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Please use this thread for all your interesting facts and comments about the GWR

Wow!

Now, keep this one SERIOUS please.

I was invited to York Rail museum for my performence at work...We had the Museum to our selves where we were served a meal on board one of the carriages that it houses...I have some great photo's of the evening if I can dig them out I will post them for you Tony..

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was only 27 years old when he was appointed as chief engineer.

Back in those days, (1833) 27 year olds were still in short pants.

I loved Jeremy Clarksons film about him on BBC's Great Briton's

Thank you Maureen, but York Railway Museum is not exclusively GWR, it's polluted by LMS, LNER, Midland, & even Southern Railway garbage.

Take it ..not to bother then..

In preparation to build the GWR, he walked the entire way from London to Bristol, to survey the best route. Then he designed every bridge, tunnel, aquaduct, termini, stations, the lot. Himself.

Every one of them survives to this day, including the magnificent Box Tunnel, & Paddington Station.

Big Brother anyone ??

Or how about painting the living room and then sitting back and watching the paint dry..

Or alternatively, why not mow the lawn and then sit by the window and watch the grass grow ??

Well, could I have just the GWR stuff, please? I'm a bit of a snob about Railways.

GWR (God's Wonderful Railway or Great Western Railway) is the only one that matters.

I was in York Railway Museum Bookshop one day about 3 years ago, & imagine my surprise when I saw a pictiue of my Father on the front cover of a book!

It was taken at Swindon Railway Works (where the magnificent GWR Loco's were built), and showed my Dad as the Fireman on the last ever Steam Loco ever to be built in Great Britain, as it left Swindon. His "driver" was Princess Elizabeth (as she was then), later to become H M The Queen. he had to say to her, in railway fireman tradition, "right away Mate", meaning, all clear to proceed. Not too many peeps get to call Her Majesty "mate"....!

Be honest - you are loving this. We ALL are.

NO


I work on the Railway all week, ..so..so..sooo.. I am taking my bat and ball home now..

;tk;

Wow! now that must have been an amazing moment.

Did you know that Swindon was the first station to have a 'Refreshments room'?

You work on the railway? What? Really?

The Nun, my hero.

What do you do Maureen, & where?

Yes, an awesome moment. I purchased every copy!

No, I never knew that about Swindon Railway Station.

I'd like to write a book about Railway Stations. It has to be said, the more Northern - particularly Yorkshire - stations on the GNER are cathedral like, quite magnificent.

Paddington, of course, is awesome, much better than any other London Termini, though St Pancras is easily the mot beautiful Railway Termini in the world, though not much of a Station, as such. The Ironwork for St Pancras was forged in Butterley, in Derby, by the way. Victoria & Waterloo do nothing for me. Oddly, you may think, some of the Tube Stations in London are very special indeed, Baker Street, Farringdon, Whitechapel, West Acton all have their charms.

Birmingham New Street is bottom of the list, it's awful, Leeds is interesting -  lots of platforms - & Newcastle is pretty good, as is Edinburgh Waverley, & York.

Crewe is not what it's cracked up to be, nothing like, Preston is junk, Mancherster Piccadilly no great shakes. Derby is awesome, as you can see the carriage sidings, they have some awesome rolling stock there, & many restored Diesel Locos, too, all parked such that you can see them from the platforms.

I better stop now otherwise I could go on & on all day.

Swindon went into history by installing the first ever railway refreshment rooms for the public. A stop of ten minutes was given, although before long the GWR would curse this facility as it prevented the speeding up of trains, until in May 1845, the company announced new express services to Exeter without this interruption. However the GWR was taken to court by the buffet leasee, with the company losing their case and in the process learning a valuable lesson.

I blame RED

heres your hero, taken in 1857 by Robert Howlett. The chains are from the Great Eastern steamship



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But what about the Local Lines... where Semaphore Signals and Tokens are still used...surely they deserve a mention..

ashamed to say i am finding this intresting

My Grandad and my Dad were both Firemen/enginemen (Flying Scotsman included), and my uncles were both engineers for BR. Are we related  ;tk; ?

When I was 10 I won a "Design the Train of the Future" competition for Blue Peter. I won a first class train trip to York and VIP entry / tour of the national railway museum to see my design on show.

Worst thing was going on blue peter LIVE and having to explain how my train would work?

Didn't have the guts to tell them I copied it out of a "trains of the future" book!!!! BUT I did add exhaust pipes to it.....

Glad to say thats my only train story....

Steve

Don't worry Maureen - EVERYTHING will be explained on this thread in the fullness of time....

Exciting, 'innit?

Thanks Tonji. Amazingly, despite building the GWR, he also conceived the idea of, & designed, the SS Great Eastern, & SS Great Western. And the Clifton Suspension bridge. And...and...and.....

A quite extraordinary man.

For those of you holding your breath, don't worry, there will plenty more fascinasting factoids to come from me on here, but I'm involved in a comp right now, so it may take a while.

Just in case you were worrying.....

I haven't been to York railway museum for years, but when i was a kid I used to love it.

Trains have a romance about them that is not captured by other forms of transport.

My father was the Honorary Secretary of the Rialway and Canal Historical Society in the mid 1970s. My childhood was spent in places like Didcot railway centre and on the Grand Union


and I never knew tikay's dad was a railwayman!

Some more essential GWR facts from the corners of my brain...


The Great Western Railway was the first to install electric telegraph alongside its line.

Impressive Brunel achievements on the route included the viaducts at Hanwell and Chippenham, the Maidenhead Bridge, the Box Tunnel and the Bristol Temple Meads Station.  Brunel used the broad gauge (2.2 m) instead of the standard gauge (1.55m) on the line.

Daniel Gooch, who had worked with Robert Stephenson in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was put in charge of locomotive production. Gooch was told by the company to produce a "colossal locomotive that should easily surpass anything that had gone before". The result of this directive was The Great Western that could travel at an average speed of 67 mph. It has been said that "while Brunel built the Great Western, Gooch made it work".

One of the consequences of using the broad gauge was that Great Western locomotives could not use Euston Station and Brunel had to build its own station at Paddington. This was not completed until 1854.

 

When I used to live in Dunfermline as a kid. We visited the park there often. In it was an old steam train that was very run down, and was used by children to climb on.  This thread has brought those memories back . Looking back on it now, it seems a shame for a nice old train to be used this way. 

Here is a pic. I don't know a great deal about trains.  Can you tell me what kind of steam train it is?

http://2dunfermline.co.uk/index.php?ID=2418

My Childhood holidays were usually at Dawlish Warren, in converted GWR Carriages ah the memories. I thought they were small until I bought a narrow boat.

My favourite trainy type thing is the London Underground

The first time I was in London, I fell in love with the tube. Fascinated by the whole mass transit thing.
Bought myself a "Mind the Gap" hat so everyone knew I was a big tourist  :D

Rollox to the natural history and British museums, it was the transport museum I found most interesting.

Harry Beck was the man who designed the famous tube map back in 1933. His ingenious idea was to not feature above ground landmarks and not make it to scale. It makes it so easy to use.

His design ideas have been copied all over the world. He was only paid 5 guineas for his trouble.

I know a heap of useless information about the London Underground. For instance, there are 287 stations and only 2 contain all 5 vowels.
Mansion House and South Ealing.

I'm so sad I took a wee trip to Farringdon, just to see the station.
Even sadder, I went to Angel to ride Europe's largest escalator.

heres a poem i wrote some years back about my uncle jolly. he was a railway man up the west coast line in Scotland and quite acharacter :)

 Uncle Jolly ©
Annemargaret 
Glasgow, Scotland
2003
Jolly was a tough man
He drank whisky and beat up his wife
Had a million pals
Travelled the West Coast Line
A retired railway man
"How ye dain tinker?"
Highlanders would shout
As he killed and gutted a sheep
Took it back to Glasgow to feed his ego
Young family children would quiver
Hid behind mothers
As he ate worms and licked a red hot poker
Man of steel!
Don't go near him!!
Don't touch or see his whisky under the cushion where it was hid
Feart to the heart of uncle Jolly
His kilt was dirty, almost boggin
All the boys in his family still longed to have it.
And travel the line he called his home
Free to roam where everyone knew him
Highlander Heart.
 

Seems like a nice bloke....

he was a nasty piece of work. he kept his kids in the floor under a trap door if they were 'bad'
hes pan bread now. hope he mends his ways in the next life


mad

Don't know the specifics Sark, but that would be, generically, an 0-4-0 Pannier Tank.

The 0-4-0 refers to the wheel & bogie configuration. This one has no front or rear bogie, just 4 wheels in the middle, being designed for light duties. Larger locomotives were likely to be, for example, 4-6-4, 4-6-2, etc.

Pannier, because it has no Tender, so the water is carried on large "Pannier" tanks either side of the boiler, hence the "slab-sided" look, bearing in mind that the boilers are always round.

I actually think it's rather nice that kids can play on it.

"pan bread" - not heard that one before! In cockney rhyming slang, that'd be "brown", as in "brown bread".

Thanks Tikay.  I would prefer to see it restored and back running again on a Railway enthusiasts line. That would probably cost a fortune though.  It looks alot better than it used to do 20 years ago.  Back then it was spray painted and had graffiti all over it.

its a scottish thing tikay, its acctually "pan breed"

I am afraid it costs a fortune to restore these things. The main cost is the boiler, which has to be tested & certified for safety reasons, as they operate at extremely high pressure, & if one exploded, it would have dire consequences.

I shall be all night answering & commenting on this thread, it's fascinating, to me, anyway. Kev is, secretly, loving it too.

They spell "bread" wrong in Scotland?

No, Kev is only reading it to remind himself that his life isnt that bad after all ;)

i work in the railway too


can you guess from this little ditty what i do:-

Its not my job to drive the train
Its not my job to take fares
Its not my job to signal the trains
but let one leave the tracks
and its hell i catch

Get back to your daft Eurovision junk thread Couch. This thread is for grown-ups.

You are too young Tikay. You should have been born 80 years ago when the idea of electric trains was not yet thought of.

Permanent Way maintenance? Safety Inspectorate?

You hear that Kv?

"You are too young, tikay".....!

That's a first on blonde.

Hope he did not mean to Post it in "things I never expected to hear".....

i meant it was pronounced pan breed, smart arse ;)

What sark actually means is you should have been born 80 years ago instead of 95 years ago.

yeah tikay

Im an engineer for a railfreight company..based on a terminal so i dont go near the mainline

thats way to scary wouldnt trust those damn coss's or lookouts...u can buy a PTS down the pub i hear for 30 quid

Im actually more of a wheel tapper and shunter than p-way

sigh, all that hard work undone.........

Whats the highest mainline station in england?

The one that takes the most drugs ??

sigh

If you lob them up, you cant expect me not to volley them home ;)

Keep OFF this thread Colchester Chiropodist. It's for grown-ups.

grown ups who still play with train sets ??

I watched a show on the discovery channel last night  (well 4am this morning) it was called 'Trains' with Pete Waterman.

Wow!!!! I learned some cool stuff.

An express locomotive used 12000 gallons of water while travelling from London to Glasgow. That means they have to refill 6 times en route. They managed to do this without stopping by lowering a scoop into a long water trough that sat between the lines. If they didn't get the scoop out quickly enough, it was torn off when it hit the end of the trough. Wow!!

Express train drivers were apparently the equivalent of todays commercial jet pilots and commanded as much respect. Wow!!!

During its record breaking run, the Mallard had reached the incredible speed of 124mph when the driver recieved a warning that the bearings were overheating, this warning came from a device desiged to emit a strong SMELL when the temperature got too high. He smelled the warning!!! Although he knew his engine would be destroyed within 12 seconds, he pushed on and set a top speed record of 125mph, the record stands to this day. Wow!!!!

The Cornish Riviera Express, built over 100 years ago, is still in use today. Wow!!!

Luxury trains had restaurants, cinemas, beds, even barbers shops. Wow!!!

GWR used so much coal, they mined their own. Wow!!!

What a great programme, I'ts on again next week to tell us all about the role the railways played during the war.

"During the war........"  I can't wait!

Doesn't Pete Waterman own a private line for old steam trains?   I am sure I watched  a TV show profiling him once

Did you take notes during the show or do you just remember all these facts from one viewing at 4:00 AM?

Yes, Apparently he once bought the Flying Scotsman, but he got so many complaints and death threats when he changed the colour, that he sold it again.

I remembered them, and a load more, it was interesting.

I went to the shop for a loaf of bread yesterday, and I came back without it.

The Fat Controller was going to do the same thing to Thomas once.  He didn't in the end thankfully.  It is abit extreme sending death threats to someone for changing the colour of a train.

Was Tikay interviewed by the police?

Very old thread - Bumped by popular demand.

The most difficult engineering problem that Isambard Brunel had to solve when building the London to Bristol line was the Box Tunnel. Positioned between Bath and Swindon, Box Hill consists mainly of limestone.

Two miles long, on a descending gradient of 1 in 100, one MP warned that the slope was so great that if the brakes failed, a train would leave the tunnel at 120 mph (193 kph). Another MP argued during a debate in the House of Commons on the subject, that if the tunnel was built, no one would be brave enough to enter it. The tunnel was so straight that it was argued that on some days the "sun actually shines through the complete length of the tunnel".

GET A JOB !!!

Went to York railway museam again last week, man this place is awsome :)