing journey – as long as you’re a passenger, and not responsible for steering the ship. The Cook Strait is notoriously rough and unpredictable, with particularly weird tidal surges: http://www.niwa.co.nz/sites/default/files/images/imported/0011/43004/cookmov_2.gif.

The vessel, MV Kaitaki, felt oddly familiar. It turned out to be a former Irish Ferry, originally built in 1995 for the Holyhead-Dublin route: originally the MV Isle of Innisfree, it was latterly P&O’s MV Challenger, operating between Portsmouth and Bilbao. ‘Kaitaki’ is the Maori word for ‘challenger’.

The other two vessels on the Interislander service, DEVs Arahura and Aratere, are rail-capable, purpose-built as the physical link between the railway systems on the two islands.

Though none of the ferries transport passenger rail vehicles, they make it possible to travel all the way from Auckland to Christchurch by surface public transport, using the Overlander, the Interislander ferry and the Coastal Pacific train [see http://www.seat61.com/NewZealand.htm].

Indeed, when I return to New Zealand at leisure I plan to use that route and then the TranzAlpine to reach the west coast of the South Island at Greymouth.

The errand that took me on the Interislander was a lecture for the Nelson Decorative & Fine Arts Society at the Suter Art Gallery [http://thesuter.org.nz/visitus.aspx].

While I was in Nelson my host, Ainslie Riddoch, and her colleagues gave me snapper for lunch at the Boat Shed Café [http://www.boatshedcafe.co.nz] and dinner at Harry’s Bar [http://www.harrysnelson.co.nz], where we admired the waiter’s sang froid in serving a ménage à trois in the far corner. Ménage à trois is not, I’m assured, usually on the menu.

Ainslie’s husband, Hamish, told me about the holiday potential of the “Top of the South”, in particular, the tiny settlement of Collingwood, named – like Nelson and Wellington – after a British hero of the French wars a generation earlier.

During the 1850s gold rush there was a serious suggestion that Collingwood should be designated the capital of New Zealand. Now it’s where tourists go to experience wide-open spaces, with curious outliers of history such as the Collingwood Cemetery (1857) and St Cuthbert’s Church (1873): http://www.farewellspit.com/collingwood-new-zealand.html.

I’m fascinated by remote places that time passed by, so I will return to the Top of the South.

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