Bristol Bath Road Depot

[the green mile]

I was thinking more along the lines of Truly and Billy Hardcastle!

[Robin Summerhill]

Good answer above

I just hope the security services don't start taking an interest in a gang of old codgers poring over drawings and diagrams in a sleepy backwater pub.

Well at least they won't be able to accuse of plotting to blow the depot up

[jules]

Oh I'll be Clegg for sure I'm "risk averse" - that'll wind Robin up. I shall wear my full PPE - I might even wash it in advance (joke).

I'm good for Monday 26th. 7:30 for 8?

I only need one more stamp on my Bristol Beer Factory card for a free pint, so it has to be done ....

I think I only ever made it working back to home town to Bristol and Bath Road once in my service days. Whatever it was I brought with me, I was told very firmly to take it straight back where it came from!

[Robin Summerhill]

Oh I'll be Clegg for sure I'm "risk averse" - that'll wind Robin up. I shall wear my full PPE - I might even wash it in advance (joke).

Which then makes me Compo ..... Although, thinking about it, She Who Must Be Obeyed might agree with you

I'm good for Monday 26th. 7:30 for 8?

Lets make it the 26th then.

If anybody else wants to come along of course, there is no problem, but the main idea of this is to get a floor plan of Bath Road so we shall have to try to stay on topic until that's been completed!

[Robin Summerhill]

Whilst I was posting about this meeting over on the "Pub meeting" thread this suddenly occurred to me.

There would have been plans drawn up by somebody (possibly the Engineers?) when the depot was demolished and redeveloped in 1960.

These drawings might still survive somewhere. Can anybody think of where they are likely to be (or who its worth asking) if they are still in existence?

[jules]

There would have been plans drawn up by somebody (possibly the Engineers?) when the depot was demolished and redeveloped in 1960.

When I was a kid, I once got a load of copies of civil engineering track plans and drawings of the various goods yards from Lawrence Hill up to Filton Junction. They came from Collett House - and very obliging they were too considering I was just a kid - I went home with a huge bag of big sheets all reproduced in purple ink and I think they charged me just 2/- for doing them

Anyhow, reason for the post is I guess drawings for Bath Road would also have been done in Collett House, so who knows what has happened to the doubtless archive of records they had in there ... All now lost probably.

[Robin Summerhill]

Anyhow, reason for the post is I guess drawings for Bath Road would also have been done in Collett House, so who knows what has happened to the doubtless archive of records they had in there ... All now lost probably.

Drifting seriously off topic but the tale is being told for illustrative purposes

Back in the late 80s I was tasked with setting up a computerised attribute database for a local council's housing stock, and they also wanted plans to be made available for all of their property variants (about 1000 variants, as I recall) linked to the computerised system.

I asked about the archive drawings. Back came replies with a variation of "Well, there are a few down in the basement, but there was a fire and they were all destroyed." Or "there was a flood and they were ruined so they all got chucked out." Or "a mountain goat got in and ate them." In a nutshell, people had convinced themselves that they all went missing years ago and I could forget that line of enquiry as a total waste of time

By the time I'd finished digging around in that basement, and a few other places that I found them lurking around, like in Architects personal files and "kept for old time's sake," or misfiled where most of Calne Borough Council's drawings were filed under Wootton Bassett, or sent off to the County Records Office at Trowbridge at the time of the 1974 local government reorganisation, and so on, I found the original drawings for just over 94% of those 1000+ variants. Some dated from the 1920s, but they had still survived (completely off topic - when I did a job for Sarsen HA in Devizes a few years later I found drawings dating back to 1912!)

The moral of this story is - Never assume that archive drawings went in the bin. Find out for certain for yourself.

That's why I made my original post - do any serving or recently-retired railwaymen around here have some ideas about who to ask? The worst they can do is say they don't know, the best they can do is to is blow the dust off them because nobody's looked at them for 40+ years.

[Robin Summerhill]

Just another thought on those drawings - if any major building work was done on Bath Road depot (major repairs, planned extensions etc), somebody would have needed to know where the drain runs were, and where the service ducts went and what services were in them, what the original foundations could take if an extension was planned, and so on. This would probably not be the sort of thing that would have been carried out by the 82A workforce, because they drove or maintained locomotives, not buildings (as far as I remember, anyway).

Nevertheless, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were copies of the original drawings somewhere within the depot, and they might have been "saved for old time's sake" by somebody when the depot closed.

[the green mile]

All this info would have been held by the CMEE's plant section in Swindon which eventually became Railtrack and then Network Rail. Sadly,the only contacts I can think of have all succumbed to asbestos related diseases - apart from one. I will see if I can make contact next week but I'm not optimistic about a result.

Does anyone know who the main contractor was when the depot was rebuilt back in 1960?

[Robin Summerhill]

Does anyone know who the main contractor was when the depot was rebuilt back in 1960?

Google searches have drawn a blank on this one

However, it does give a new line of enquiry. If the depot redevelopment was carried out by a private contractor, there would have been contract documents drawn up by the legal department. Ninety-nine times out of 100 a copy of the contract drawings will be included in that legal bundle.

And legal contract documents tend to get filed away in legal archives and left there until hell freezes over. Whose legal team would have drawn it up - BR(W), BRB, Engineers??

[the green mile]

From privatisation the answers would be very straightforward because the likes of Great Western Trains Ltd engaged a large firm of city solicitors and also set up a property management team who would probably have had access regarding property they leased and were responsible for maintaining.

Unfortunately, I don't think Bath Road would have come under that umbrella. I think we are looking at the now defunct British Railways Board downwards but I have no idea where to even start researching. I'm not sure if the WR Chief Civil Engineer or his Divisional underlings were responsible for buildings such as depots per se although it was Civil Engineer's staff who came in to look after the fabric of the building e.g. painting, windows, roofing etc. It was the CM&EE who looked after plant and services. No idea if one was subcontracted to the other or if it was a joint responsibility.

So far I have been unable to elicit a response from my NR contact.

I take it we are all still ok for next Monday evening!

[Robin Summerhill]

I think we are looking at the now defunct British Railways Board downwards but I have no idea where to even start researching.

Do BRB Residuals still exist? They had offices in Islington (I think I remember reading that somewhere)

I take it we are all still ok for next Monday evening!

We are! Well, I am anyway

[the green mile]

The BRB did exist post privatisation to look after residual interests (such as land and possibly liabilities in connection with asbestos related claims) but I'm sure it was finally put to bed a few years ago.

I think we are going to have to rely on memory and if we are not 100% accurate, who is going to know, including ourselves of course? What will be quite difficult will be to pinpoint with any certainty what the place looked like at any given time. Many of the offices on the top floor had walls of a dark wood veneer (walnut I think) suggesting that they were stud walls which could easily be knocked about to alter the layout and I'm sure that happened. For instance, I seem to recall the admin office going all the way along to the south end of the building but it was later walled off to form the largest of the CM&EE classrooms. And after I left, my successor spent a lot of his time introducing IT systems rather than getting dirty crawling under locos. That involved setting up a computer room on the top floor but I'm not sure if that was an existing room or a bigger one being partitioned off.

I am in regular contact with Andy off forum giving him a fair bit of detail as it springs to mind regarding the depot itself.

[Robin Summerhill]

Roy - please send me an email that I can reply to.

I've drawn up a first stab at the three floors as .jpg images that I could send to you and I'd like your thoughts on the them.

My email address is on my profile page

[Robin Summerhill]

Roy - please send me an email that I can reply to.

I've drawn up a first stab at the three floors as .jpg images that I could send to you and I'd like your thoughts on the them.

My email address is on my profile page

In the absence of an email from Roy I have emailed the images to Pete and asked that they be added to this thread.

The mind is a particular blank about the exact layout of the southern end of the block (ie the left hand side as you look at the images). I am not sure that the staircase was actually in the corner of the building - it might have been set back a bit.

When Pete posts them it would be helpful if those of you who remember the place could have a look and offer some corrections.