Tuesday Treasures

We are very fortunate indeed here at Didcot Railway Centre with our vast collection of historic locomotives, artefacts and memorabilia that forms our world-famous museum telling the story of the Great Western Railway and its employees. For our volunteers and staff there are objects of great interest everywhere around the centre, each item unique to keeping the greatest railway company on the rails.

Our Tuesday Treasures blog is designed to share this vast and historically important collection so enjoy our deep dive into the rich history in our Museum and Archives.

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TUESDAY 30 SEPTEMBER

Rambling and the GWR - 2

In our blog in January 2022 we introduced the important GWR contribution to the then emerging pastime of rambling which began with their commissioning in 1931 of Hugh E Page, then secretary of the North Finchley Rambling Club, to produce a booklet, at the modest price of six old pence, entitled ‘Rambles in the Chiltern Country’. That title and others were further published in later years and continued into the BRWR era.

Alongside those books, however, the GWR seized upon the added opportunity to focus special train services and today we illustrate just one example from the Great Western Trust collection namely a double-sided handbill of August 1932 advertising special facilities for ramblers to enjoy the ‘Harvest Moon’ on Saturday 17 September, along the Thames by travelling from Paddington to Maidenhead, Cookham, Bourne End and Marlow and even partake of a Salter’s Steamer cruise too.

The main side relates to the simpler train only facility at 2 shillings and 6 pence or 3 shillings for Marlow return, and the reverse side the combined train and Salter Steamer Thames River cruise for 4 shillings return. Several hundred people joined the train at Paddington, and a hundred more at Ealing Broadway.

Marlow station photographed by P M Gates on 11 August 1935, with the branch line train headed by 0-4-2T No 4827

So what is this ‘Harvest Moon’ all about? The Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the Autumnal equinox which traditionally fell around 22 September. The moon appears to rise nearly the same time each evening for several nights in a row, providing prolonged moonlight that aided farmers in harvesting their crops before the advent of electricity.

Of course those longer brighter evenings were also perfect for safer rambling if that is, the weather obliged such expectations!

Boulter’s Lock at Maidenhead, with the Salter’s Steamer Cliveden which took the ramblers from Marlow to Maidenhead on the Harvest Moon special

This simple handbill is yet another example of the GWR being keen to take every opportunity to create a marketing response to a potential demand, even to the extent of arranging at risk, special trains. The Trust has yet to discover any surviving records of quite how rewarding that commitment proved to be.

TUESDAY 23 SEPTEMBER

More Railway Art and Social History

A few weeks ago we looked at part of a collection of menus and wine lists from the large estate of hotels owned and operated by the British Transport Commission and latterly British Railways. This time, we examine the other ‘half’ of the collection which consists of similar items from the many named trains that BR ran during the 1950s and 60s.

Both The Cornishman (by Arthur Hundleby) which features the Celtic cross and the Cornish Riviera Express were introduced by the GWR in the Victorian and Edwardian eras respectively and the latter still runs six days a week from London Paddington to Penzance and return. A mere ten years separate the two menus shown here with a great difference in style.

For nine days in July 1958 the Commonwealth games were held in Cardiff and this item marks the occasion. First held as the British Empire Games in 1930, by 1954 they were in transition as the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, finally becoming the British Commonwealth Games from 1970. Of note are the long abolished names of various countries, Ceylon and Malaya being among them.

The Mayflower was introduced by BR (Western Region) in June 1957 leaving Plymouth, for Paddington at 8.30am returning at 5.30pm. The name persists to this day although with a late morning departure from Paddington and mid afternoon from Plymouth. The menu, illustrated by Eric Fraser shows a stylised sailing ship and examples of the people who sailed the Atlantic in search of a new life in the new world. The austere attire typifies the deeply religious zealotry of those early settlers, a road which the current USA seems to be travelling.

Finally, in 1950, The Inter City was a name attached to a breakfast time departure from Paddington to Birmingham Snow Hill and Wolverhampton (Low Level). Together with a late afternoon return it was a fast, restaurant car service aimed primarily at the businessman. The name was dropped from the timetable in 1965 at which point it was adopted by BR for all long distance passenger services. It became a highly successful division of BR until the privatisation and fragmentation of the railways in 1994.

TUESDAY 16 SEPTEMBER

Passenger train service timetables

This is a very rich subject beginning with posted time bills in the earliest GWR period up to today with the only timetables being on the internet. The Great Western Trust collection has a substantial array of the varied forms and they will become a feature in future blogs.

Today however we focus upon the BRWR era, in fact the time when in great enthusiasm for enhanced services provided by Diesel Multiple Units (DMUs) BRWR published area and district timetables with the trains’ image and had high hopes that they would increase patronage over steam trains. This was coupled to lower running costs and much simplified branch line track layouts as they effectively modernised the GWR’s auto-train formation of reversible direction operation.

We illustrate all 6 timetable booklets issued for the suburban services from Bristol, Bath and Swindon all covering the period 2 November 1959 to 16 June 1963. The clever use of varied colours for their covers avoid public and staff confusion.

All that said, however, closer study of the cover information actually shows that up to and including the September 1961 to June 1962 edition, lurking at the bottom was the fact that service to Bath Green Park remained a ‘Steam Service’ although the earliest edition had also had ‘Steam Services’ on the Portishead and Yatton to Clevedon branches. Within these booklets a trend of service provision and of course income is exposed by their number of pages.

From first to last edition we have 48; 48; 56; 40; 36 and finally 28 pages.

Clearly at first, train service increased so that in the June to September 1961 we have an increased page number, but then the decline in the following years is quite marked. Yes, even DMUs had failed to stem the decline in use and coupled with ever-increasing operating costs, we all know the outcome! Not just here but right across the railway system!

By the time of the last issue, the Beeching Report had been published, proposing closure of up to half of the routes these timetables covered. Perhaps that alone was sufficient evidence to have such a publication cancelled as it killed any staff motivation to promote existing services?

Those closures came as follows:-
Bath (Green Park) to Bristol, March 1966; Bridport Branch, May 1975; Bristol to Avonmouth etc, November 1964; Bristol to Portishead, September 1964; Chippenham to Calne, September 1965 and Yatton to Clevedon, October 1966.

These surviving booklets at least show that BRWR did try to capture the public attention to what they believed were genuine advances in operations and passenger comfort and they form a key aspect of the evolution of GWR and BRWR passenger service timetabling, if only also exposing its sad decline over time.

We will return to this theme in future blogs.

A three-car diesel multiple unit departing from Corsham on a local service towards Bristol Temple Meads in the early 1960s. Corsham station, between Chippenham and Bath, was one of the smaller intermediate stations on the main line, identified for closure by the Beeching Report, and its last trains ran in January 1965

TUESDAY 9 SEPTEMBER

GWR Locomotive Exchanges - 1910

2025 has been the 100th anniversary of the locomotive exchange trials between the LNER and GWR which had been set in motion by claims and counter claims at the British Empire Exhibition of the relative engine ‘power’ of the GWR Castle class locos versus the LNER A1 Pacific locos. Our ‘Rivals Reunited’ event at Didcot from 14 May to 2 June celebrated that meeting of No 4079 Pendennis Castle and No 4472 Flying Scotsman and did so with impressive visitor numbers. The Great Western Trust was able to provide primary source material for the various information displays.

Before that noteworthy 1925 trial, however, an earlier such exchange trial took place in 1910, but then between the GWR’s No 4005 Polar Star and the LNWR ‘Experiment’ class loco No 1471 Worcestershire.

Those who enjoyed our companion DRC Going Loco Blogs may recall that in its edition of 1 October 2021, it covered much the same subject, and included a contemporary photo of 1471 leaving Paddington taken at the section where the Hammersmith & City Line emerged from beneath the GWR main line.

Today’s Blog illustrates that very same photograph, an original print of which has recently been donated to the Great Western Trust by GWR Driver James H Springthorpe’s granddaughter. This rather tired remnant of an album contains a number of images of GWR and SR locos and locations recorded in small prints with many having short captions of locations and dates.

The interest in this example is that it has been annotated on the back:-

“Worcestershire 1471 leaving on its last run Aug 25 1910 to Exeter with the 11:50am ex Paddington”

It is thought that the photograph was not taken by Springthorpe himself, but by A Lacey Pfungst, who is credited as photographer of an identical scene in the November 1910 edition of the GWR Magazine. The same edition of the GWR Magazine has four photos credited to Pfungst of Polar Star leaving Euston with Springthorpe driving, so perhaps Pfungst passed the album on to Springthorpe as a memento – we can only speculate.

Behind the loco is the GWR dynamometer car, and emerging from the underpass is a Hammersmith & City Railway train and on the far right are two men clearly stopping their work to observe the LNWR loco pass by. We can hardly ignore either, those beautiful semaphore signals!

Springthorpe was the GWR driver of 4005 Polar Star on the LNWR element of these exchanges, and their Royal Train driver as well! In fact the GWR Staff Magazine of September 1920 includes reference to both the King and Queen shaking his hand after a particular Royal train journey!

TUESDAY 2 SEPTEMBER

GWR Road Motors and Rail Motors

Today’s Blog benefits from another remarkable, if frail survivor of the Edwardian era in the Great Western Trust collection.

It is an undated publicity pamphlet produced when James Inglis was the GWR General Manager (June 1903-December 1911) which has a diagrammatic map of the London radial lines, on which the line from High Wycombe through Beaconsfield, Denham, Northolt and Park Royal to Paddington is noted as ‘new line under construction’. That line was opened in August 1906, so our publication was issued sometime between June 1903 and August 1906, about 120 years ago, hence its fragile condition!

We illustrate the opened out title side, and the rear side, with that map.

What to our eyes may be confusing is that the GWR adopted a similar form descriptor for both its then operating ‘Rail Motors’ and ‘Road Motors’. In hindsight, quite logical for those times before transport evolution brought us today to our ‘buses’ (shortened from the original ‘omnibus’) and our ‘car’ (shortened from ‘motorcar’). The monochrome photographs the GWR includes of both their ‘motors’ proves our point! Of course ‘rail motors’ later evolved to the diesel era ‘railcars’.

Helpfully, the map illustrates both the rail motor and road motor routes covered in the very detailed services timetable which exists as the ultimate fold-out section of the pamphlet. A final phrasing or should we say spelling that is used in that timetable, but was dismissed long ago, is the description of the modest ‘halt’ platform stations as ‘halte’, the latter being the German word for stop. We wonder whether it was quietly dropped upon the start of WW1

Keen eyed bloggers will note that the road motor service route on the map includes a circular journey around or through Burnham Beeches. That particular locality proved very popular, and the GWR ran special excursions there by road motor and their later omnibuses for many years afterwards.

A GWR road motor at Slough railway station, possibly about to set off on a tour of Burnham Beeches

Also of interest is the map’s inclusion of electric tramways, existing and proposed, on the road from Hammersmith to Staines and in the Richmond and Hampton Court area. But no mention of the electric tramway that existed from Shepherd’s Bush to Southall and Uxbridge. That route must have been considered in direct competition with the GWR’s train services and therefore it was censored from the map!

For those involved or interested in paper conservation, we finally wish to explain that the remnant of non-conservation grade fixative tape, awaits removal but only once it delaminates. Sadly that will still leave a dark witness stain of its glue, and justifies our regret that previous owners used such fixatives without realising its long-term damage to the item they believed they were protecting!

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