Harrogate Show

I always fancied having a serious 'go' at model engineering and in fact I have some boxes of machined 'bits' for a 3 1/2" gauge engine sitting in a garage in England. But on recent trips back to Blighty I've been more than impressed with the sheer professionalism that has crept into this area.

Take this for example - a 5" gauge model of an A4 I spotted at Harrogate Model Engineering Show in 2004. Good grief! To turn out something this size and quality you'd need a workshop bulging with the latest in digital machine tool technology and probably more cash than the original cost back in 1934. 'Model Engineering' when I used to read it up avidly in the 1960's was about casting wheels in your garden shed and finding a way to mill castings with a bicycle hub and a ground down screwdriver.

Nice model though eh? I could fancy driving this at a scale 'ton'. I remember the 12" to the foot version of 'Seagull' well - it was still in service when I first went up to university and I've got some nice cine film of it somewhere crossing Durham viaduct on a rainy Saturday morning

La'al Ratty

At Ravenglass in West Cumbria, midway between Barrow in furness and Whitehaven the Raveneglass & Eskdale Railway, known locally as "La'al (little) Ratty" begins. It terminates at Dalegarth, a small village in the waestern Lake District. This narrow gauge railway has steam locos, some are replicas of pacific types famous in steam's heyday. None of the rolling stock is more than five feet high.
Shown here is the link motion of a 2-6-0 loco, the Northern Rock. Named after the building society perhaps? Who knows.
La'al Ratty is no toy railway. It runs services up the Esk Valley winter and summer. But less frequently in winter.

Norman

Korea Railpass

I'm feeling very inclined to make a trip to Korea soon. Maybe this year. You can get cheap flights over from Narita and I'd like to take a look around some of the 'sights' there. And get the feel of the place - I have quite a few Korean friends here now.

As a foreigner you can get a Korea Railpass - around USD 75 for three days. Three solid days of 'gricing' on a new railway system - perfect eh?

My eye was caught yesterday by an item about the new North - South Korea rail link. It seems that there are problems over tests that were supposed to have been started this week, but the system itself is built and ready to go as soon as the politicians and generals make their minds up. Here's a picture of the station on the southern side of the DMZ at Imjingak.

There's lots of talk about trans-Eurasian traffic - mainly freight of course between Japan, China and Europe. Hey! Maybe one day I'll be able to get on the train here in leafy Chiba-ken and get off again at Preston about 10 days later!

How will the gauge issue work in all this though? The new link is 'standard gauge' but as I understand it South Korean railways are 3'6" like Japan. And across Russia the tracks are 5'0" gauge and standard gauge in China. I wonder how all that would get worked out.

Be great to see some Calais-Pusan freight trains though! Here's hoping.

Fairbourne Railway

Last year I spent a week on the Welsh coast with my daughter Julia. I must have been one of the few people in Britain never to have holidayed there before and it was fun.

Here's a very small railway that was only a couple of miles from our cottage - the Fairbourne Railway. At 12" gauge it's more miniature than narrow gauge and it only runs two miles from Fairmourne station out to the point at the mouth of the Mawddach estuary. Goes nowhere basically, but you can catch a boat the few hundred yards across to Barmouth if you are inclined. You can find their web site here.

Some of their locos are rather nice and I especially like this one. It's a third size model of a real narrow gauge engine that ran on the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway down in Devon and was sadly closed back in the 1930's.

Great place to walk the dog too!

Over the Rockies

Holiday planning season is here, so I thought I'd include a postcard from a 'far away' place - well, far away from me anyway. Thanks Rev. Mugo and I hope that you enjoyed your recent bit of 'gricing' along the Canadian Pacific yourself! Forget those elk and bison and stuff - time to find a good 'grade crossing' with plenty of trains ...

I always wanted to get a good peep at the Canadian lines. When I was a child I had ideas of going and getting a job as a 'Mountie' and watching those big Canadian 'Hudsons' with a Rocky Mountain background. I had a train book some well meaning relative gave me with sketches of men in loud check shirts waving to passing locomotives.

Also one of the Jack London stories - was it 'White Fang'? - was based near a section house somewhere along the tracks. Never mind the canines - what about the cabooses?

Actually a few years ago Julia and I did make it to the CP lineside about a hundred miles west of Vancouver at around seven in the morning. Can't even remember where now - one of those funny Canadian names that is a mixture of Qwakiutl Indian and Scots Gaelic. It was certainly raining like Scotland anyway.

Chapelon Pacifics

When I was a teenager I lived for a few years in the south of England and my first 'solo' trips abroad were to Paris. In those days you could buy an 'overnight' special cheap return travelling out by train via Bologne on the Friday night boat and travelling back to England on the Saturday night boat. Fare Crawley to Paris (Gare du Nord) return was 17/3 (87 pence, about $1.20!) This gave about ten glorious hours to lurk on smoky French station platforms and in the vicinity of engine sheds before you arrived back in Britain on Sunday morning exhausted and smelling of sulpher.

The highlight of such trips was arriving at Bologne (Maritime) on the boat around three in the morning to find one of these beauties simmering on the quayside ready to take the boat train down to Paris. Probably even this actual one on occasion - a Chapelon Pacific number 231K 8 - though here she is carrying the 'Golden Arrow' headboard. That was the premier service via Dover and Calais.

Andre Chapelon was probably the classiest of all steam locomotive designers and the French locomotive crews were real 'poseurs' too with leather 'flying helmets' and very Gallic goggles.

Fancy a ride? I can hear the roar of her exhaust now as she heads off in the dark across the misty fields of the Pas de Calais. A racehorse headed for the capital and breakfast ...

Rice field route

Here's a neat view of the Sobu Line between here and Naruto. Nowhere else in the world could you get this kind of a view. A 1067mm (three foot six inch) gauge single track but laid to the highest of main line standards stretches to the horizon and expresses down this tangent will touch 80 mph. DC electrification and all beautifully maintained.

Down each side of the track is a rice field road. And beyond that some frozen weed covered tanbo - our standard kind of rice paddy in Japan. Hard to imagine that in a couple of months frogs will be croaking here and the young green plants will be standing in shallow lakes.

It's a mid winter evening in 2004 and I'm waiting for the down Shiosai to pass. Of course I've been keeping warm in the car and enjoying some bags of snacks. Heaven eh? Who could ask for a happier place to be than by some busy lineside?

Vivarais

My first experience of French narrow gauge was on a camping holiday about twenty years ago. Actually it was a pretty boring trip - we were near Aurillac which is a kind of semi-arid Keswick (sorry Keswick!) right in the middle of the country. But I made an overnight drive on my own across to the Rhone valley near Valence to see if it was any better around there and I wasn't disappointed.

This was the engine I found simmering at Tournon in the Ardeche at about seven on a sunny morning - Chemin de Fer de Vivarais number 404. Now one of the most interesting preserved lines in Europe, it was once a part of a huge metre gauge secondary network that criss-crossed the whole of France.

404 is an 0-6-0 0-6-0 Mallet and every morning takes a train from the banks of the Rhone at Tournon up to Lamastre in the hills - about a 20 mile climb. Part of the route is even over the SNCF freight line on dual gauge - what more could a gricer reasonably expect?

Any suggestions?

I was round at a friend's house today and spotted this beautiful and very unusual item on top of the piano!

Amazing eh? Actually there is a whole train - the locomotive, a 'Wagon-Lits' coach, a 'hospital coach' with stretcher and a working rotary snowplough (watch your fingers!) . It is '0' Gauge tinplate, as is obvious I guess from the 1:48 on the cab side.

I said I'd try and identify it for them. My own guess is that it's Bing from the early 1920's. The locomotive (obvious from the conical smokebox door not visible here) is modelled on a Bavarian 'Pacific' and it has the letters 'GBN Patent' which I think was the first trade mark of 'Gerbruuders Bing'. That hospital coach kind of dates it to shortly after the First World War for me.

It's a very fine model - the clockwork mechanism inside is finished like a Swiss clock and would power a battleship and is still immaculate. This is really the 'Paleolithic' of railway/railroad modelling eh? When people first realised that trains were worth modelling!

Keiyo Line

The Japanese love big civil engineering projects and happily this runs to building new main lines too.

In the 1970s many new communities were created around Tokyo Bay with major land fill schemes and in 1990 they were joined by a new main line - the Keiyo Line - from Tokyo central station to Soga. It is about 30 miles long with seventeen stations including one at Urayasu for Tokyo Disneyland and also a station to serve the new 'Information City' at Kaihin Makuhari. Forty years ago most of these places were just sea bed, and the new route runs a couple of miles south of the previous coastal Sobu Line!

Also most of the track was built elevated so that they don't have to worry about building at ground level later.

Here's an East Japan 205 EMU on a stopping train on a sweaty dull May afternoon at Chiba Minato (Port), no doubt with those big air conditioning units on the roof roaring away at full throttle. Everyone waiting for the doors to close and a bit of coolness to relax in.

The New 'Shiosai'

On the way back from Chiba this afternoon I caught a later train than usual and we had a 'meet' with the Tokyo-bound 'Shiosai' at Minami-Shisui.

'Regulars' on this line know all the 'meets' and head out onto the platform with lit cigarettes while their train is held 'in the hole' for passing 'varnish' as they would refer to it in America. Me, I head for the end of the platform with my camera ...

A few days ago I posted a picture of the old 183 Class express, but here is the kind of train that we've had on the line since last December - the 255 Class Boso Express Units.

These trains are completely state of the art in terms of electronics and they do from 0 - 60 in about ten seconds but they will never quite have the charm of their predecessors to me. It's a sign of old age I know

Railway Architecture

Carnforth again I'm afraid but this is one last look at it. Just past the tallish building on the right hand platform is the Settle - Leeds junction curving off to the right. It is a very tight curve at which even the relatively short wheelbased bogies of a DMU squeal in protest.The Leeds train never exceeds 10 MPH here. A Pacific 4-6-2 would have no chance. I guess even a 0-4-0 saddle tank wold be struggling. But they must have managed sometime. Its interesting to note the overhead electric cables. Why are they there? They end at the signal box beyond the bridge. Electric trains do not use these platforms. Indeed the only electric trains that run are the high speen Pendolinos run by Virgin between London and Glasgow on the mainline.

Norman

MAV 424

A long time ago - I think 1977 - I had a trip to Hungary to visit a penfriend there. I had a really good time - the country was already in the process of becoming quite liberal and there was a kind of exciting haze of doing stuff that was technically illegal but who cared?

Railway photography fell into this category, and I got shouted at a few times for pointing my camera at trains. But who could resist those lovely MAV (Hungarian State Railways) locomotives.

At Vacs motive power depot I was happily running my camera and tape measure around one of these beautiful 424's when I found a policeman standing next to me. But he was obviously a railway fan himself and very proud of the engines. He muttered something about 'not photographing installations' and then let me get on taking pictures of the engines to my heart's content.

In those days all the Hungarian engines carried red stars on the front of the smokebox which made them look like something out of a John le Carre novel. Here's 424.287 in Budapest recently on the shuttle service out to the (excellent I'm told!) railway museum. I can't wait to make a trip ...


photo thanks to Michael Taylor

More about Carnforth

A whole section of the station has been reconstructed just as it was before British Railways took over. I remember Sunderland and Newcastle stations in my childhood. They were a bit grimyier than this and I suspect Carnforth was too in its steamy past.

Norman

Stainmore

The railway that I used to know so well as a child crossed the north of England between Darlington and the Lake District. The line had been built in the 1860's to carry iron ore and coke between County Durham and Barrow-in-Furness.

This was never an easy railway to run. The gradients were steep (sometimes more than 2%) but only small engines could be used because of weight restrictions on the high viaducts. So 'double heading' of feight trains was common.

Here is one of Worsdell's pretty little class J21's on a passenger train from Darlington to Penrith passing the summit box which was 1370 feet above sea level - the highest main line railway in England. My grandfather often worked 'relief' shifts at this box and I would go with him. It could be a fearsome place in winter - there was a red box of 'iron rations' on the shelf in case men got snowbound working there. I seem to remember that the stove was kept running full time too! Ofter kindly drivers would kick some extra coal off the tender as they passed.

Shasta 'Daylight'

When I was about seven or eight I used to see advertisments for Athearn 'PS-2' box car kits in our British magazine 'Model Railway News'. Much later in life I got to see PS-2 boxcars in the flesh (at various railroad museums!) and also what American freight trains looked like and I was very impressed.

So here's a 'marker' for items to appear soon on Western railroading and especially the 'Espee'. Here's a old photograph of the 'Shasta Daylight' in the 1950's passing the mountain of the same name, a place which has become very important to me over the years.

The two-tone orange and tuscan 'daylight' livery was agrguably the prettiest of the North American paint jobs although who could fail to love the ATSF 'warbonnet' colours. Both are just perfect for hot clear desert days.

Sadly the 'Shasta Daylight' vanished long ago but the Amtrak 'Coast Starlight' still uses this route in the middle of the night.

Walter M. Smith

There are often people I coome across in railway history that I would love to have known more about. Usually they are engineers that didn't quite make it to the top of their profession and who don't appear in biographical dictionaries of famous scientists and designers.

Most of all I'd love to know something about Walter M.Smith - a Glaswegian who started as an apprentice with the North British Locomotive Company and ended up as Chief Draughtsman for the North Eastern Railway. If he hadn't had such a talented boss as Wilson Worsdell probably he would have been their Chief Mechanical Engineer. But he did design some engines of his own - and espcecially these beautiful 'Atlantics' which made very sophisticated compound use of steam.

But the really interesting thing about Walter Smith is that he made it to Japan in the 1870's and for several years was locomotive superintendent on the Tokaido line.

The North Eastern Railway and Japan - he and I would have had a lot to talk about! I still wonder sometimes if there's some correspondence or diaries lurking somewhere that might make a proper biography of hims possible.

The Train from Barrow

No saddle-tank pulls in to Carnforth on the Barrow line these days, alas. This modern DMU of the Transpennine Trains runs from Barrow to Manchester Airport. It is fast, and more comfortable than the Virgin trains and it runs on time. That has to be something of a record for British trains. Actually up to last year it was always late and by the same amount. Now the powers that be have rescheduled it to the [late] times.

Norman

'Brief Encounter' revisted

Just to follow on from Norman's blogs on this topic I have to say that Carnforth station is still a great spot for gricing. For 'up' trains this is the bottom on the hill that starts around Tebay and by gum! Do they still hammer past here fast or what! Just like they always used to. In the movie there's a great shot of an unrebuilt 'Royal Scot' class storming through at night. The highlight of the whole film for me ...

I was just re-reading the blurb on the internet about this movie again "David Lean's first major success, Pamela Johnson as .. Trevor Howard as the doctor ... blah! blah!" For goodness sake man! When are you going to get to the trains? That lovely Fowler tank engine on the Barrow plaforms, those old L.M.S. compartment coaches.

Ah! But you will have to hire or buy the movie I'm afraid ...

Brief Encounter - the Clock

The two lovers parted for the last time under this very clock lovingly restored.After Big Ben it is probably the most photographed clock in England. Very likely the most photographed railway clock!
I have spent a day photographing around Carnforth Station. More pictures to follow...........

Norman

Brief Encounter

Carnforth Station, some seven miles north of Lancaster in the UK was the location for the famous film "Brief Encounte" starring Trevor Howard in the good old days of black and white movies. It was a romantic tale of a love affair centred around brief meetings at this railway station. With Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No2 as the musical backdrop it was a guaranteed romantic tear jerker. What I call a Kleenex Special.
The station had fallen into near dereliction sinse those days but around 2002 English Heritage and the EU decided to throw some money at it and restore the station to its former glory. This visitor centre is the result. The old refreshment room is back to where it was and much of the station is fully restored and is indeed a tourist attraction. The steam trains no longer thunder through, alas, only the Virgin Pendolinos and Cross Country trains along with the blue trains of Trans Pennine Railways. Electric bullets or faceless diesels.

Norman

le Train a Grand Vitesse

My favourite part of France is Burgundy. It would be Burgundy even if there was no high speed rail line there, but the fact theat the original TGV line fom Paris to Lyon runs through some of the prettiest parts of the area certainly adds to the charm eh?

I've 'griced' along this route for twenty years, but on my last visit there in the autumn of 2004 I discovered that all the lovely old red first series TGV have gone and been replaced by these silver brutes.

There is something especially nice about seeing these trains in Burgundy, which they flash through at around 180 mph. This is a great spot to spend a spring or autumn evening - about ten miles north of Cluny and at the end of a tangent that runs to the horizon. The speed these trains approach you need that kind of visibility too, or your camera won't even get switched on in time.

In Japan the shinkansen routes in the countryside are usually a dead loss for train watching, being either in the air on concrete stilts or underground. But no-one would be disappointed along the TGV line!

Embsay Railway

Many of the preserved railways in England are purely 'local affairs'. They don't have big main line engines in steam or offer long cross-country rides.

Here is one such. The Embsay Railway, near Skipton in Yorkshire. It's in a very nice part of the country and basically goes a few miles from nowhere to nowhere. Often when you turn up on a steam weekend motive power is some small industrial 0-6-0 as here, hauling a couple of very old coaches.

Who wouldn't like such a railway? A nice day out if you are not in a hurry to get somewhere. Oh! And a VERY good railway bookshop here too. And of course a cafe for a cup of tea.

Limestone Brae East

'Limestone Brae East' is my railway shed. Here's a picture of it that I took about a year ago on the day that I completed the HO loop around the garden. My ancient and trusty Athearn SD9 has just completed the 'opening ceremony' by making a grand circuit of the property.

Neat eh? There's not a lot of space in Japanese gardens as a rule but the 'up side' is that timber - especially cedar - is much cheaper than in the UK.

Last year I did a lot of 'tail-chasing' of trains around the circuit to run in stock that had lived in boxes for years, but so far this year my schedule has made it hard to spend time playing trains. But this month I'll make an effort.

In the shed one side has a station layout and the other a lot of work benches and storage. There's also a small loop around the interior to test stock out on if it rains.

My stock is a mixture of American and British stuff collected over years. I'll show you some of it soon.

All-time favourites

If you were to ask me which was my all time favourite class of locomotive on any railway in the world I wouldn't even have to think over my answer. It would surely be Nigel Gresley's 'A3' Class Pacifics.

These engines were introduced in 1923 and eventually 80 were built. For forty years they handled expresses on the East Coast main line between London and Edinburgh and other LNER routes. Their mechanical performance was improved over the years and also in my view their appearance too. Just a few years before the class started to be withdrawn they were fitted with double blastpipes and 'German' style smoke defelectors as in this picture of 60046 - 'Diamond Jubilee' - taken about 1960. This is how I best remember them as a young 'gricer'!

These engines were terrific performers. My memories of them as a child are of seeing them thundering down the Vale of York on summer days wheeling an express along at around the 100 m.p.h. mark - something awesomely beautiful to witness. If you want to read a good book about A3's there are many and perhaps the best photos are here. The picture on this blog was taken from this volume with thanks.

The most famous example of the class today - and sadly the only one to be preserved - is 60113 'Flying Scotsman'. Most of the engines bore the names of famous race horses such as 'Tranquil', 'St. Simon', 'Sansovino' and my all time favourite locomotive for reasons I'll talk about another time 60076 'Galopin'.

Can't see the wood for the trees

Here's a photograph I'd guess was taken in 1963. It's of a small stream just to the north of Barnard Castle town centre called Percy Beck.

How can I date it so accurately? I used to play in this stream often as a child and one of the signal boxes operated by my grandfather was just to the right of the stone viaduct in the background - Barnard Castle West. In 1958 the woodland here in this valley was clear-felled and in 1960 they began to replant with the saplings you can see in the picture. In 1965 the railway was closed, and the signal post you can see on the viaduct was removed.

The trackless viaduct still survives but the woodland here has grown back tall again and you could walk under this bridge in summer and not even realise it was there. A lot of the stonework is covered in ivy and the new forest is mature - just within my lifetime.

I've included this picture here because for me it's a good example of how views can change so quickly - and often there's nowhere where that happens more obviously than around a railway.

Recently I returned to a good photo spot near a tunnel in Cumbria where I would photograph steam locomotives as a teenager. To my surprise all I could see was a wood! The lack of trackside fires since dieselisation, and changed maintenance priorities over forty years, had meant that the portal and track had completely vanished behind a screen of oak

Shiosai nostalgia

We have one 'named express' on the Sobu Line and there's eight in each direction every day between Tokyo and the Pacific Coast at Choshi. This train is called the 'Shiosai' which in Japanese means 'Sound of the Sea'

Now they employ very modern stock we'll look at another time but until last December the service used pretty ancient but absolutely immaculate 183 Class EMUs. A classic Japanese design and livery. It was a pleasure to see them flashing by in that two tone red paint job, nearly forty years old and yet perfectly looked after by the engineers at Makuharihongo depot.

I didn't often travel on it because, apart from the 500 yen express charge, there was seldom much advantage as it doesn't stop at our local station and if you did get it back from Tokyo you would still end up waiting on a draughty platform at Chiba or Sakura

So here's the late afternoon 'Shiosai' as it used to be - passing us at Minami Shisui while our local train waited 'in the hole' on the up platform.

I'm sure that JR must have preserved one of these classic units somewhere and perhaps they are still in use on some remote line up in Tohoku. But sadly around here they are just a memory now.

Platform routine

Here's a photograph I took at Inage yesterday afternoon. A 'local' from the west side of Tokyo has just pulled into plafform three headed for Chiba. Luckily it's a still quiet time of day - school is already 'out' but most kids are still involved in 'club activities'

The working of trains on a plaform like this is unimaginable in Britain. Between seven and eight in the morning fourteen stop here and in four cases there is only two and a half minutes between one leaving and the next pulling in. Forty four sets of doors along the eleven car E217 unit will open and passengers getting off will spill out between lines of commuters already waiting at the marks on the platform where the doors will draw up. Perhaps 500 people will get on the train and it will be away within thirty seconds.

It's a method of train operation that is conducted with military precision. And of course it relies on passengers as well as staff to make it work. More than a million people use the Sobu Line to commute into Tokyo every day - it is one of five main routes into the capital operated By JR

Welsh Incident

The title to today's piece refers to a poem by Robert Graves which might make you laugh if you haven't read it. But I've been inspired to put some narrow gauge in by the latest piece on Eddie's railroad site - if you haven't see it yet look here and the link is also on the right of the page ...

By the way of anyone knows of other good blogs like this let me know, I'd like to add the links.

I think that the Talyllyn was the first (but maybe the second?) of the railway rescue projects back in the early 1950's. And this is their most famous locomotive - 'Dolgoch'. It's an amazing little line hidden in the hills of mid-Wales. If you haven't been - why not? There are loads of interesting railways around there, some of which will feature here soon.

Keeping Dolgoch company is my daughter Julia and her dog Darcy. I don't think Darcy is 'into trains', especially ones whose safety valves suddenly 'lift' without warning or that sound their whistles in the vicinity of large black dogs ...

Behind Bars

Out in Mihama-ku this afternoon and I took my tape measure with me. I've been planning to measure this beast for a couple of years. It's a shunting tank used in the Kawasaki steelworks at Chiba and it lives in a small park.

Actually I'd forgotten which small park and which set of traffic lights and I ended up walking around three kilometres further than I needed to but I found it in the end.

I've always thought that this tank would make the perfect live steamer in 7 1/4" gauge. Solid short frame 0-6-0 with all it's works outside and easy to adjust. Pefect eh?

So no prizes for guessing how mad I was when I eventually tracked it down to discover a fence around it and 'keep out' notices. Had someone taken leave of their senses???. Fencing such a nice locomotive in like a wild animal? There was a sign but I couldn't read it.

Well, Edera has now and it seems that the problem is that the Parks Department have found asbestos. They will have to remove it which they plan to do during this year but in the meantime keep your distance.

Found asbestos?? Don't they know that every steam locomotive in the entire world has a layer of asbestos under those boiler lagging plates. What else did they think kept the heat in?

Anyway, at least they are going to sort it out. But no working drawing for me for some months yet

In the Park

A feature of Japan is the number of steam locomotives that found their way into municipal parks in the 1950's and 1960's. There are literally hundreds and often they aren't easy to track down.

In a way it's a big bonus - to have so many engines saved from the scrapper's blowtorch. But many seem to be starting to deteriorate now - in the UK this wonderful and fortuitous national collection would already be attracting a big conservation effort. If something isn't done soon they will rust away. And some of the ones under cover are sad examples too - one in Sakura is imprisoned behind thick chicken wire that makes a photograph impossible!

Here's one of the better examples - a class C57 'Pacific' in a park near Oomori station in Tokyo. It looks a bit sad here in the driving rain but mechanically it's in good shape and actually moves it's wheels under compressed air power a couple of times a day.

Just behind it is the old Tokaido main line where it lived during it's working life, speeding expresses from Tokyo to Osaka and points west. A very fitting location for retirement eh?

I was past here a couple of weeks ago headed for Tsurumi and noticed that C57 66 had been given a fresh coat of black paint by someone over the winter. Great!

Belah Viaduct

When I was a boy my grandfather worked on the railway as a 'relief signalman'. The 'relief' part meant that he provided holiday or sickness cover for regular signalmen. It was a great job as it meant that he travelled on his motorbike over a wide area to many different signal boxes and during my holidays I often went with him.

One of the 'boxes' that he occasionally worked was at Belah. Belah was I think then the highest viaduct in England; the tracks were 65 metres above the river. It was said that the whole structure was finished above the foundations in just six weeks by sailors - who back in the 1860's of course had to climb high masts every day so were used to heights.

This viaduct was the largest on the Stainmore Line across northern England - a route sadly long closed. It will feature a lot in this blog.

Belah 'box' is just at the far end of the viaduct to the left of the tracks - you can make it out in this picture if you look carefully. To get there you had to park up at Barras station and walk down the line and then over this viaduct, something I did several times. If there was an icy gale blowing or it was a dark moonless night it was quite a scary experience!

'Standard' 4MT

I guess in Britain we must have pretty well invented the 'preserved railway'. I wonder which the first actually was - perhaps the one of the Welsh narrow gauge lines, the Ffestiniog or the Talyllyn line. In terms of 'standard gauge' the two earliest were, I think, the Bluebell Railway in Sussex and this line in Yorkshire - the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway.

This kind of operation is run by enthusiastic members. Now we have dozens, probably hundreds, of preservation societies around the country. Their tracks are still usually the haunt of steam locomotives young and old.

And this one is young - a British Railways 4MT 'Standard' tank locomotive designed by Robert Riddles and built at Brighton in 1951. For some extraordinary reason in Britain after the war we set about building hundreds of new national standard steam locomotives at a time when many countries were already scapping them.

These 4MT ('mixed traffic') engines were very nippy and were mainly used on suburban trains. It's a pretty design don't you think? But sadly most were scrapped after not much more than a decade of service. A waste eh?

When did all this start then?

I'm sometimes asked where I get my interest in railways from. Who knows? But one thing is sure - it was 'in my bones from my earliest memories.

When I was still in nappies my parents lived on Croft Aerodrome just a few miles south of Darlington in north east England. This airfield had been built during WW II and is now a racing circuit but around 1950 it was still in use for flying. My father had a job in 'maintenance' and we lived in a Nissen Hut on the south site of the site.

At the end of the access road, if you turned left at the gate a short walk (or in my case a push in a pram) brought you to a bridge over the East Coast Main Line just where it slimmed down from four tracks to two to cross the River Tees half a mile to the north.

I don't know how many times I pestered my parents to take me there, probably a lot. But I have clear memories as a three year old of watching the clouds float over the Cleveland Hills while a succession of trains raced up the Vale of York. I didn't know it then but I lived in a gricing nirvana, an endless procession of LNER express locomotives in all the exotic post war liveries. Long freight trains would be held at the catch points huffing in the sunshine as they waited for an express to Edinburgh or Newcastle or London to overtake. And then the clanking and clattering of three link couplings as they got underway again ...

Good grief! Fancy being let loose on the grassy embankment again with a good digital camera.

That's the trouble with time eh? No reversing it.

Keisei Line

Here's a picture I took last week. Edera had to go to a lecture in Yuukarigaoka and that gave me the opportunity for a bit of 'gricing' along the Keisei line tracks through the town.

It's a great place for photos too - trackside access along a lane might almost have been designed to give photogenic angles. Some kind resident has even planted a few flowers by the lineside.

The Keisei Line is one of several private railways in the 'Greater Tokyo' area. This is it's main lne from Tsudanuma out to Narita but there is also a branch to Chiba. Keisei made a lot of money over the years developing real etate near its stations and the trains are heavily used by commuters.

As you can see the trains are 'standard' 4' 8 1/2" gauge (1475 mm). The main JR system is the old British 'colonial' 3'6" (1076 mm) gauge for reasons we'll look at later.

This is a Keisei 'all stations' train from Narita to Ueno - the terminus just to the north of central Tokyo. It's a really typical Japanese design and the roof - if you could see it - is loaded down with air conditioning to keep travellers cool in summer.

Tools of the trade

Whe I was still in short trousers the technical term for trainspotters was 'gricers'. I wonder where this word comes from. Once I heard it suggested that it derives from 'grousers' who go grouse shooting. But our 'bag' was a book full of engine numbers and not dead birds


When we went on our gricing trips we always took with us our beloved Ian Allan abc locomotive listing books. Mine are now carefully packed away in Lancashire - family heirlooms! - but here's a secondhand one I bought a while back in a bookshop near Aylesbury which lives with me in Japan. It says inside that it used to belong to David Richard Barnett of 9 Westwood Avenue, Glenholt, Plymouth and it's the winter 1962 edition. It cost 2/6 - two shillings and sixpence or 'half a crown' in old money.



If you take a peek inside the book you'll see that David used it to summarise his gricing activities. All the engines he 'spotted' have their numbers carefully underlined and 'namers' - on this page some of the surviving Great Western Railway 'Castle' Class - have the name underlined too. A man after my own heart.

Books like this are still published for Britain and Europe by Platform 5 Publications and for North America, where they are known as 'rosters', by Kalmbach and others. You can get books like this for Japan too but they are much, much more complicated for reasons I'll explain another time.

- Iain

Chiba eki

Here's a view of part of Chiba eki (station) taken from the top of the nearby Sen City Tower.

The station is a "Wye". On the lower right (platforms 1 to 6) the Uchibo Line and Sotobo Line tracks are coming in from the southern part of the Prefecture, and above them (platforms 7 to 10) the Sobu Line tracks are curving in from the east of the Prefecture. That's my train home!

On the left of the photograph the combined Sobu Line tracks are heading off to Tokyo - the nearest are the slow lines and then further away the fast lines.

Many Japanese stations tend to look the same - not surprising because so many were rebuilt in the 1960's and 1970's. This station was only completed in 1968, before that the main station for the town was about half a mile way. All the tracks were completely changed around here too - in the 1950's this was the site of the steam locomotive roundhouse.

Notice how large the passenger overbridge is compared with Britain. Actually here there are also two passenger underpasses between platforms here as well. It's very normal to have at least three links between all the platforms in busier stations in Japan because of the thousands of passengers that can arrive on every train in the rush hour

- Iain