“Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?”

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: USA tank 30075

Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: USA tank 30075

I don’t know much about railway locomotives, but I thought I could identify a Southern Railway USA-class 0-6-0 tank locomotive when I saw one.

Wrong.

I spotted a locomotive with the unmistakable American outline at the Barrow Hill Roundhouse, but 30075 isn’t what it seems and its story is interesting.

These USA tank locomotives were mass-produced by the United States Army Transportation Corps in 1942, as part of the preparations for what became D-Day.  382 of these punchy little shunters (which the Americans call “switchers”) were stockpiled in Britain, ready to operate the railways of Europe as they came under Allied occupation.

After the Second World War the Southern Railway bought a batch of fifteen to use in and around Southampton Docks, because they could cope with very sharp curves and yet were powerful enough to haul a full-length boat-train if necessary.

Fourteen were actually used, while the fifteenth was broken up for spare parts.  Under British Railways the fourteen were numbered 30061-30074.  Four of them survived into preservation.

30075 is not one of the fourteen, let alone the four.

Other ex-US Army locos were bought by private railways in Britain;  the Chinese bought some, as did the Egyptians, and some ended up in Israel and Iraq.

The Yugoslav State Railways thought they were so good they bought over a hundred, and then built nearly a hundred more themselves.

One of these, number 62-669, dating from 1962, was purchased from a Slovenian steelworks by the Project 62 Group [http://www.project62.co.uk/background.htm] in 1990.

They brought it to the UK, converted it as closely as possible to the British specification, and gave it the next number in sequence after the fourteen originals.

In 2006 the Group bought another from a steelworks in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and this will in due course become 30076.

In the 1960s we thought steam locomotives, apart from a few museum pieces, would disappear forever.  Fifty years later, preservation is morphing into reconstruction and, in this case, reconstitution.

It’s an interesting and welcome twist on the conventions of museum preservation, and it’s ironic that while many genuine historic locomotives are preserved in aspic, sitting indoors, beautifully maintained, highly polished like works of art, brand new locomotives like Tornado and nearly-new examples like the USA tanks are coming into service.

If it steams, and it moves, and it brings pleasure, I’m in favour.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list has a section on the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Keeping the wheels turning

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: D9009 Alycidon

Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: D9009 Alycidon

Among transport-preservation enterprises, I think the Deltic Preservation Society is particularly admirable.

The Deltics were the first-generation high-powered diesel locomotives that replaced steam on the East Coast expresses between London and Edinburgh in the early 1960s.  In their time they were the most powerful diesel locomotives in the world.

The prototype was named Deltic as an allusion to the marine-pattern Napier engines, which featured a triangular arrangement of cylinders like the Greek letter delta.

Twenty-two production locomotives were built, replacing a roster of 55 express steam locomotives dating back to the 1930s, and ran the East Coast services until the arrival of the High Speed Train in 1978.

They lasted another ten years on other routes, and six of the original twenty-three have been preserved.

They’re much-loved for their size and power, their classic American shape and the distinctive sound of their diesel-electric power units.

Three of these belong to the Deltic Preservation Society [http://thedps.co.uk] and are based in a purpose-built depot at Barrow Hill Roundhouse, Derbyshire.

All three locomotives – D9009 Alycidon, D9015 Tulyar (both named, in the old LNER tradition, after racehorses) and 55019 Royal Highland Fusilier – were purchased as long ago as the 1980s, and they have now been in preservation for more years than they were in public service.

Another Deltic, 55022 Royal Scots Grey, recently made news when it was hired as a working locomotive by GP Railfreight to haul bauxite trains:  [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13592652].

The Society maintains them in working condition so that they can earn their keep on preserved railways and on main-line excursions.  Alycidon and Royal Highland Fusilier are serviceable, and Tulyar is currently under overhaul.

It’s good to see superannuated locomotives in practical use, rather than as frozen-in-time exhibits in a gallery setting.

I applaud the acumen of groups of enthusiasts who have so successfully combined their own enjoyment of maintaining traditional engineering with a commercial business model that brings pleasure to present-day enthusiasts and guarantees a long-term future for these fine locomotives.

A similarly laudible preservation campaign, but at an earlier stage in the process, is the Deltic Preservation Society’s neighbour at Barrow Hill, the 5-BEL Trust’s project to restore an entire train, the Brighton Belle:  http://www.brightonbelle.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=200113.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2018 ‘Waterways and Railways of the East Midlands’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list features the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Tornado

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: 60163 Tornado

Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: 60163 Tornado

I’d been looking forward to seeing the new A1 locomotive 60163 Tornado, ever since it took to the rails in 2008.  I caught up with it at the Barrow Hill Roundhouse “Fab Four” event in April 2012 – a well-organised facility for connoisseurs of locomotives to stand and stare at them and, in many cases, take photographs.

I happened to find my way to the trackside at the moment when a large, loudly hissing cloud of steam advanced down the line.  By the time it came alongside, anyone with a camera needed to shield their lens against the fog of cool condensation that completely enveloped us.

The cloud turned out to contain 60019 Bittern, one of the glorious streamlined A4 Pacifics now displayed in garter-blue livery.

The next cloud of steam proved to be 61994 The Great Marquess.  It was a damp, cold morning, and each loco was loudly blowing off surplus steam through its safety valves.

It’s an extraordinary sensation to stand within a few feet of a railway line, amply protected by safety fencing, as a hundred and more tons of locomotive glides past, the steam exhaust utterly deafening, the wheels and motion barely audible.

The final cloud of steam was something else.  60163 Tornado snorts and clanks and blows steam in all directions:  it’s intended to speed down long, straight stretches of main line, and doesn’t take particularly kindly to doing a catwalk turn.

Once this procession had reversed back into exhibition position I took an opportunity to look over Tornado closely.  It’s a strange beast:  it makes weird banging noises while sitting doing apparently nothing.

It is indeed a magnificent piece of engineering, built from scratch to fill the gap in the ranks of preserved main-line locomotives that ran the East Coast route in the days of steam, to the original post-war design by Arthur H Peppercorn, the last Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London & North Eastern Railway.

In order to run on present-day main lines the design is necessarily adapted to present-day railway conditions – slightly lower than the original, fabricated with the advantages of modern engineering, equipped with the data recorders and warning protection that modern trains carry, with riding-lights that look like traditional oil lamps but are in fact LED clusters.

In effect Tornado represents the form that the original A1s would have evolved into if steam had continued in Britain after the 1960s, and it carries the “next in class” running number accordingly.  Its name commemorates the RAF Tornado pilots who flew in the first Gulf War.

The first standard-gauge steam locomotive to be built in the British Isles since 1960, Tornado has all the dignity and elegance of original museum pieces, with the added frisson of being virtually brand new.

The very sight of Tornado brought audible expressions of ecstasy from hardened rail enthusiasts.

This must have been how it felt to see Flying Scotsman, Mallard and the rest when they emerged from the workshops between the wars.  Tornado’s website is at http://www.a1steam.com.

It won’t be the last.  Other new builds of lost locomotive designs are on their way, led by a new LMS ‘Patriot’, which will take the last-in-class number 45551 and the name The Unknown Warrior as a national memorial engine, replacing the long-lost, much rebuilt original 1919 London & North Western Railway memorial locomotive, Patriot:  http://www.lms-patriot.org.uk/overview.html.

 

Exploring Sydney: St Andrew’s and St Mary’s Cathedrals

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St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, Australia

St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney, Australia

St Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral, Sydney, Australia

St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Sydney, Australia

Catholic cathedrals in most Australian cities were deliberately designed to outshine their Anglican neighbours.

In Sydney, Australia’s earliest settlement founded in 1788, the Anglicans were quicker off the mark, and after a couple of false starts completed St Andrew’s Cathedral, which was consecrated in 1868.

The architect, Edmund Thomas Blacket (1817-1883) had a difficult time adapting the existing foundations and part-construction of an earlier project, and produced a modest-sized but imposing composition, with more than a passing resemblance to York Minster.

Sadly, St Andrew’s Cathedral has been compromised more than once.  Because of the noise of Sydney’s trams passing the east end of the cathedral, the entire church was reversed, placing the entrance on the east so that communion was celebrated as far as possible from the tramlines at the west end where the choir had to fight, not only the trams, but also the acoustics.

When in 1999-2000 the original layout was restored, liturgical considerations required that the old altar had to go.  It was, in addition, riddled with termites.

As a result, the fine reredos designed by John Loughborough Pearson and carved by Thomas Earp was left framing a vacancy.

The seat of the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney is the splendid St Mary’s Cathedral – also the successor to a couple of earlier structures which were successively destroyed by fire.

The foundation stone of St Mary’s was laid in 1868, the year St Andrew’s was consecrated.

The Catholics had the advantage, however, of a spacious site on the edge of the built-up city-centre, and they chose as their architect William Wilkinson Wardell (1823-1899), who already had St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, well under way.

Wardell lived long enough to see St Patrick’s substantially completed, but St Mary’s took much longer.  Work on the nave began in 1913 and was completed in 1928.

Even then, Wardell’s elegant design was truncated, because there were insufficient funds to complete the twin western towers with spires.

Indeed, it seemed unlikely that such expensive luxuries would ever be justified, until an A$5,000,000 grant from the New South Wales Government prompted the ingenious solution of flying in steel frames by helicopter and cladding them in Wondabyne sandstone to match Wardell’s original design and intentions.

St Mary’s Cathedral was topped out, in the literal sense, in August 2000, completing a project that began in 1868.

Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Gothic Down Under:  English architecture in the Antipodes explores the influence of British architects, and British-trained architects, on the design of churches and other buildings in the emerging communities of Australia and New Zealand.  For details, please click here.

Marvellous boy

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'The Death of Chatterton' statue, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

‘The Death of Chatterton’ statue, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

On the way from the house to the lavatories at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire there is a disconcerting moment when one comes upon a recumbent marble figure at the base of the garden wall.  It appears that an eighteenth-century gent has fallen from the top of the wall and expired.

In fact, the statue is a reproduction of Henry Wallis’ painting ‘The Death of Chatterton’, which hangs in Tate Britain.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) was the sad, unregarded poet who passed off his work as “The Rowlie Poems”, the rediscovered work of a fifteenth-century monk.

He was found dead of arsenic poisoning in his London attic at the age of seventeen.

Horace Walpole took against what he saw as a literary fraud, but Keats dedicated his ‘Endymion’ to Chatterton’s memory, and Wordsworth thought well enough of his talent to describe him as “the marvellous boy”.

How his statue came to Kedleston – or who sculpted it – remains obscure.  Apparently Lady Ottilie Scarsdale, wife of the second viscount, found it in pieces in the yard of a monumental mason, and bought it.

I admire her wit in positioning it where it startles passers-by.  It’s something to chat about.

For visitor information about Kedleston Hall see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/kedleston-hall.

Royal flush

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Royal bathroom, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

Royal bathroom, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

When my friend Jenny and I visited Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, I was disappointed not to be able to show her the royal bathroom.

The early twentieth-century owner of Kedleston, the Viceroy Lord Curzon was ambitious to entertain King George V and Queen Mary, and in anticipation had an en-suite bathroom discreetly added to the State Bedroom.

I had the opportunity to photograph this some years ago, but the room stewards assured us, with regret, that it’s not usually shown to the public.

Apparently there’s a second modern (that is, early twentieth-century) bathroom, which I haven’t seen, nearby.

As consolation, Jenny and I were allowed to see the po-cupboard next to the dining room.  This common, convenient feature of grand dining was for the use of gentlemen after the ladies had retired to the drawing room.

It saved a long trek in white tie and tails.

I duly photographed the po-cupboard, but the royal bathroom is far finer.

For visitor information about Kedleston Hall see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/kedleston-hall.

 

Love match

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Tomb of George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquis and Earl Curzon, Viceroy of India (1859-1925) and his first wife, Mary Victoria, Baroness Curzon (1870-1906), All Saints' Church, Kedleston, Derbyshire

Tomb of George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquis and Earl Curzon, Viceroy of India (1859-1925) and his first wife, Mary Victoria, Baroness Curzon (1870-1906), All Saints’ Church, Kedleston, Derbyshire

Nestling against the cool classical pile of Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire is the far older medieval parish church of the long-vanished village of Kedleston.  The north aisle of the church is an early-twentieth century Gothic memorial to a great love match.

George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquis and Earl Curzon, Viceroy of India (1859-1925), famously the “superior person” of an undergraduate ditty, like a number of his contemporaries married the daughter of an American millionaire.

Mary Victoria Leiter’s father was a co-founder of what became the Chicago-based Marshall Field department-store empire.  Her wit, charm and elegance was legendary.  The breaktaking peacock coronation gown, by Worth of Paris, which she wore as Vicereine at the Delhi Durbar in 1902 is on display within Kedleston Hall.

Perhaps the only sadness about their relationship was her inability to produce an heir, and the medical complications following a miscarriage destroyed her health.  She died in her husband’s arms on July 18th 1906.

Curzon commissioned the Gothic Revival architect George Frederick Bodley to design the memorial chapel at Kedleston, and employed the Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal to carve her effigy in 1913.  Mackennal, by then Sir Bertram, ultimately provided an effigy of Lord Curzon which was installed in 1931.

Lord Curzon’s second wife, who has no obvious memorial at Kedleston, was Grace Elvina Duggan, a rich American widow aged 38 at the time of their marriage in 1917.  Though she had three children from her first marriage she did not provide a Curzon heir, and the marriage deteriorated into a separation.  She is buried in the churchyard of Kedleston Church.

The finest monument to Grace Curzon is not at Kedleston.  She was the subject of John Singer Sargent’s final portrait in oils, now in the Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grace_Elvina,_Marchioness_Curzon_of_Kedleston.jpg.

 

Shrine of books and manuscripts

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John Rylands Library, Manchester

John Rylands Library, Manchester

Leave the traffic and bustle of Manchester’s Deansgate, and step into the studious quiet of the John Rylands Library, and you’re transported to a different world – of peace, calm and more books and manuscripts to study and admire than you could absorb in a lifetime.

It’s no longer usual to enter through the street doors into the gloom of the original entrance lobby, which in some ways is a pity.  Instead you enter through a light, white modern wing that brings you to the original Gothic library by a gradual route.

This brown stone Gothic Revival temple of learning is a monument to one of Manchester’s greatest cotton merchants and philanthropists, John Rylands (1801-1888), conceived and paid for by his third wife and widow, the Cuban-born Enriqueta Augustina Rylands (1843-1908).

She had a very strong idea of what she wanted – a free public scholarly library in the heart of the city of Manchester, for which she purchased as core collections the Althorp Library of Lord Spencer and, later, the Bibliotheca Lindesiana from the Earl of Crawford.

Initially, she intended the library to specialise in theology, and specified a Gothic building that would suggest ecclesiastical and university architecture, so she engaged Basil Champneys (1842-1935) on the strength of his work at Mansfield College, Oxford (1887-90) [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfield_College,_Oxford].

Enriqueta Rylands was so anxious to begin work on the Deansgate site that, though Champneys produced the initial design within a week of gaining the commission, she demanded to see building work begin before the detailed work had even started.

To satisfy her, he contrived a 4ft 6in concrete platform on which later rose his spatially complex, technological advanced repository of some of the most valuable books in Manchester – its interior insulated from the smoke and noise of the city by lobbies and ventilated by the best air-conditioning that was practical at the time.

The reading-room is on the first floor, to catch the limited available light, approached by a capacious, picturesque sequence of staircases, galleries and vaults that Nikolaus Pevsner described as “a cavalier throwing-away of whole large parts of the building to spatial extravagance pure and simple”.

The atmosphere of monastic calm, within yards of the busy city-centre street, is dramatic, and reflects the religious emphasis of the original book-collection, though Mrs Rylands insisted on toning down some ecclesiastical features such as the intended traceried screens to the reading-bays.

Despite the romanticism of its aesthetic appeal the building was designed to be fireproof, with a six-inch ferro-concrete lining to the masonry vaults, and was from the beginning lit by electricity, generated in the huge basement.

Cost was not a restriction:  when it opened in 1900 the bill came to £230,000, and by 1913 Champneys was required to extend the building.  Further extensions were added in the 1960s and in 2004-7.

Since 1972 the building has been the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, though members of the public are free to join:   John Rylands Research Institute and Library (The University of Manchester Library).

The building itself is open to the public [Visit (The University of Manchester Library)], and the entrance wing contains the excellent Café Rylands and a quality bookshop.

It’s worth seeking out.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Building schools for Sheffield

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Former Carlisle Street Schools, Sheffield (1985)

Former Carlisle Street Schools, Sheffield (1985)

I have the publisher’s word that I was the very first person to hand over money for the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group’s excellent new publication Building Schools for Sheffield, 1870-1914 – even before the Lord Mayor received his presentation copy.

When I browsed through it at the book launch, over tea and fruit-cake, I saw that one of the very few Sheffield Board Schools for which there appeared to be no satisfactory image was the Carlisle Street Schools (1891), in the heart of the east-end steelworks.

I had to confess to Valerie Bayliss, the Group Chairman, that I had a couple of images that I’d taken when the steelworks were being cleared in the mid-1980s.  I’ve now passed them on to be in good time for the second edition.

Indeed, the panorama that is included on page 48 of the book demonstrates vividly why this long-forgotten school needed a capacity, after an extension in 1894, of 1,121 pupils.

Very few people have lived in the Lower Don Valley now for decades, but when the School Board handed over its responsibility to Sheffield Corporation in 1902, it had provided places for over 12,000 pupils in the heart of the steelmaking east end of the city.

Building Schools for Sheffield, 1870-1914 is obtainable from http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/publications/sheffield-schools.

 

Exploring Sydney: Sydney Tramway Museum

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Sydney Tramway Museum, Loftus, Sydney, Australia

Sydney Tramway Museum, Loftus, Sydney, Australia

I had great difficulty persuading anyone to take my admission money when I checked out the Sydney Tramway Museum.  Eventually, a gentleman dressed as a tram conductor, on the second tram I rode, correctly answered my question “Do you think I look like a concession?” and I decided the operation was simply relaxed.

Similarly, when I made my second visit to the deserted refreshment cabin it was another tram driver who actually provided me with a plastic cup, a teabag and a large carton of milk – and a ceramic mug to dispose of the wet teabag.  The whole experience was very relaxed.

Finding the Museum is a matter of deduction.  There’s virtually no signage:  resting trams can be seen from the platform of Loftus railway station, but it requires navigation to find a way into the site.

Two tram-rides are on offer in opposite directions, out-and-back trips where the entertainment at the outer end is watching the crew reverse the trolley poles.

The display hall has a fascinating collection, not always well displayed.  There are welcome invitations to climb aboard some trams, including the Sydney prison tram, 948, which is difficult to photograph because of the photo display boards propped against its sides.  Displays throughout are copious and labelled in detail.

It’s apparent, though, that a significant proportion of the fleet of trams is off limits to visitors.  It’s a pity there isn’t an escorted tour of the workshops and other storage areas where interesting-looking relics in a variety of liveries lurk.

A huge amount of volunteer effort has gone into this well-resourced museum, and further development is afoot behind a fine Victorian façade beside the track.  In time to come, when there are attractions at the termini and high-quality shop and refreshment facilities, the Museum will provide a magnificent day out.

This is the place to learn about Sydney’s complex, interesting and much lamented tram system.  If you’re passionate about steel wheels on steel rails it’s a must.  At present, though, for a simple outing it’s a bit of an effort.  http://www.sydneytramwaymuseum.com.au.

There is well-edited footage of the final week of Sydney’s tram services in 1961 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SADQyImniSI.

To see the state of Sydney trams that didn’t find a home in the museum, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rozelle_Tram_Depot and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V0dBzsf6eY.