Category: Historical
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Forty years of dereliction and decay: After closure the line remained derelict for the next twenty years or so. There were moves to reopen it, none of which came to fruition. Most of the route’s track remained until the early forties. The army blew up part of the Blyth bridge thus the line was severed…
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The fourth instalment in this comprehensive series on the origins of the Shinkasen! This covers a series of photographs of the line’s construction between Tokyo and Osaka, with the former and latter stations well represented, as seen during 1963. There’s also some detail about the construction of the New Tanna Tunnel on which work had…
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That darned canal aqueduct at King’s Cross is a major factor why the railway layout at this prestige London railway terminus has problems. Its not just that, there’s also the Camden sewer which also caused problems too by being right across the entrance to the three Gasworks tunnels. As we have seen, that sewer was…
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The Alfred County Railway was a two foot gauge line from Port Shepstone to Harding in KwaZulu Natal. Running for slightly less than a hundred years, it closed for good about five years or so ago after several attempts to revive its fortunes by way of tourism as well as a better freight service. In…
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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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