Kevin Robertson

The 'Badminton Line' is sometimes mistaken as a sleepy GWR branch line, but in fact its origin and current operation is as a route connecting the new Severn Tunnel, thus South Wales, directly to London and skirting central Bristol and the route through Temple Meads and Bath. However when built just after 1900, it was equipped with an array of stations serving the sometimes very minor locations along the route. One of these was the eponymous estate at Badminton.

This 1988 book focuses on the construction of the line and these initial stations. The civil engineering was quite problematic for a short line, particularly the amount of water to be dealt with, and this is well described. The stations are also described in good detail and well illustrated with both photographs and drawings of their layout and buildings.

Although always an important route, the stations never had much local traffic and so became casualties in the Beeching era. The important marshalling yard of Stoke Gifford, North of Bristol, also closed in 1971 and its site became a whole new station, the increasingly large and busy Bristol Parkway.

A good book and an enjoyable read on this important, interesting but now largely overlooked line. However its age is a limitation and so much has happened there since. Readers would also enjoy P. D. Rendall's The South Wales Direct Line: history and working, which gives a more operational description of the line in the BR and later era.… (mer)

The Southern way: the regular volume for the Southern devotee, issue 36, edited by Kevin Robertson (Noodle Books, 2016) brought back many trainspotting memories on the Southern region in the mid 1960s and the impending end of steam. The photographs taken by John Seddon and described by Andrea Durrant in ‘Fifty years on: counting down to July 2017, part 2, winter 1966/67, are so shiny that they give a false impression of the dirty, uncared got, end of steam days engines that ploughed their last days up and down from London Waterloo to Bournemouth and other destinations and back again. The Bulleid and Merchant Navy Pacifics came to life again as I relived those days with my runabout ticket, a lure that too precedence over the World Cup Final in July 1966. It was getting off a steam hauled train at Southampton Central that I heard the public address announcement that England had beaten West Germany 4-2. The engines features on these pages are:
34019 West Country Bideford
34021 West Country Dartmoor
34024 Tamar Valley
34037 West Country Clovelly
34057 Biggin Hill
34071 601 Squadron
34013 West Country Okehampton
34100 West Country Appledore
34104 West Country Bere Alston
34108 West Country Wincanton
35012 Merchant Navy United States Line
73085
73118
76008 Class 4
80016
80139 Class 4

Having gorged on the images and the unique smell of the steam, I turned to ‘In the glasshouse: Southern Railway signal box design, 1936-1946’ pages 26-33. Many people do not salivate at the sight of signal boxes. I have never understood why. The article focuses on the wonderful, unmistakeable and large Art Deco style signalboxes that were an uplifting sight for anyone looking through a train window. There are large photos of the signalboxes at Surbiton, Dorking North, Arundel, Bognor Regis, Horsham, Ascot and Strood.… (mer)

'Leader' was the work of one man, the Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Southern Railway, O.V.S. Bullied. He was an innovator, sometimes beyond the means of the Southern Railway to maintain or even perhaps understand his slightly unconventional designs. In the immediate post-war years, he devised a design for a steam locomotive that would embody the latest thinking on valve gear and boiler design, plus would have lower maintenance costs and be able to be driven from either end like the new diesel and electric engines. The design was too revolutionary; the one completed engine lasted only until 1951, never entered revenue-earning traffic and its design features were not repeated elsewhere. This is the story of a fascinating 'might-have-been'.… (mer)