September 2010 edition
Front Page
Merchant Navy Class Locomotive No. 35028 "Clan Line"
(C) Alan Hawkins
Contents
Welcome...
Video Highlights
Photographic highlights
73096 - from breakdown to recovery. A photographic and video report.
A Freight on Rail Report- on track for sustainability.
The Passenger Train (1940) From the Prelinger Collection on Internet Archive.
A Gem of a Book! (Dick Bodily)
Christian Wolmar: "Blood , Iron and Gold" Podcasts
Newsletter
On This Day
Along The Trans Siberian
Around The World in 80 Railways. 4. The Channel Tunnel
Future Mainline Steam Excursions
High Speed Trains (on Youtube)
RTNnews International
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Welcome to this September 2010 edition of "On Shed", the online magazine of the RailTubeNetwork.
We are pleased to give a warm welcome to the 20 new members who have joined Steamtube this last month, bringing our international membership to a grand total of 328. Please feel free to upload your own steam railway photos and videos…and make comments, or ask questions…there is usually someone who may be able to point you in the right direction for the answer!
And thank you all for your courteous manners.
Steamtube really is the friendly "home of steam on the net"
Our Steamtube archive now holds 1,302 video clips and 5,513 photographs …
And we had many visitors to the site last month…our page views for the last month was just short of 40,000! In addition, there were in excess of 7,000 page views at the SMJ (Stratford and Midland Junction) specialist railway site.
It has been very pleasing to see the speed with which videos and photos are uploaded to our sites. Thank you.
And a special thank you to those who provide additional information through the group pages……6024 and the S & D groups, for example. Please feel free to use the site’s group pages to keep the membership well informed regarding galas, mainline excursions etc.
You will have noticed that we have grouped Diesel, Electric and Disused onto one site….please continue to support these with your excellent archive and current photographs and videos. (Embedding from Youtube is the best course of action.)
So, what’s in this edition of "On Shed"?
Mainline steam highlights…..upcoming mainline events….Around the World in 80 Railways…..(Part 4 Channel Tunnel)….Day 7 in our trip along the Trans Siberian…..a book review…a couple of Podcasts featuring Christian Wolmar..
..a photographic account of work done on repairing 73096 by the MHR volunteers…an article from Freight on Rail (on track for sutainability)…
On This Day….
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"Do you want to share in our success? Sponsor our Steam Tube banner and have your company or group or organisations name on every page of Steam Tube and have our thousands of visitors see your name and web address - all for a very reasonable rate!
email tfc@steamtu.be for more details!"
===========================Video Highlights....
Mainline railtours............
The Midlander hauled by 6201 Princess Elizabeth (John Edkins)
6024 King Edward 1 (Fred Lewis)
Western Highlands June 28-30,2010 (Roni)
Cornish Riviera Express, Dawlish. 26 June 2010 (XxBec3509)For more excellent clips...visit..http://steamtube.ning.com/video/video?sort=latest
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Photographic Highlights
Dick Bodily Nic Burden Mark Sorrell David Creasey
Bernard Roberts David Cooper Tony Wood Etienne Labar
For more excellent photographs......http://steamtube.ning.com/photo?sort=latest
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73096 ...from breakdown to recovery! A photographic and video report...
Congratulations to all at MHR Ropley for getting this fine locomotive back into service.
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RAILWAY NEWS
Monthly Newsletter
New consumer rail traffic
The latest ORR figures issued on 24th June show consumer rail freight is growing and increasing market share despite the recession, through a combination of domestic intermodal and international traffic which proves that rail is moving out of its traditional markets. Here are some examples If you drill down behind these figures.DB Schenker started a new direct train service linking the Midlands with Italy at the beginning of June. The flow from Birmingham to Padova in Northern Italy builds upon existing twice weekly DB Schenker services which take only 42 hours via the Channel Tunnel with customers ranging from retailers, food producers and manufacturing. The train provides customers with a saving of at least 24 hours over traditional road haulage and customer also do not need to worry about collecting from the rail freight terminals as DB is providing a full door to door services collecting from the customer and delivering to the end destination. There is also a timetabled connecting import and export service between Birmingham and Glasgow providing an alternative to the road network.
Transfesa and Solsor which are both major pan-European logistics operators are together running a weekly refrigerated service between Spain and the UK which has a transit time of 45 hours and uses Transfesa’s axle changing facility on the French/Spanish border. Transfesa mainly uses railways for long distance transport and road for final delivery.
Direct Rail Services have relaunched a five day supermarket service for WH Malcolms with each daily train hauling up to 26 containers. It is estimated that CO2 savings of 12,000 tonnes per year will be made. This equates to removing over 13,000 lorry journeys off the road network between Daventry and Mossend.
International Produce, the logistics arm of WALMART responsible for supplying the supermarket chain ASDA with fresh fruit and vegetables, has been able to transfer fruit and vegetable imports from road to rail, using DB Schenker, to deliver 40 containers every weekend from the Port of Tilbury to the rail freight terminal at Wakefield.
The intermodal service run by DB Schenker for Stobart which commenced last Autumn carrying refrigerated fresh produce from Spain to the UK is the longest rail freight service in Europe under the operation and direct control of a single operator. This service has 30 intermodal reefer boxes and avoids 13.7 million road kms per annum between Spain and the UK and reduces CO2 emissions by 8625 tonnes per annum. There are aspirations to increase the service to three times a week, and then five times a week in the future.
The Royal Mail now has seven mail trains a day operated by DB Schenker, transporting more than one million items of mail every day.
Freightliner’s trading division Logico have launched a container service from Southampton to BIFT (Birmingham Intermodal Freight Terminal) on behalf of Allport, the UK’s leading independent freight forwarder. .Commencing last August, this is the 12th daily service that Freightliner operates from Southampton, to destinations in Birmingham, Cardiff, Coatbridge, Daventry, Doncaster, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester.
All these services are benefiting from reduced costs, improved service reliability and will result in a reduction in carbon emissions and improvement in road safety.(C)Freight on Rail July 2010
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The Passenger Train (1940)
From The Prelinger Collection on Internet Archive
Describes a journey from a large city to the country on a streamline train. Shows duties of many of the people who work in the station and on the train.
Visit: http://www.archive.org/details/passenger_train
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A gem of a book
Most cut price bookshops are full of less than authoritative railway books typically full of dramatic colour photographs of steam with often misleading texts. In short the sort of books no enthusiast would want on their shelves. But while browsing through such establishments as ‘The Works’ very occasionally one comes across something worth having. Recently I came across such a find in a Lakeland cut price book shop.Priced at £4.95 ‘ O S Nock’s Pocket Encyclopaedia of British Steam Railways and Locomotives’ is an absolute little gem. I’ve always tended to avoid Ossie Nock’s prodigious output of works on various British railway lines and builders of engines, finding his books a bit ‘samey’ and less authoritative than the definitive works on various rail topics by other authors who have specialised in a particular subject. But no one can deny his wide encyclopaedic knowledge of British steam railways, much of it gained first hand as a engineer for the Westinghouse Brake and Signal Company, which comes to the fore in this ‘Pocket Rocket’ of a book. No one else apart from C J Allen was as well placed to write overviews of Britain’s railways in the steam age.
This 392 page volume consists of an amalgamation of two books originally written in the ‘60s for Batsford, ‘Steam Railways of Britain in Colour’ and the earlier ‘British Steam Locomotives in Colour’. They were quite different in format from his previously published books and quite ground breaking at the time in that they each consisted of about 190 colour illustrations, accompanied elsewhere in the book with about half a page each of very readable interesting anecdotal text. The locomotives volume is at the back of this new book where locomotives are shown in roughly chronological order of build. The steam railways volume found at the start of this 2009 combined reprint is a delightful hotch potch where pictures of important locomotives that he did not have room for (or forgot to include) in the original book are mixed with pictures of carriages, signals and crests of pre-grouping railway companies.
The text is entertaining and rather quirky in style. While learning about The NBR ‘Scott ‘ class locomotive the reader is told that in a later text he will be informed about the rivalry between the NBR and the Caledonian (but for now we are concentrating on NBR 4-4-0s!)
What’s special for me about this book is that I can just dip into it and find out something new every time plus it brings to life the ‘monochrome’ era of pre-grouping and ‘Big Four’ steam, which I’m too young to have known, with its colour illustrations of the liveries of engines and carriages. Where else are so many examples shown in colour?
Two other excellent books I’ve recently seen offered cut price at ‘The Works’ are ‘The Great Central from the Footplate’ by R Robotham and F Stratford and A S Peck’s ‘The Great Western at Swindon Works’. So keep your eyes open .
(C) Dick Bodily 2010
A very useful reference book, Dick. (Shedmaster)
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Christian Wolmar speaks about his book "Blood, Iron and Gold"
and...Part 2
For details on obtaining your copy of this excellent book, go to http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/
...and this is a copy of the July newsletter that CW sends to subscribers....
"Dear subscriber,
I never quite got round to sending a July newsletter because I was on a bike ride from Britain to Italy, on which there are a few blogs on the site. So I am making up for it with a short newsletter now, and a longer one later in August.
My gosh, I did miss a lot while I was away and already a lot had happened in June. The new government is finding its feet and in Philip Hammond we have a transport secretary who seems interested only in showing his credentials as a future chief secretary to the Treasury or, as that seems to be in the hands of the Libdems, the big cheese himself as a replacement for young whippersnapper Osborne who seems bound to cock it up at some point.
Therefore, as several of the new pieces on the site suggest, we are in for tough times with little light at the end of the tunnel. For the time being, Crossrail, Thameslink and several other big projects look safe, though the London Underground might be the first to suffer under the new regime given the scale of its investment plans and their cost. The trouble is, though, is that Hammond does not look like the sort of fellow to bat for his department, which is the name of the game, but rather wants to ingratiate himself with the Treasury. And that’s a game you can never win, as they will always want more.
Apart from the ridiculous ending of the non-existent ‘war on the motorist’, transport news has been landing thick and fast on my desk. On the railways alone, we have had the report into the Intercity Express Project, the franchise review, the preliminary findings of the McNulty review and the announcement of the departure of Network Rail’s chief executive – and much more besides. There’s material about most of these things on the site, or there will be soon.
I need help – a huge number of hardback copies of Fire & Steam have come into my possession and I need to offload them from under my bed. Therefore, for just £5 plus £2 75 p and p, you can have a signed copy. Pay by PayPal – xian@pro-net.co.uk – or email me for the address to send a cheque.
Meanwhile, there is quite a lot of new material on the site, thanks to the delay in sending out this newsletter. There are four new Rail columns: in 645 I look at whether the Libdems can leaven the Tory cuts and in 646 I continue the theme by looking at detail on the possibilities for both franchising and Network Rail. Then in 647 I describe my first meeting with the new transport secretary who asked some odd questions about level crossings and advanced stop lines while in 648 I return to the subject of cuts following the Budget.
There are also a couple of new Transport Times columns: in June I suggested that the minister should not confine himself to a cuts agenda – which now seems a rather forlorn demand – while in July I suggested that HS2 might have all sorts of unexpected consequences and gave my new book a plug, too.
And there are a couple in TSSA Journal, which now has its own tab on the home page as I have written regularly for the magazine for several years: in the July issue I wrote about the sudden announcement of the departure of Iain Coucher from Network Rail while in August I focussed on the cost of consultants and the damning report by Sir Andrew Foster on the IEP project.
Otherwise, not much else apart from a small piece for the Financial Times on the spread of high speed rail across the world and a review in The Oldie. As ever, nearly all these articles have attracted interesting comments – which shock horror sometimes disagree with me – so please add to the debate.
Please note that the lecture/launch of my new book, Engines of War, is on September 28th, at 6pm in the German Gymnasium next to St Pancras. Tickets are, as they say, going fast, and can now be obtained on line from the Railway Children at £15 here, with a fiver off buying the book on the night. All profits are going to the charity. See you there
More news later in the month
Christian Wolmar"
Why not visit his site, and subscribe to the newsletter!
"On Shed" is pleased to present this information for your pleasure.The views expressed in CW material are not necessarily those of "On Shed".
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================================================On This Day
07/09/1962
Last 'Cornishman' express ran over the Stratford-upon-Avon to Cheltenham route: this and other express trains were re-routed via the Birmingham - Gloucester line.
Winchcombe Station, looking north.It was near here in 1975 that a goods train derailment effectively brought to an end this line between Stratford-upon-Avon and Cheltenham. For more on this, visit www.gwsr.com.15/09/1830
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened.During the ceremony, William Huskisson MP, became the first person to be killed by a train.
27/09/1825
The Stockton Darlington Railway opened. It was the first passenger rail service, the steam locomotive travelled at 10mph.
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Along The Trans Siberian
Crossing the Ob River
Novosibirsk
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Around The World in 80 Railways. 4: The Channel Tunnel
When travelling to the near continent from the UK, travellers would go from Dover to Calais...this would be the part of the journey least liked or anticipated...after all, what would the weather be like...a stormy crossing would take days off your stay. If only you could travel from England to France without getting your feet wet!
This short film , found on Youtube, provides an insight into the tunnel, its construction and early setbacks....
The Tunnel was opened with great ceremony on 19th May 1994
In recent times there have been some problems...a fire, which closed the tunnel for 7 months, and the weather related problems this last winter (2009/10)
The weather difficulties of this last winter were a considerable embarrassment for the tunnel's operators..
Still, you pay your money, and take your choice...
Some will always prefer to go by ferry...others will face their particular demons and succumb to the quick trip
under the water.....
Statistics for the tunnel are revealing.......
Total cross-tunnel passenger traffic volumes peaked at 18.4 million in 1998, then dropped to 14.9 million in 2003, from then rising again to 16.1 million in 2008.
Cross-tunnel freight traffic volumes have been erratic, with a decrease during 1997 due to a closure caused by a fire in a freight shuttle. The total freight crossings increased over the period, indicating the substitutability of the tunnel by sea crossings. The tunnel has achieved a cross-Channel freight traffic market share close to or above Eurotunnel's 1980s predictions but Eurotunnel's 1990 and 1994 predictions were overestimates.
For freight transported on through freight trains, the first year freight prediction was 7.2 million gross tonnes, however, the 1995 figure was 1.3 million gross tonnes. Through freight volumes peaked in 1998 at 3.1 million tonnes. However, with continuing problems, this figure fell back to 1.21 million tonnes in 2007, increasing again slightly to 1.24 million tonnes in 2008.
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Future Mainline Steam Excursions......
| Wed 01-Sep | THE DORSET COAST EXPRESS - London-Weymouth (WCRC) [wcrc] 30777 (34067/70000): Victoria-Southampton-Weymouth 60019 (/34067/70000): Weymouth-Southampton-Waterloo | RYTC |
| Thu 02-Sep | THE CATHEDRALS EXPRESS London Kings Cross-Carlisle [wcrc] 46115: TBA-Carlisle and return | STDR |
| Fri 03-Sep | THE SCARBOROUGH FLYER Crewe-Scarborough [wcrc] 46201/46233/6001971000: Crewe- | RYTC |
| Fri 03-Sep | THE WEST HIGHLANDER (day 1 of 4) Liverpool-Glasgow [wcrc] 46115: Liverpool-Preston-Glasgow Central | RYTC |
| Sat 04-Sep | Excursion (Provisional) [CANCELLED] Chester-London Kings Cross [dbs] 46201: Chester-Kings Cross | UKRT |
| Sat 04-Sep | THE WEST HIGHLANDER (day 2 of 4) Glasgow-Mallaig-Fort William [wcrc] 61994: Glasgow Queen St-Fort William 62005: Fort William-Mallaig-Fort William | RYTC |
| Sun 05-Sep | THE WEST HIGHLANDER (day 3 of 4)  (14/08) Fort William-Glasgow [wcrc] 61994/45407: Fort William-Crianlarich-Oban-Glasgow Queen St | RYTC |
| Sun 05-Sep | THE SPITFIRE (10/08) London-Faversham (WCGN) [wcrc] 70013 30777/44932: London Bridge-Dartford-Rochester-Faversham, Sheerness-Faversham, Faversham-Ramsgate-Dover-Ashford-Tonbridge-Redhill-London Bridge | SHNM |
| Sun 05-Sep | THE HOP PICKER (10/08) Faversham-Dover (WCGN) [wcrc] 70013 30777/44932: Faversham-Canterbury East-Dover | SHNM |
| Sun 05-Sep | THE CATHEDRALS EXPRESS London Waterloo-Exeter [wcrc] 70000: Waterloo-Salisbury-Yeovil Jc, Castle Cary-Taunton-Exeter TBA: Yeovil Jc-Salisbury-Waterloo | STDR |
| Sun 05-Sep | THE WAVERLEY York-Carlisle [wcrc] 44871 (/45231/45305/45690/46115): York-Leeds-Settle-Carlisle and return | RYTC |
| Sun 05-Sep | THE SHAKESPEARE EXPRESS [Times] Birmingham SH-Stratford-upon-Avon (TY01) [wcrc] 4965/5043: Birmingham-Shirley-Stratford-Solihull-Birmingham (Twice) | VNTL |
| Sun 05-Sep | THE TORBAY EXPRESS [Times] Bristol-Kingswear (EH01) [dbs] 6024 (60163/71000): Bristol-Weston-Exeter-Kingswear and return | TBEL |
Be sure to check with the tour operators to confirm these runnings......
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HIGH SPEED TRAINS
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To keep up to date with railway developments worldwide check out......
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Thank you for reading through this edition of "On Shed"
If you have ideas...or articles...perhaps about your favourite locomotive/railway/heritage railway, please let us know. We would be pleased to hear of your ideas.....and suggestions....
Till next month....
Peter S. Lewis (Shedmaster) Editor, On Shed.
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