TRIVIA - Things you saw travelling on BR that you don't see today

quarella · 11 May 2018

eisenach said:
Putting my little Honda 70 motorbike in the guard's van (late 70s) when I couldn't be bothered to ride it down from Leeds to Abingdon. I usually had to travel in the van with it. Just think of the Health and Safety issues with that now! A potential petrol bomb on board.

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations_destinations/luggage_animals.aspx
My bold.

Articles and Animals not carried

Articles exceeding one metre in any dimension that cannot be carried by the passenger concerned. This includes canoes, hang-gliders, sail/surf
boards, large furniture and any large musical instrument that cannot be carried without assistance.

Motorcycles, mopeds, motor scooters and motorised cycles.

Livestock (for example, pigs. sheep and goats).

Any animal or article which, in the opinion of the train company staff, is causing or is likely to cause inconvenience to passengers due to its size or behaviour. On train staff are authorised to have items such as these removed from the train.

RailUK Forums

randyrippley · 11 May 2018

eisenach said:
Putting my little Honda 70 motorbike in the guard's van (late 70s) when I couldn't be bothered to ride it down from Leeds to Abingdon. I usually had to travel in the van with it. Just think of the Health and Safety issues with that now! A potential petrol bomb on board.

I used to do the same with my Honda C50 when I was a student......(also late 70s)
the alternative would have been to ride it Lancaster to Yeovil, hate to think how long that would have taken

Cowley · 11 May 2018

randyrippley said:
I used to do the same with my Honda C50 when I was a student......(also late 70s)
the alternative would have been to ride it Lancaster to Yeovil, hate to think how long that would have taken

I remember my cousin Ian riding his C50 from Nottingham down to Cornwall in the early 80s on the Fosse Way. He was a big guy too (a truck driver by day and a nightclub bouncer by night) :lol:

.
It started playing up on the way back from Lands End and he managed to coax it back to Penzance station where the staff helpfully let him stow it in the guards van to Exeter.
Once there he made it to ours and tinkered with it for a weekend before getting a truck driver friend of his to take them back up to Nottingham a week later.
He was back riding it again in a couple of weeks.

Rick1984 · 11 May 2018

large furniture and any large musical instrument that cannot be carried without assistance.

So I'd be fine taking say a bedside table onboard?

TheGrandWazoo · 4 Jun 2018

ChiefPlanner said:
Fish traffic conveyed in Parcels Vans.

Hmmm.... traveling back from Inverness on the Sleeper in 2015, my bike shared the guards van with boxes of langoustines headed for London restaurants!

DavidGrain · 4 Jun 2018

TheGrandWazoo said:
Hmmm.... traveling back from Inverness on the Sleeper in 2015, my bike shared the guards van with boxes of langoustines headed for London restaurants!

A friend told me that he could not buy langoustines in a fishing port in Scotland because they came straight off the boats and straight onto lorries to Spain.

randyrippley · 4 Jun 2018

DavidGrain said:
A friend told me that he could not buy langoustines in a fishing port in Scotland because they came straight off the boats and straight onto lorries to Spain.

did he try asking for scampi?

AY1975 · 6 Jun 2018

AY1975 said:
Buffet car stewards coming round and serving tea and coffee at your seat, in the days before refreshment trolleys (see also my thread on the earliest trolley services at www.railforums.co.uk/threads/when-were-refreshment-trolleys-first-introduced-and-on-which-routes.163187). I think this still happens in first class, but sometimes used to happen in standard (or second as it was called until the late 1980s) as well if there were enough buffet staff to do this as well as staffing the buffet counter and if they weren't too busy with serving passengers at the counter.

There is a film clip from the inauguration of the Kent Coast electrification where a buffet steward can be seen serving at-seat, as well as at the counter, on a 4-BEP unit at www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y7l9oZTWJE

trebor79 · 7 Jun 2018

The floor of the carriage being so liberally sprinkled with the clippings from tickets that it looked like a wedding had taken place.

Blue seat reservation tickets.

Mk2 carriages with manual sliding vestibule doors. Still the nicest ambience I have ever experienced (last time was York - Bristol early 2000's, a very pleasant surprise to see that waiting at the platform).

Electric trucks scooting around the platforms towing cages of parcels behind them.

Red Star.

Proper restaurant cars.

Highlandspring · 7 Jun 2018

Rick1984 said:
So I'd be fine taking say a bedside table onboard?

If you can get it onboard you can take it. This brought to mind something that happened on the Glasgow North Electrics last year - two guys turned up at Jordanhill station with a large wardrobe which was apparently full of all their belongings because they were moving house. The driver of the Dumbarton bound train they intended to board tried to stop them getting on but they were adamant and proceeded to load it onto the train. They should have listened to the driver, unfortunately for them they had to get back off again less than 5 minutes later because the train had developed a fault and was being terminated at Garscadden (the next station but one) in order to run it off empty to the depot!

whitrope69 · 7 Jun 2018

A Railway that was run as a public service, lived within its means, rarely used Bustitution, could manage to deal with snow, wind/rain and was a place that felt like it was going places under the Sector Management of late 1980's early 1990's.

Warwick · 7 Jun 2018

whitrope69 said:
A Railway that was run as a public service, lived within its means, rarely used Bustitution, could manage to deal with snow, wind/rain and was a place that felt like it was going places under the Sector Management of late 1980's early 1990's.

Do you want a damp cloth for those rose tinted spectacles that you seem to be wearing.
"Lived within it's means". It was a nationalised industry with the hand of the treasury continuously hovering.
"rarely used bustitution". Obviously I travelled on several of those rare days as I have many memories of a bus service in lieu of a train.
"could mange with snow, wind/rain". The only difference was that the disruption was shorter as staff would clear the mess up quicker.

yorksrob · 7 Jun 2018

Warwick said:
Do you want a damp cloth for those rose tinted spectacles that you seem to be wearing.
"Lived within it's means". It was a nationalised industry with the hand of the treasury continuously hovering.
"rarely used bustitution". Obviously I travelled on several of those rare days as I have many memories of a bus service in lieu of a train.
"could mange with snow, wind/rain". The only difference was that the disruption was shorter as staff would clear the mess up quicker.

Also in heavy snow, it was a lot easier to loco drag a slam door unit, as happened on the Southern without fear of doors ceasing up.

randyrippley · 9 Jun 2018

Trains
Here in Northern land you don't see many of them on the railway nowadays, especially in places like Blackpool or Windermere

Rick1984 · 10 Jun 2018

Highlandspring said:
If you can get it onboard you can take it. This brought to mind something that happened on the Glasgow North Electrics last year - two guys turned up at Jordanhill station with a large wardrobe which was apparently full of all their belongings because they were moving house. The driver of the Dumbarton bound train they intended to board tried to stop them getting on but they were adamant and proceeded to load it onto the train. They should have listened to the driver, unfortunately for them they had to get back off again less than 5 minutes later because the train had developed a fault and was being terminated at Garscadden (the next station but one) in order to run it off empty to the depot!

That's suprising. Though my parents did apparently take a Habbitat sofa on bus from Glasgow to Kilmarnock so hey ho

randyrippley · 10 Jun 2018

Highlandspring said:
If you can get it onboard you can take it. ............

well this guy tried to take a horse onboard

later he took it inside a pub and to the local hospital
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-13451965

Pigeon · 28 Jun 2018

Big long red and white tickets with the variable details filled in in purple print.

DMUs accelerating away from stations in first gear, suddenly making a loud blattering noise and chucking out thick columns of clag as they passed through a rev range which coincided with an exhaust system resonance.

Station and train buffets with a selection of sandwiches that someone had been doing the Monty Python spam sketch thing on, only with tomatoes instead of spam. However many different fillings there were they were all "...and tomato". Didn't always happen, but was a massive pain when it did, because tomatoes make me puke and it doesn't even help to pick them out because they leave vile-tasting slime behind all over the rest of the filling.

Motorail trains running through stations on the WCML with all the protective mats over the windscreens flipped up in the air like the peaks of caps, due to them only having two tie-down points, one in the middle of each short side, so the airflow of the moving train got underneath the bottom edge and lifted them up, and they would then stick like that for the rest of the journey. (Beats me why they didn't use four tie-down points, one in each corner, like everyone else's version of a windscreen-protecting mat does.)

Shrub Hill having a Motorail dock; Shrub Hill also still having a Motorail mat, absolutely filthy, hanging around as a gash kneeling mat, years after the dock had closed.

Also anything else connected with Motorail.

Ron Hash for Cash advertising on the wall of Shrub Hill toilet.

The blinds in DMU cabs having a little hole in the driver's side blind at eye height so that on late-night services he could twist round in his seat and peer through it at passengers getting off with each other on the front seat.

FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN MESSAGES FROM ELSEWHERE being displayed properly before they knocked the wall down.

Bensonby · 1 Jul 2018

The clattering of hundreds of departure boards changing simultaneously at a large terminus station.

farleigh · 2 Jul 2018

Bensonby said:
The clattering of hundreds of departure boards changing simultaneously at a large terminus station.

The one from Brighton has been preserved by the Network SouthEast Railway Society

BR Boy 125 · 13 Jul 2018

DarloRich said:
To stop this thread: http://www.railforums.co.uk/showthread.php?t=151941

Getting cluttered with trivia i thought we should have a new thread about memories of travelling with BR and things we saw then that we don't see now.

I will start with one: No journey was complete without a gang of jocks seeing how much export/best they could drink between London & Scotland ( WCML seemed bad for it!) . Some of the empty can piles resembled modern art!

(BTW when i was a kid i thought you only got four types of beer: McEwans/Broon/Vaux/Exhibition)

You don't see that these days.

Well my dad, saw plenty of HSTs on the GWR in their first livery, class 50s, class 47s, even a few class 52s.

ChiefPlanner · 13 Jul 2018

Getting cluttered with trivia i thought we should have a new thread about memories of travelling with BR and things we saw then that we don't see now.

I will start with one: No journey was complete without a gang of jocks seeing how much export/best they could drink between London & Scotland ( WCML seemed bad for it!) . Some of the empty can piles resembled modern art!

(BTW when i was a kid i thought you only got four types of beer: McEwans/Broon/Vaux/Exhibition)

You don't see that these days

Travelling south from Glasgow Central in the Winter of 1979 , having done a special management trainee project in the Scottish Region - 87 up front and travelling steerage we had a jovial husband , wife and 2 kids opposite who were enroute to Gatwick. The parents consumed a heroic amount of canned lager (remember the sexist Tennants cans with pictures of young ladies on them) , the kids had Irn Bru and a wide range of snacks - they must have gone through about 20 cans and a bottle of Scotch.

They (the parents) were unable to stand up at Euston , so we got the Platform Supervisor to attend (he was really grateful for that) - never have I seen so many cans put away on a 5 hour journey. I hope they got to where they were going.

ChiefPlanner · 13 Jul 2018

Pigeon said:
FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN MESSAGES FROM ELSEWHERE being displayed properly before they knocked the wall down.

Remember it well ..was it not "Images from elsewhere" - the media certainly picked it up a few times ....

Hornet · 14 Jul 2018

ChiefPlanner said:
Remember it well ..was it not "Images from elsewhere" - the media certainly picked it up a few times ....

Without implicating anyone in decades old criminal activity, it is safe to say that there is a direct and enduring link between us Halls and the slogan, daubed on a wall on the trackside outside Paddington station stating enigmatically ‘Far Away is Close at Hand in Images of Elsewhere’.

https://tomhalltravel.com/2013/09/20/far-away-is-close-at-hand-in-images-of-elsewhere/

PeterC · 14 Jul 2018

The following morning's newspapers on sale at London terminals in time for the last few trains of the night.

ChiefPlanner · 14 Jul 2018

PeterC said:
The following morning's newspapers on sale at London terminals in time for the last few trains of the night.

And at Embankment Station (LT) , so on a good Saturday nights boozing , you could get the 0002 Sunday am train , with Sundays papers to hand. (Waterloo - Wimbedon , 4 VEP) , saved getting up till whenever next day.

MP33 · 15 Jul 2018

On the railway bridge across the North Circular Road at Stonebridge Park. Written in big letters right across the bridge "M KHAN IS BENT OK"

Hornet · 16 Jul 2018

MP33 said:
On the railway bridge across the North Circular Road at Stonebridge Park. Written in big letters right across the bridge "M KHAN IS BENT OK"

For those of a certain age, found on the Commercial Road in Limehouse in the 70's.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisdb1/3488736388

His campaigners certainly annoyed a lot of people in the sporting community. Sham 69 even sang about him.

In a case dripping with nostalgia for anyone with a long memory and a taste for the quirks and trivia of British life, George Davis, a 69-year-old Londoner, has had a conviction for armed robbery, dating back more than half of his lifetime, quashed by the Court of Appeal. Mr Davis had been jailed for 20 years in 1975 for a raid the previous year on an office in Ilford, a case that gained extraordinary public attention because of the campaign to protest his innocence. While he languished in prison, his supporters – with his wife Rose in the vanguard – crashed a car into the gates of Buckingham Palace and draped banners over St Paul’s Cathedral to try to draw attention to his case. That having little effect, they went for the coup de grâce. With one day left of the cricket Test against Australia at Leeds and the contest finely balanced, protesters broke into the ground, gouged holes out of the pitch with knives and forks and poured a gallon of oil on to one end. The match had to be abandoned, costing England any chance of regaining the Ashes. It worked. Though some sections of public opinion were outraged, the words “George Davis Is Innocent OK” immediately turned into a national catchphrase and Scotland Yard announced, a little too hastily, that it was conducting an inquiry into the way the original case had been investigated. A year later Mr Davis was released by the home secretary. However, the wheels of justice grinding slower than even the dullest cricket match, it is only now that the case has been finally closed. And Lord Justice Hughes still said merely that the conviction, based on dubious identification evidence, was unsafe and that the court was not able positively to exonerate Mr Davis. Nonetheless, this improbable celebrity emerged from the court on Tuesday looking like an old-fashioned kind of jolly uncle – umbrella in hand, all beams. He kept most of his thoughts to himself, however, perhaps saving them for a Sunday paper. It was a case with multiple layers of irony, the most significant being that while Mr Davis was almost certainly innocent of the crime in question, he was not the most respectable gent in London. The year after he was released he was caught red-handed robbing a bank and got 15 years, reduced on appeal to 11. There were no protests. And Rose revealed at the time that among those angered by the ruin of the Test was the prisoner himself. With little else to do in his cell, he had been keenly following the match. In fact, it rained almost all day in Leeds anyway – and for the cricketers, if not for Mr Davis, the result would have been the same: a draw. There were, however, wider long-term consequences. Identification rules have been tightened, making it harder for police just to round up the usual subjects in these cases. Even more significantly, campaigners of every kind got the message. This was one of the earliest cases of its kind. Soon every group with a grievance – disgruntled fathers, environmentalists, Middle Eastern terrorists – grasped that a good stunt, be it minor or murderous, beats hours of patient argument. Peter Chappell, who was by his friend’s side again on Tuesday, was the spokesman for the campaign in 1975. “A man serving 20 years for a crime he did not commit is far more important than a game of cricket,” he said in 1975. Quite. But a spokesman for al-Qaeda would also say that the ends justify the means.

https://www.ft.com/content/290832d0-863b-11e0-9e2c-00144feabdc0

jamesthegill · 16 Jul 2018

PeterC said:
The following morning's newspapers on sale at London terminals in time for the last few trains of the night.

Blimey, something even I remember! Used to get them from the small newsagents on the forecourt outside Victoria station whenever I'd been up in London for a gig. Was good, gave me a different crossword to do on the train home than on the way in!

DavidGrain · 17 Jul 2018

Talking of late night trains reminds me of my misspent youth catching the 0010 from Euston to Birmingham. Haven't been able to do that for many years, even if I felt capable of doing so.

Clarence Yard · 18 Jul 2018

PeterC said:
The following morning's newspapers on sale at London terminals in time for the last few trains of the night.

Mine was free! To stop pilferage the papers used to supply so many free “voucher” stamped copies, which got distributed to the staff. When I worked at the Cross for the Depot Manager in the north end of West Side, the TCS would make sure everyone (from the Guvnor right down to a newcomer like me) had their chosen paper on their desk in the morning.

A few years later, when on nights with the C&W or the ODM, I used to take a break by sitting at the top of the wooden stairs in the parcels yard, watching the newspaper vans from Fleet Street arrive on their allotted pitch and the lines of the low blue four wheel wooden barrows being loaded before one of the station tractors (Reliance Mercury TE 5020 to 5026) hooked up and snaked them away to the platforms for loading onto the overnights or the few dedicated paper trains which used to bundle mixes on the move for individual newsagents.

Whilst I was sitting there drinking my coffee out my thermos, it always amused me to see all the staff (active and retired) who lived locally in the flats come down to collect their free paper, part of the voucher allocation, naturally! One old timer used to fold his copy up and give it to his dog to carry it back to his gaff in Culross Buildings - you can have up to 100 channels on your TV these days but nothing on them can match some of the things you get to see working on the railway!

TRIVIA - Things you saw travelling on BR that you don't see today

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