Category: Historical
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Sir Roundlington is a name you’ve probably never heard of. He was supposed to be a new TfL mascot, but he didn’t make the cut. Other examples of short-lived mascots include Wilfred the bunny, who failed to make the cut in the 1920s. Sir Roundlington is probably the least well-known, and after being deposed from…
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The King’s Cross upgrade is a complex project because of the proximity of the adjacent tunnels known as Gasworks to the main line station and its platforms. This is why the layout was hugely rationalised in the seventies – in order to provide more flexibility – however that came with certain caveats which have only…
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This is the third part of the feature on Thomas Telford’s achievements. The first part of this feature used colour versions of the Rosoman painting located on the left hand side of the work sourced from the Internet with some upscaling involved. Th post depicts the structures on the right hand side of Leonard Rosoman’s…
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This isn’t some anatomical write-up on the composition of Thomas Telford’s body! Rather its a relatively unknown painting that commemorates his life’s work. There’s barely anything on the internet about this painting thus I deemed it an appropriate move to write a post about that work. How this came about is I didn’t know about…
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London’s mysterious Tower Subway, which opened in August 1870 and was the site for the city’s very first tube railway even though that was a small narrow gauge line with just one carriage carrying a few passengers a time under the Thames, has been the subject of curiosity for decades because many spot its circular…
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This weekend fifty years ago both British Railways and London Transport began a major task in their ticket offices and ticket machines to embrace the pending national conversion from pounds, shillings, pennies, to the new decimal coinage of pounds and pence. The change was effected on 14 February with the rest of the country following…
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The third instalment in this comprehensive series on the origins of the Shinkasen! We begin with the notion the new line would be affectionately named Yume no Chōtokkyū – or the ‘Super Dream Express.’ The older (eg 1930s era) and considerably more popular name which many use – ‘Bullet train’ – didn’t gain world wide…
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The railway’s route from Southwold to Halesworth: From the station itself the line headed across Southwold common and soon entered the largest cutting on the entire route. This present day view on Google Street shows the start of the cutting itself. Its been a public footpath for the last seventy years or so. This footpath was what…
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The Köln-Bonner Eisenbahn’s (KBE – or the Cologne to Bonn Railway) Rheinuferbahn once provided local and express trains between Köln and Bonn. There was a substantial freight operation too with large marshalling yards servicing local industries. The company stayed independent to the very end and it would have been around today had its finances not…
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From the 1990s to the present day. Pair of 115 DMUs at the station. 1990 possibly. Source: London Reconnections A Class 165 in the early days of its use with a pressed steel DMU visible in the old diesel depot. Source: Twitter. (Note: Tweet is suspended, deleted or made private thus an archived image is…
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