Railways Blog

A blog about trains, covering photography, railway history, transport politics and modelling, in no particular order.

National Rail Enquiries Fail

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Tim Hall

So, despite the fact the festival was way out in the sticks, I booked up for HRH Prog 2 at Hafon Y Mor near Pwllheli in March. It’s a six-hour train journey, but being a rail enthusiast I always treat the journey as part of the holiday when going away.

Then disaster stuck. First, construction work on Pont Brewit near Penrhyndeudraethâ€Ž damaged the bridge, with initial suggestions that the line would be closed for at least a year until the new bridge was complete, and rail replacement buses from Harlech.

Then the storms at the beginning of January damaged the line in multiple places, and from the extent of the damage to the sea wall it’s quite possible it will take several months to repair. Replacement buses are now in place from Machynlleth.

Unfortunately it’s impossible to find the timimgs of these replacement buses online. The National Rail Enquiries website shows trains running through to Penychain (the neareast stop to Hafan-y-Mor) with no mention of bus replacements by March. Ask it about the same journey for next week, and you get train to Harlech and bus from there (total journey time from Reading just over seven hours). Given that parts of the line will certainly be closed for at least a week, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that National Rail Enquiries is lying to me.

Alternative travel plans are not looking good either. The even organisers have arranged a shuttle bus to Bangor on Thursday and Sunday, but unfortunately weekend engineering work with multiple rail replacement buses turns any attempt to travel home via that route on Sunday into a nightmare. I’d advise the organisers of HRH Prog to schedule next year’s festival for Saturday and Sunday rather than Friday and Saturday to avoid a repetition.

And travelling the whole way by coach is a complete non-starter; National Express quotes an eleven-hour journey, and no gig is worth enduring eleven hours on board a coach.

At the moment the only advice I’m getting is “check your journey details closer to the time”, which isn’t really satisfactory.

Posted in Travel & Transport | Tagged HRH Prog, Narional Rail Enquiries, Rail Replacement Bus | 4 Comments

Vintage Traction at Spiez

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Tim Hall

Some photos from a visit to Switzerland back in 2003. It was a time when I was working on an N-gauge layout based on the Bern LÃ¶tchberg Simplon line, and took a lot of photos detailing train formations, rolling stock and structures as research.

I used the town of Spiez as a base. It’s both a major rail hub with lines leading off in four directions, and a lakeside resort that’s quieter than tourist traps like Interlaken.

A few of these were on my long-dead Fotopic site, but never got migrated over to my replacement site. This was my last year of using film before I went digital; these are taken from CD-Roms scanned at the same time as the films were processed.

Here we have a veteran SBB Ae6/6 arriving at Speiz on a local freight made up largely of cement tankers, which I think originated from the Interlaken branch. These locos, dating from 1952, were once the principle power on the trans-Alpine main lines, especially the Gotthard line. By 2003 these fifty year old machines had been relegated to much humbler duties such as this one.

This BLS Ae4/4, seen here coming off the Simmental line with a train from Zweisimmen, is even older, dating from 1941. These locomotives are hugely significant historically, as the first modern-style bogie locomotives; prior to their introduction all electric locomotives were rigid-framed or articulated designs.

An SBB Em3/3 arrives with a short local freight, which I believe came off the Simmental line. With the entire network electrified and small shunting tractors available at many stations, diesel locomotives aren’t particularly common in Switzerland. They’re largely restricted to short-distance trip workings such as this one.

The sun doesn’t always shine in Switzerland, and here’s another venerable Ae6/6 on the cement run. This is one of the so-called “Kantonsloks”, fitted with chrome trim and names after the Swiss cantons.

Posted in Railway Photography | Tagged Bern LÃ¶tchberg Simplon, Featured, Spiez | Comments Off

Barbie Hippo

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Tim Hall

A fallen flag of privatisation.

Class 175 no. 175 104 in First North Western livery calls at Cheadle Hulme on a peak-hour Birmingham to Manchester working back in 2003. The North-Western franchise disappeared in a franchise rearrangement that saw its services split between the new Northern, Trans Pennine and Wales franchises.

Class 175s are still a familiar sight at this location, now carrying the livery of Arriva Trains Wales, on services between South Wales and Manchester.

Posted in Railway Photography | Tagged Cheadle Hulme, Class 175, First North Western | Comments Off

When I Were A Lad

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Tim Hall

When I were a lad, we didn’t have Brio wooden trains. We had to make our own….

You may be able to guess what it’s supposed to be a representation of. This one may have had trouble negotiating tight curves, and probably isn’t quite as accurate as the recent Dapol model.

Posted in Modelling Projects | 6 Comments

Toilet of the Month

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Tim Hall

Noch Toilet This is just… wrong.

But if you really want one on your N-gauge layout, Hattons of Liverpool have them on sale.

Posted in Modelling News | Tagged Noch | 2 Comments

Ronnie Biggs was a criminal thug who destroyed the lives of two innocent people who were just doing their job. The people we must not forget are Driver Jack Mills and his secondman David Whitby, both of whom never recovered and both died before their time. Biggs and his accomplices were no folk heroes, and screw those who try to romanticise their crimes.

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Tim Hall | 1 Comment

Modern Image?

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Tim Hall

A column in the most recent DEMU Update suggested it’s well past time to retire the term “Modern Image” as a description.

It made perfect sense in the late 1960s when used by the likes of Cyril Freezer in the pages of The Railway Modeller. Back then, the default “serious” model railway was the archetypal GWR branch line terminus. Only a minority of modellers attempted to recreate the present-day scene, and a generation of enthusiasts had lost interest in the real railway with the end of steam in 1968.

In 2013, “Modern Image” makes a lot less sense. The railway of the early 1970s bears little or no resemblance to the colourful post-privatisation scene of today. Indeed, a layout set in the 1970s is set as far in the past as a chocolate-box 1930s layout would have been in the 70s.

Reframing “Modern Image” to define models set in the past decade isn’t so useful either, There’s no strong cut-off point equivalent to the end of steam in 1968, not even privatisation. In the years 1958 to 1968, British Railways replaced their entire motive power fleet aside from some early electrics. While recent years have seen a lot of new equipment replacing life-expired trains from the 60s and 70s, we haven’t seen a wholesale replacement on an equivalent scale. An awful lot of the 70s and 80s ex-BR fleet is still in traffic wearing new liveries, such as those mid-60s class 86s in the photo above.

Older modellers whose interests are firmly in the steam era will continue to use the term Modern Image through force of habit, and there’s little point trying to stop them. But that’s no reason not to discourage its continued use in magazines or exhibition programmes.

Continental-style epochs never really caught on, but I think it’s better to describe layouts and modelling interests in terms of approximate time period. “Pre-Grouping North British”, “30s Great Western”, “1970s Blue Diesel” or “Post-Privatisation” are seem perfectly adequate descriptors to me.

Posted in Modelling News | Tagged Cyril Freezer, Modern Image | 4 Comments

First Sight of the Class 68

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Tim Hall

First sight of a completed Vossloh Eurolight for DRS undergoing testing at Valencia in Spain. Modern environmental regulations mean we’ll never get an equivalent to the roar of a “Deltic”, but it still makes an impressive sound for a modern loco.

Posted in Travel & Transport | Tagged Class 68, Videos | Comments Off

Engineering Work

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Tim Hall

It’s not every day Network Rail builds a new signal gantry at the top of the road. This was the reason the curve between Reading and Reading West was closed on Sunday.

Posted in Railway Photography | Comments Off

Classic Traction at Dawlish

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Tim Hall

There’s precious little freight traffic in the south west of England nowadays, with reduced volumes of china clay, and most other flows short-term spot traffic. So this train rather took me by surprise, especially since I’d been told earlier that it was no longer running. It’s the timber flow from Heathfield near Newton Abbott, and this is the empties heading west.

The operator is Colas Rail, one of the smaller “open access” freight operators. Their locomotive fleet is a mixture of new General Motors class 66s and refurbished older British-build power, including this class 56 dating from the late 1970s.

The locomotive is a lucky survivor. Freight operator EWS inherited the class 56 fleet when British Rail was privatised in the 1990s, and soon retired them in favour of new-build GM power. Many of the locomotives were scrapped with a handful sold to preservationists or smaller operators. This one was actually sold for scrap in 2011, only for the scrap dealer to resell it to Colas Rail along with four others, to be overhauled and returned to service.

So the appearance of this loco in its colourful black, yellow and orange livery was quite a sight, especially as the class 56 wasn’t seen this far west in BR or EWS days.

Posted in Railway Photography | Tagged Class 56, Dawlish | 1 Comment