The Bristol Railway Archive

Regarding the raft of withdrawn southern locos, I'm sure I read somewhere that they were not allowed through the Severn Tunnel en-route to South Wales so had to go the long way round. That's correct Roy. I think there was always a fear that bearings would run hot which could pose a real problem 2 m...

A few of you of a certain age may be interested in photos I have recently uploaded to a new Flickr account. You can view them here :

https://www.flickr.com/photos/190629649@N06/albums

I hope you can find them enjoyable, despite the very amateurish attempts using a cheap camera!

Yes Andy, I have. There was another supposition he made regarding the Grange-hauled express on p.387 which I disagree with. He suggests the reporting number (which he deciphered as 8O63) indicated a train bound for the Southern Region. I am certain this is incorrect and under magnification the repor...

Have you got Lightmoors volume on South Gloucestershire "Buxton"? Yes Andy, I bought it back in the summer. It is, as you say, a cracking volume with a wealth of photos of places I know very well. Well worth the thirty quid being asked. There are a couple of inaccuracies I found but nothing that de...

And I think that to some extent I was ahead of the trend; the final demise of the Westerns was attended by frenzied hordes, but the Class 22s and the Warships seemed to slip away without anybody apparently noticing or caring. Ah, the class 22! I've got a sneaky feeling we would see them occasionall...

I'm a bit late joining this reminiscence thread and I have really enjoyed reading your posts on this topic and it has stirred a lot of fond memories of the late 1950s through to 1968. So I thought I'd tap away and put them down for posterity!! Having a grandfather and a father both working on the ra...

Talking of South Wales, during the miners' strike in 1984/5 Nantgarw coking plant managed to dispose of the vast majority of its stockpiled blast-furnace coke to Llanwern steelworks using (amongst other wagons) coke hoppers (the ones that had wooden boards around the tops to increase capacity for co...

As regards steam in the Bristol area, I have a photo I took of 9F 92212 heading north LE at Charfield in July 1966. It was a Sunday and it had worked an extra freight south that morning, presumably from Washwood Heath and as far as Stoke Gifford. The photo I have shows it tucked in behind a works tr...

One of the memorable sights from steam days around the Bristol area were the superb 9F's in charge of the twice-daily class '5' Avonmouth - Bromford Bridge oil trains and the returning empties (running as class '4'). My memory fails me, however, when trying to recall if these passed to diesel haulag...

It also occurred to me that non-fitted heavy coal trains would have benefited from the extra braking capability provided by the pilot loco on the descent into the tunnel. I wonder also whether the pilot loco from STJ was not the same loco that banked to Patchway. I have just spent a few minutes peru...