[PRCo] More of London (2)

Tue Nov 12 18:43:44 EST 2013

You're absolutely correct Dwight … February 1960.   I thought it was 1958.   I saw either it or or another one of it's class (9F 2-10-0) at Law Junction, south of Glasgow in August 1960 while shooting pictures with Jim Aird.   

They had a stunningly long life like our New York Central Niagaras and the Pennsy T-1s.   However, steam was what they understood coming out of the war and they had abundant supplies of coal.   If I understand history correctly, and feel free to correct me, until sometime after 1964 when Britain began to get North Sea oil, all of their oil supplies came out of the Middle East.   At least they could fire a steam engine on domestic fuel.

The country lived on coal back in the 1940s and 1950s and early 1960s.   Those pea soup fogs we read about in London were really not fogs … it was a mix of light winter fog with heavy smoke.   The homes were all heated with coal stoves in every room.   If you loved the filth in Pittsburgh, you would also have loved choking in London, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, York and Glasgow.   

John Bromley once sold me a great book on the reminiscences of a London trolley motorman entitled, "The Wheels Used To Talk To Us."  One of the great tales in it was one of a motorist in a London pea soup who was following a tram home and followed it right into the depot (carbarn).

The last British city to have a flood of trams, and it reminded me very much of Pittsburgh, was Glasgow.   It was a very gritty, grimy industrial city … steel, shipbuilding, locomotives … the buildings were perpetually covered in a pall of brown and black droppings that came out of industrial stacks.   In the 1940s and 1950s it had around 1.1 million people and then industry collapsed and the population moved out.  Today it's down around 600,000, about where it was in the 1890s.   We don't need ships when Boeing in Seattle was offering a plane that would carry as many people across the ocean with 2 percent of the workers as the Queen Elizabeth did.   But I saw it at the beginning of the decline.    North British Locomotive Company still had 2,600 workers in Glasgow in 1960, they were out of business two years later.   Without ships and locomotives, you didn't need steel mills.  But if you loved Pittsburgh or Wheeling or Johnstown, you would have loved Glasgow, Scotland.   I did …. spent two weekends here with a wonderful Scottish family.  The chap I visited worked for North British Locomotive Company.

Here's what it looked like.   Back then there were two Scotlands … the gritty one and the beautiful highlands with the lakes and castles and seaside views.   Here is the grimy greasy gopher guts one….

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERN6xKuk6R8

And a professional film about the last day.   I think we have to feel sorry that someone decided women could run trams but not buses so they had to fire those smart looking gals in a city with high unemployment.

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO2DmTnXlDA

The Glaswegian providing the narrative about their underground here is a real hoot:

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyCeWX_Ujmc

This is the same subway with modernized equipment:

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ieI_0UMT8A

Modern Glasgow isn't as charming as old Glasgow …. but should any of you find yourself there, it does have a nice "stuffed and mounted" transport museum.    Great collections of locomotives, trams, buses, automobiles, carriages.   Only problem is that the biggest transport items ….. the ones actually made on the Clydebank …. can only be shown in pictures.   You cannot move an 800 foot long steam ship into the museum.   It's worth a couple of hours.   

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYgz8Q9bezo

I guess we all have some remorse that the others … the older ones … saw things we did not get to see.   John Swindler has often commented that I remember things from his neighborhood in Pittsburgh that he never saw because he was too young.   The 78 Laketon shuttle, right John?    Well, we're all in a way too young.   We all missed things.   You missed the Laketon Shuttle.  I wished I had ridden the Lake Shore Electric and the Indiana Railroad and Pacific Electric.   Oh yes, I also missed some things in Britain by just a few years … Leeds, Aberdeen, Edinburgh.   

But we have to revel in what we did see.   And for a few of us, the world doesn't end at the front door.   

On Nov 11, 2013, at 11:36 PM, Dwight Long wrote:

> 
> Fred
> 
> A minor correction.  The last British steam locomotive built for main line service (prior to Tornado) was Evening Star, a 2-10-0 and it was built in 1960.  It is now at the museum in York.
> 
> Dwight
>  ----- Original Message ----- 
>  From: Fred Schneider 
>  To: Western PA Trolley discussion 
>  Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 10:40 PM
>  Subject: [PRCo] More of London (2)
> 
> 
>  This is only for those who care.  The others may delete it.   
> 
>  One knows only who really loves the same thing he or she does and also who despises the subject.   Those who like it might tell you.   Those who violently disagree generally make sure you know.  Those who waver to either side … you sometimes know while the masses in the middle will never say anything.    This is for those who might care.   
> 
>  There are two guys on his list whom I know to be Anglophiles.   I once told Derrick that I had done something so crazy as having dashed off to London, England, with my wife merely to attend the theater on Saturday night.  Mr. Brashear advised me that he had once done the same.   The other one I know would be John Swindler, whose Mum followed his Dad home from England at the end of World War II.   John still has cousins in Britain.   Dwight Long has been there a few times.    And I've been there so many times (18 at last count) that when I looked at a travel video of one town two weeks ago, I got that same feeling we all get when we come home from vacation … the "it's great to be home" feeling.   By the way, I get that I'm home feeling in many places ranging from where I live to Pittsburgh or Los Angeles or some English or German or Swiss towns.   It comes from wandering.   
> 
>  Beside John and Derrick, some of the rest of you might enjoy some of these videos and the attached narrative and this is for you.
> 
>  My first visit to Great Britain occurred in August 1959 when I had a one day escape from an army troop ship docked at Southampton.
>  Because I knew from an American railfan friend that London Underground was still running steam locomotives on the Metropolitan Division northwest of Rickmansworth, I escaped from the tour and went searching for these 1896 teakettles.   Back then the we could ride behind one of the electric engines in this video from Baker St. out to Rickmansworth and behind steam beyond.   I sniffed soft coal smoke all afternoon.  (To put it into perspective, a few weeks before I had been to the opening of the Riverside line in Boston.)  
> 
>  The original Circle Line tube was opened by the Metropolitan as a steam underground railway.   Can you imagine all that dirt underground?   Well, if you look at the stations today, all the air vents that allowed the smoke to escape have been bricked up.  But early in 2013 they ran some steam excursions with Metropolitan number 1 and one of those electric engines (the Sarah Siddons) which I rode behind in 1959 … the electric was doing most of the work.
> 
>  But there were not options when it opened.  In 1868 steam was modern.  We would not have successful electric technology for another 22 years and MU operation for another 30 years.   In fact it was extend under steam multiple times until 1884 and was not electrified until 1905.   (See for history:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_line_(London_Underground)
> 
>  And here is the first video….
> 
>       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg4GY9aKfRE
> 
>  Now the punch line … I was standing at Baker Street the following year (1960) when a Metropolitan guard came up and started to chat.  When it came time for him to leave, he grabbed me by the arm and pushed me up into the cab of one of those old electric engines like Sarah Siddons and I had a free ride out to Rickmansworth and back.   Then I spent the rest of the evening with him chatting in a local pub and trying to make like I enjoyed warm ale.    Turns out I think he was attracted to how I had mounted two cameras side-by-side to take both slides and negatives. He had been trained as a photographer in New York City but could not find  job when he returned to London so he wound up working for London Transport.   
> 
>  And another nice flick of the Tube in London.   Unlike New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia, London has had a zone fare system for as long as I've going over there and that goes back to the pounds, shillings and pence days.   Can you imagine looking at the change in your hand and telling if its correct … 12 pence to the shillings, 20 shillings to the pound?     They also had half pence.   (A quarter pence was called a farthing so that a haypenny was two farthings.)  They actually had some children's tickets on the tube that ended in half pence back then.    It only took a few weeks before that came naturally but I was 20 then.  It probably wouldn't be that easy at 73.     
> 
>       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_olfhN3elog
> 
>  In case you are confused by the multiple rails, LT has separate positive and negative power rails in addition to the two running rails.   I think they have the ability to switch polarity so do not assume either one is the hot rail.   You might have a standard but if the insulation fails on one, you could easily reverse polarity.   The national railroad network, on the other hand, uses only one power rail.
> 
>  My next thought was to remind people of what it was like in World War II, when the tubes were used as bomb shelters.   I started looking to see what might have been on line.   Here is a great 1941 educational film on keeping the system running in war time.  You say, 1941 and wartime?   Yes, they were at war long before we were … England and Germany were at war since Sept., 1939.    Much of the equipment in this film was still running when I first got there in 1959.     By the way … you see buses in the heart of the city.   London never had trams in the heart of the city.   They came only to the perimeter.   All the northern tram routes were gone by the time this film was made in 1941.   
> 
>        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH2ZC9rbxSw
> 
>  Perhaps the best tram film I ever saw from London was this commercial film made in the last week of service in 1952.   It was once pulled for copyright infringement and now I found it again buried under the heading "British Transport Films."  Before it gets yanked again, enjoy, if you will, "The Elephant Never Forgets."  It's a reference to an intersection in the south of London … think Elephant and Castle.    I love the older couple riding the top deck, maybe because I have fond memories of viewing downtown Glasgow from the top deck of a tram.   And John Krish, the man who photographed this,  was fired for taking it … he was told only to photograph the chairman of London Transport shaking hands with the last tram driver.  He was told not to make a 10 minute film. 
> 
>       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc9gtJndKE4
> 
>  Unfortunately, there is no easy way to find videos that show people camped in the underground stations to avoid the Blitzkrieg in 1940 or 1941.   We didn't have high speed movie films or digital cameras then.   There are still pictures out there.   Can you imagine thousands upon thousands of people who survived because the slept on the concrete station platforms underground?   There are many films of the bombing of London on YouTube under keywords like Blitzkrieg or Blitz of London or Battle of London but nothing that really shows how the transit system was damaged.   (Now, a lot of the items out there are copyrighted … someone puts it on YouTube illegally and it disappears a few months later when it is discovered … the good stuff might have been there and is gone.)   
> 
>  How many of us even know today that the song lyrics, "and Jimmy will go to sleep in his own little room again" referred to all the English kids who were sent to the country or even to other nations to get away from the bombs during the war?   By the way, the "Forces Sweetheart," Vera Lynn, is still alive at age 96.
> 
>      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwtW2Lx5Vwc    
> 
>  Southwest of "The City" is a place called Clapham Junction where two railroads, the one that built Victoria Station and the one whose home was Waterloo Station crossed.  It is still one of those places where you can commonly photograph two or three or four trains all moving at the same time.   This should give you some idea what I meant in the previous e-mail that the Underground isn't important south of the Thames; instead its the national network rail that fills the void.     I've been to both places and Clapham actually makes Jamaica on the Long Island dull by comparison.  
> 
>       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjgoL0TryA8
> 
>  And, as of 2012, there is a second circle line called the London Overground … sort of like we might have a second Beltway around a city.   The London Overground is made up of national railroad network lines:
> 
>       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YqsdXXbwOI
> 
>  This link is specifically for John Swindler, who did sail with his Mum on the Queen Elizabeth (or maybe it was the Queen Mary) to see Grandmum.   It has a great picture of a boat train leaving the dock at Southampton with a "Battle of Britain" class Pacific up front and the Queen sitting at anchor.   That particular locomotive was erected in December 1948 and ran until 1967; RMS Queen Mary made its final crossing the following year.   
> 
>       http://cruiselinehistory.com/boat-trains-to-southampton-from-cunard-lines-to-the-rms-titanic-and-the-ss-united-states/
> 
>  Most of you remember Chicago as a city with almost more mainline train stations than you could count … Union, Central, LaSalle, Dearborn, Northwestern, Grand Central.   Well, London was the same kind of place but with even more stations.   The railroads were not unified into British Railways until 1948 and some of them were merged earlier.   But most of the stations remain today.   Paddington was Great Western's station in 1854 and Isambard Kingdom Brunnel's statue is still prominent there.   Euston dates back to 1837 and served the London and Birmingham Railway originally and eventually the London, Midland and Scottish.   St. Pancras, right next to King's Cross, was built in 1866 and served trains to the Midlands.   Today it also handles the Eurostar services to Paris and Brussels which circle the city on new track.   King's Cross goes back to 1852 and is home today to the East Coast mainline to Scotland.   Victoria opened in 1860 and served four companies on the south.   Waterloo dates to 1848 for trains to the southwest.  Charing Cross opened in the financial district in 1864 and allowed trains ending at London Bridge to cross the river into the City.    Liverpool Street in the east handles trains going out into the Fen country … if you take a boat train to Holland, you use it and it goes back to 1875.  And all these places are still open.  And there are a few minor places like Marylebone.    There are five terminals in about two miles along Euston St / Marylebone Road across the north side of the city!   
> 
>  And when Mr. Swindler and I were first there, the southern ones were mostly third rail or steam and the northern stations were almost all steam.    Great memories.   
> 
>  My arrival in London in 1959 was a Waterloo Station.   Here is a stop motion film of Waterloo Station in the rush hour 40 years ago.   What's happened since then?  The traffic has gotten heavier and the old compartmented stock is gone.   You want that last phrase in American English?   British Railways had a lot of rolling stock with ten seat compartments, each with doors on both sides.   It has all been scrapped due to the inherent hazards of being mugged or robbed or assaulted (sexually or otherwise) if you wound up in a compartment with the wrong person.
> 
>       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPIaG644jsI
> 
>  And a cluster of high definition scenes in King's Cross, Euston, St. Pancras and Paddington
> 
>       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnFuaDntIbw
> 
>  And if anyone has the time waste, here is an hour-long film of steam in Britain, remastered from 8 mm films taken in the early 1960s … the time I remember.   The last steam engines were delivered in 1958, a year before I first went there.   The last fires were dropped about eight years later (maybe nine) except for more tourist railroads than you will anywhere else.   Yes, it was a different world from here … vacuum brakes back then.   Most trains were so light that very few engines had stokers.    A fitted freight had brakes on all cars.   They had compartmented carriages (not coaches).   The engines didn't need headlights because, except for one grade crossing, the entire network was fenced and gated.  But the steam engines still sounded like steam engines.
> 
>       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXw_cQbr6Do
> 
> 
> 
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