All ABOARD! -- Welcome Thread

Something I slacked on when I created this group, all those years ago, was I didn't create a welcome thread. No real snack car/dining car experience where we could meet and greet.

Let me fix that now. :)

Welcome aboard the LTR. We're here to talk trains, railroads, railways, and the related books, games, and movies that go along with them.

Feel free to introduce yourself, maybe even chime in with what drew you to the world and culture that is the train life.

My local heritage steam railway, all 26km of it, is partly powered on money raised by secondhand book and magazine sales (as are many similar orgs). Each station has a volunteer-run book stall, often based in a disused goods wagon (or freight car if you prefer).

Oh, and I'm part owner of a fully functional steam locomotive built over 100 years ago in 1918.

I also enjoy exploring abandoned railway tunnels.

Hi.

I'm just a railroad man's daughter. My daddy was a depot agent for the CB&Q, Burlington Route, Burlington Northern, and BNSF. He worked in several small towns in Nebraska, and ended his career in Torrington, Wyoming. I moved 11 times by the time I was 12.
We traveled a lot by train as I grew up. I love trains and train travel. I can dimly remember the huge steam engines that roared through some of our towns. We lived up over the depot at least twice that I remember. Alas, I don't think depot agents exist anymore, and I know they don't use the telegraph key. My dad was really good at Morse code.
Dad also loved model trains, so have some of that in my history as well.

My interest in railways started in the 1950s when I was very young. My mother and my grandfather had both worked for the LMS, albeit in clerical roles. My uncle was a draughtsman at the Vulcan Works and he would take me to the factory after hours and let me climb all over the locos they were building - no Elf and Safe Tea restrictions in those days. By that time they were mostly diesels. Many were for export and I probably saw some of those very same locos in Africa years later. We used to visit my grandparents in the north west of England which was one of the last bastions of main line steam in UK right up until 1968, and some of my earliest memories are of a steam loco's safety valve blowing off in the dark and steamy atmosphere of the old Euston Station (I like to think that I can remember the famous Doric Arch but that might just be wishful thinking) and of steam locos idling in the sidings in places like Warrington and Wigan. As a youth I joined a model railway club which met in a shed rented from British Rail and could be accessed by sidling along the edge of the station platform, under the bridge, and up the bank. Again that wouldn't be allowed these days.

Then my railway interest took a long break when I moved to Africa living and working in places where travelling was difficult due to insecurity and photographing essential national infrastructure such as railways was frowned upon, but it was rekindled in 1995 when I spent a year in UK and joined the heritage Dean Forest Railway as a volunteer, got my hands dirty working on the steam locos, and began training as a fireman.

Back to Africa where I was a spectator again for a few years, before moving to South Africa in 2001 where I joined the Friends of the Rail in Pretoria and completed my training as a fireman and driver, operating a variety of steam locomotives on the main line. We took evening classes at the national railway college and had to pass the same exams as the professional staff, except that for the final module on types of traction we took steam instead of diesel or electric.

Back to Kenya in 2009 where I became a volunteer at the railway museum in Nairobi, helping to maintain and operate the three working steam locomotives on the rare occasions when they run, which unfortunately hasn't been for a few years now. Our largest loco, Class 59 Garratt number 5918* "Mount Gelai" failed with leaking superheater elements, not a major repair but something that nobody has yet got round to. Our smallest, a Class 24, appears to have had some of the brass and copper fittings half-inched, but our mid-sized locomotive, Class 30 number 3020, should still be in running order with minimal repairs and maintenance. We wait patiently for an opportunity to give it a try again.

Meanwhile I am building an Africa-themed model railway in a 40 foot shipping container. Keeps me off the streets, and I made great progress during the COVID lockdown. It's a lifetime project, and a layout that size is really never finished. You always find something that can be improved or modified. Sir Rod Stewart took 26 years to finish his, so this should keep me busy until I'm 90 if I get that far!

Let me add that I have really appreciated the camaraderie of the international railway community over the years. When I first pitched up by chance at the Dean Forest Railway and asked to take photos, before I knew it I found myself in the crew mess coach drinking railwayman's tea (hot, strong, sweet and milky) out of a tin mug and being invited to sign up. At an Australian heritage railway they were closed that day but I was treated like a VIP and given a complete insider's tour of the site (and more tea in another mess coach). At a famous US steam railroad when I asked if I could see inside the loco shed and workshop I was told it was strictly forbidden, "but wait until all the visitors have gone and then talk to the fireman on the loco!" and once again I got a VIP tour including a footplate ride. In Zambia after chatting to a diesel driver who was shunting (switching) he asked me where we were going next. "Just into town". "Jump up and I'll give you a ride to the level (grade) crossing". We thought it was on his way somewhere and he would just have to slow down and let us off; in fact he made a special trip and after he had dropped us he headed back to his shunting work. In Zimbabwe a uniformed inspector accosted me. "Why are you taking photos from the platform?" I expected to be arrested or ejected, but his next words were, "Walk onto the track there and you'll get much better photos!" Then the driver of a passing Garratt beckoned me up onto the footplate. After riding for half an hour or so of steady steaming I thought to ask him, "Where are we going, anyway?" Turned out were only running around the balloon, so I was back after an hour or so. In Bangkok we had already been to the loco shed and made ourselves known to the crew, so when a security guard tried to stop us going near the steam loco when it appeared in the station, the driver rushed over, sent him packing and took us up onto the footplate. On South Africa's famous Blue Train I got chatting to an off-duty loco inspector in the dining car and next stop I found myself on the footplate. Great memories, all of them.

I've really appreciated all that I have learned from old drivers and firemen - one of my South African mentors had fifty years on the footplate. There's plenty that they know that is not in the manuals nor taught in the classroom. I've also had the opportunity to meet some of the "greats" of steam preservation, such as the late David Shepherd (I fired one of his locos for him when he came to visit South Africa) and Bob Meaney (when I accompanied the curator of the Nairobi Railway Museum and another colleague to Tyseley in UK to see what we could learn there) and found them always very gracious and willing to share their experience. One of my great regrets was trying to make contact with Phil Girdlestone too late as he had only just died. A missed opportunity.

* Hence my username.

Hi John - happy to make your acquaintance formally, although we have changed views a few times in other threads.

Happily I can remember the doric arch at Euston and the magnificent Grand Hall. A pity John Betjeman failed to save those from demolition - but he did a good job with St Pancras.

An early memory was a cheap day excursion to visit family in Liverpool in May 1951 taken there and back by 46162 - Queen's Westminster Rifleman. Later that summer a first visit to Kings Cross and the sight of 60134 in magnificent BR blue at the head of a Pullman Car express headed for Leeds (or was it Edinburgh). She remained my favourite loco. One of her nameplates is on the wall of the Severn Valley Railway museum at Kidderminster - wish I'd bought it.

That same year I became the owner of a cabside from 4042 Prince Albert - it cost me 10/- (50p) - I sold it at auction many years later for £5000. Not a bad investment.

Hope you read this message - like all my posts it will self destruct in a week or so.

Yrs Foxhunter

>5 Foxhunter:

Thanks, yes, and one of the things we share apart from our love of railways is having a locomotive as part of our LT usernames. I believe alco261 is another one.

Foxhunter - 60134
Mount Gelai - 5918

Both magnificent locomotives. The A1s were true greyhounds, and beautiful with it. The Class 59 Garratts (along with the South African GMAM, Zimbabwean 15 class, Australian AD60 and many other Garratts) were 250-ton behemoths, but not without their own beauty.

Edited to add: Sorry, did I really type A4 first time round? Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Now corrected. A1.

My father was a railwayman until I was 10, so I grew up travelling everywhere by train (back in the days when the railways in the UK went everywhere). He was a signalling engineer, so I never had a lot to do with the steamy end of trains; but I did once operate (under supervision) the marshalling yard at Toton, just outside Nottingham, one Sunday morning when Dad had a trip back to see some old mates.

Dad left the railways in 1967 because British Railways were due to close the signalling drawing office in Derby where he was working, and they could not decide whether they were going to move him to Birmingham or Glasgow. At the same time, he'd completed a major re-signalling project on the West Coast Main Line from Euston to Weaver Junction to coincide with electrification; but there was no indication as to when electrification would be extended further north. And all his overtime was involved with schemes to take equipment out and close lines (the Midland line from Derby to Manchester was an particular rush job that hit home to him; he later said "In an hour's overtime, I put forty blokes out of work", which upset him). What with a lack of new opportunities, neither relocation option seemed especially attractive.

It was only when Dad left the railways and we started travelling by car that I began to get interested in railways. During the 1970s, I developed an interest in photography and we decided that we should photograph railway installations that were being removed and modernised, or closed outright - especially signalling installations. Forty years later, these became the subject of a book, The Lost Railway; the Midlands which made little impact on the enthusiast community, alas.

I did some time in preservation, working on the Midland Railway Centre at Butterley in Derbyshire. As we went into the 1990s, the state of railways in Britain made me look to Europe, and I "discovered" Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Poland. This in turn led to me ending up as Secretary of the Austrian Railway Group. Truly, no good deed goes unpunished. Seven years ago, I produced for the group A Bibliography of Austrian Railway Literature, which sold well (in Vienna, at least, where it was the first such bibliography for 100 years!).

>7 RobertDay:

I'd love to have operated that marshalling yard! I've never actually operated a signal box, but when we did our fireman and driver training we had to learn the "systems of train control", ie signalling, and I've always found it fascinating. On my model railway layout I'm striving to have realistic signalling, with working colour light signals, and maybe one day I'll even be able to motorise the semaphore signals.

Bad eyesight kept me from ever getting involved in the practical side of railway operations — with hindsight perhaps not such a bad thing, but when I was about 16 I’d have jumped at the chance to become a signal engineer, had it been possible. I was fascinated by signals and what they meant from an early age, probably through the influence of a favourite uncle who was a signalman in a lever-frame box. (Sadly I never got the chance to watch him at work, but I did get invited to “play trains” a couple of times at a local power station where they still used a small steam engine to shunt the coal trucks.)

My English grandmother worked for the Lancs & Yorks during WWI, her father drove a fireless industrial loco for the CWS(!) and one of my German great-grandfathers was a shunter, so I must have at least a 3/8 share of railway DNA, I suppose. But I doubt if that’s what originally got me interested in trains. Riding on the front seats of DMUs, and spending holidays on the Welsh narrow-gauge lines or riding the trams in the Ruhr probably had more to do with it. And being brought up on a diet of L T C Rolt’s books, naturally.