3-foot gauge in Britain

Struner said:

There was the Jellicoe Express, a daily "passenger" train for naval personnel, London-Thurso. But the Jellicoe Special, the coaltrain ran to Grangemouth or sometimes to Rosyth. But there was plenty war-related goods traffic on the Far North line as well - coal for the fishing boats, all sorts of equipment for the naval dockyard at Invergordon, timber going South etc.

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In 1941 my dad was sent to defend Scapa Flow with a scaffolding pole (that's another story) and was taken seriously ill when he was up there. My mother got a special pass from the War Office to visit him and had to present herself at Euston at a prescribed time to catch the Jellicoe Express. She said it was an immensely long, very crowded train populated by very friendly (!) sailors - but she did find a compartment with some WRNS in it for moral support!! It was delayed and diverted and took nearly 36 hours to reach Thurso - then a rough trip across the Pentland Firth.

The joys of rail travel in World War II -- gruesome stuff re same, heard by me as experienced by my parents' generation; and in reading from many other sources. Many sufferers vowed to -- come peacetime -- never use a passenger train ever again. At that, one gathers that the experience in Britain was pleasurable, in comparison with the same in contemporary German-occupied Europe.

It was the presence of Jellicoe Special coal trains, one loaded northbound and one empty southbound, in the two passing loops at Quintinshill that led to the down local having to be backed onto the Up Main to be overtaken, leading to the huge disaster there.

David L Smith writes in his books of ones north of Carlisle which were routed over the G&SW line, and the range of amusing incidents that befell them in their journey.

Further topic-drifting, and a bit facetiously; but am put in mind of the book published a few years ago, titled The Quintinshill Conspiracy. When said book first appeared, my initial thought was, "Good grief ! Are we going to be told that the truth was, 'the Germans done it' ?" It turned out, nothing so dramatic -- essentially, a matter of "Labour versus Capital" machinations.

Calthrop said:

The joys of rail travel in World War II -- gruesome stuff re same, heard by me as experienced by my parents' generation; and in reading from many other sources. Many sufferers vowed to -- come peacetime -- never use a passenger train ever again. At that, one gathers that the experience in Britain was pleasurable, in comparison with the same in contemporary German-occupied Europe.

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On an Eisenbahn Kurier DVD I have an express for Hanover is seen arriving ECS at Essen in early post war times.
It is formed of a mixture of goods wagons including open vehicles and passengers were told it was forbidden to ride on the buffers in German and English!

One of the most surreally fascinating articles about the Jellicoe Specials was a fictional article in, of all magazines, Railway World, maybe in the 1970s, who never normally carried such tosh, but it was the Christmas issue. Author had gone walking by the old Brecon & Merthyr to what seemed to be Torpantau while it was still open, got overnight accommodation in a pub by the line, and had a series of extraordinary waking dreams about looking out on 1916 with B&M locos, driven by devils, pushing all the coal specials up over the mountain. Morning came and back to the present day - except when he went to the station a WR pannier tank was stuck there because all the tokens were inexplicably up at the top end - again.

Anyone remember it?

I've never heard of this one before; but it sounds like a superb "tale of mystery and imagination". Would be splendid to be able to read the piece in its entirety. Hey, at least they were safety-conscious devils...

Taunton said:

One of the most surreally fascinating articles about the Jellicoe Specials was a fictional article in, of all magazines, Railway World, maybe in the 1970s, who never normally carried such tosh, but it was the Christmas issue. Author had gone walking by the old Brecon & Merthyr to what seemed to be Torpantau while it was still open, got overnight accommodation in a pub by the line, and had a series of extraordinary waking dreams about looking out on 1916 with B&M locos, driven by devils, pushing all the coal specials up over the mountain. Morning came and back to the present day - except when he went to the station a WR pannier tank was stuck there because all the tokens were inexplicably up at the top end - again.

Anyone remember it?

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Yes ! The station involved (fictional obviously) was called Castell Gwyn, and the denouement was that it was so called because the original line was built through prehistoric earthworks. The castle of Gwyn ap Nudd - lord of the Welsh underworld.

Calthrop said:

The joys of rail travel in World War II -- gruesome stuff re same, heard by me as experienced by my parents' generation; and in reading from many other sources. Many sufferers vowed to -- come peacetime -- never use a passenger train ever again. At that, one gathers that the experience in Britain was pleasurable, in comparison with the same in contemporary German-occupied Europe.

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When my dad was conscripted in the last war, this resulted in his being posted all over the country -- just why the Hampshire regiment should end up in Bury St Edmunds, Skegness, the Lake District and Castlewellan in Northern Ireland is another question -- and this allowed him to travel to places he'd never otherwise have been, lines at that were freight-only, and lines that have since closed, such as Dumfries to Stranraer. His memories of travelling on six-wheel carriages in Northern Ireland are amusing. Trains could get very crowded; one on which he was travelling was so jammed packed that he couldn't get across to the door at High Wycombe and he had to alight at the next station where the platform was on 'his side' of the train. He also came across a line in Normandy which surprised him as it was laid in bullhead track with chairs, which he thought was peculiar to British railways.

Calthrop said:

Hey, at least they were safety-conscious devils...

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Indeed. More than the actual crews of the era were - there was a head-on at Torpantau in 1916 due to slack working with the tokens, a different error to Abermule a few years later but a similar outcome.
http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/BoT_Torpantau1916.pdf

randyrippley said:

other posts in the thread indicate the main coal source was the South Wales anthracite mines

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Not entirely surprising - the Royal Navy's access to best Welsh steam coal was credited with giving them a considerable tactical advantage over navies which relied upon poorer coal.

Struner said:

There was the Jellicoe Express, a daily "passenger" train for naval personnel, London-Thurso. But the Jellicoe Special, the coaltrain ran to Grangemouth or sometimes to Rosyth. But there was plenty war-related goods traffic on the Far North line as well - coal for the fishing boats, all sorts of equipment for the naval dockyard at Invergordon, timber going South etc.

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In the later years of the war, there was considerable traffic from Kyle of Lochalsh to Invergordon transporting mines for the Northern Barrage. This traffic was heavy enough that additional passing loops were built, some of them proving sufficiently useful that they were kept postwar.

Dr_Paul said:

When my dad was conscripted in the last war, this resulted in his being posted all over the country -- just why the Hampshire regiment should end up in Bury St Edmunds, Skegness, the Lake District and Castlewellan in Northern Ireland is another question -- and this allowed him to travel to places he'd never otherwise have been, lines at that were freight-only, and lines that have since closed, such as Dumfries to Stranraer. His memories of travelling on six-wheel carriages in Northern Ireland are amusing. Trains could get very crowded; one on which he was travelling was so jammed packed that he couldn't get across to the door at High Wycombe and he had to alight at the next station where the platform was on 'his side' of the train. He also came across a line in Normandy which surprised him as it was laid in bullhead track with chairs, which he thought was peculiar to British railways.

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Part of the World War II scene for those with our kind of tastes, one gathers -- some decidedly interesting rail venues, but experienced under nightmare conditions. An uncle of mine (not a railfan as such, but with some appreciation of what it is about the scene that delights us), had various such recollections -- his position in those years was an odd one: unlike your father's, but it likewise involved his spending time in assorted different bits of the country.

Your father's N.I. experiences sound enviable re interest, even if not comfort ! Presumably his getting to Castlewellan involved travel on the Belfast & County Down Railway's system; which would then not have had very many more years to run. It was almost all abandoned in the new Ulster Transport Authority's "micro-Beeching" purge in 1950. I always loathed that Stormont government, for its fanatically anti-rail stance and actions -- that figuring more prominently in my mind, than that outfit's -- to many people -- other less-than-stellar characteristics.

Something happened upon by pure chance today: a further bit of -- albeit very short-lived -- 3 ft. gauge (industrial) in Scotland. This discovery is owed to the Complete Atlas of Railway Station Names, covering all of the British Isles: compiled by Tony Dewick; an Ian Allan publication. The tome concerned takes a good shot at featuring not only passenger stations, but basically "all the railways there have ever been in these islands" -- including industrial lines, outside of complex conurbations. The book drops the occasional clanger of some magnitude, but I'd rate it as on the whole, an impressive piece of scholarship.

The book's maps are sometimes rather confusingly arranged; I'd had it for many months before stumbling on this morning's discovery ("lurking" in a small inset on the page essentially devoted to Dingwall -- Kyle of Lochalsh) : a 4-mile industrial line serving marble quarries near Broadford in the south of the Isle of Skye -- an island which hitherto I'd assumed to have been always completely devoid of railways of any kind. The line had -- as mentioned above -- an indeed short life (1908 -- 1913); its route is now a path for walkers.

https://hlrco.wordpress.com/scottish-narrow-gauge/...lines/skye-marble-railway/

Calthrop said:

the Isle of Skye -- an island which hitherto I'd assumed to have been always completely devoid of railways of any kind.

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Unless you don't count funiculars as real railways, Skye does in fact still have a railway, and there are a number of pictures and a little bit of text on the Internet -- see here, here, here, here and (to keep on the subject of history and nostalgia) here.

Accuse me if you will, of funicular-ism; but I personally don't count them, such as featured here, as real railways. Was unaware, though, of "the described" -- interesting to learn of -- thanks.