Research suggests that the Minehead engine was No. 78 (Knowle) rather than No. 55 (Stepney)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LB%26SCR_A1_class_locomotives

 

Rapidly pushed out to 1400 & now 1500
 
National Rail reporting no Elizabeth Line services between Paddington-Heathrow/Reading......Advice seems to be to go via Waterloo.

 

?  - I thought that Stepney was another Bluebell engine right from the start, and Wikipedia seems to confirm that.

But ... I might see the earlier trip as another guest engine appearance and not anything like an "in regular traffic" type use.  It leads towards the question "at what point does a guest cease to be a guest and become a regular part of he family" ... which we could also ask about the S&D 2-8-0s to Minehead.

 
Alterations to services between London Paddington and Reading

Due to the emergency services dealing with an incident between London Paddington and Reading some lines are closed.

Train services running to and from these stations may be delayed or revised. Disruption is expected until 12:45 09/06

 
Monday June 9

And after a few good days:


RTT has the 11:52 as starting from Shrub Hill.

 

The ladder would indicate lighting use


Typical UK railway siding / walkway light would have been enamelled metal lampshade.

I am so happy I no longer have to repair / maintain such lighting any longer 

 

Back in the early 1970s, Butlins at Minehead were having a clear out, and "Duchess of Hamilton" was donated to the NRM (and, in November 1975, became the final BR train movement on the branch, as she was towed away to Swindon by a Class 25) and the diminutive Stroudley "Terrier" "Stepney" was donated to the WSR.  There was a fanciful idea to return the loco to service, but that didn't happen.  She was used, in 1979, as a smoking prop for a BBC2 telly drama though, thanks to a smoke bomb from BBC special effects department, and a shove from another loco

So there is a precedent for a Terrier on the Minehead Branch

 
Not good

 
A plus point has to be that people get to see an engine that they wouldn't normally see

 
Poles for floodlighting usually had only two wires, possibly more in very extensive installations. If arc lamps were used there was usually a winch to lower the whole lighting unit to near ground level for attention, as this was needed frequently. For filament lamps, or later mercury lamps, a ladder was often provided for lamp replacement.

A few installations used series lighting, whereby special lamps of low voltage were used in series on a high voltage supply. Never popular in the UK, more of a USA thing.

 
I see pictures of "Fenchurch" - a locomotive I associate with the Bluebell - hauling trains on the West Somerset Railway at present and she looks so out of place (and small).  And I see Romney Hythe and Dymchurch locos on the Bure Valley and on the Ravenglass and Eskdale.

Guest locomotives help, I suppose, bring back for another ride (and another wallet extraction) people who have become too familiar with the day to day options but ... are they right?   Am I too much of a purist to be put off by Fenchurch's escapades (to me, would be OK on Isle of Wight ) or is in fine and dandy?

 

Exploiting the zoom effect in that photo, I can see more than by eye. For a start, the nearer pole is actually reinforced concrete, so might have won a game of scissors-paper-stone with a chainsaw. The two behind it do look round and wooden, though hard to see in detail. And why one has a ladder fixed to it, apparently wrapped in vegetation, who knows?

And while there's only the two running lines here (between the skew bridge in the picture and the footbridge the picture was taken from) in any of the old maps I've looked at, some time between the 1930s and 1960s the entry line for the goods yard at the station was extended into this section. There had always been an unused space for it under the footbridge, oddly.

 
I do think we will see filton bank being wired at least as far as. Temple meads and parson street.

siemens are pushing their battery trains and offering good financedeals.to pay for infrastructure investment for them so I'd say watch this space although TFW are starting a procurement process now.for new rolling stock jn addition to what they have now and they want to run to Bristol TM

 
I would LOVE to be taking a trip this week ... but so much else going on, and that would be greedy. Also impractical.  Many trips sold out, Clevedon and Portishead both only reachable by slow coach (or slow bus) and the most practical excursion looked like one from Penarth until noted that the Severn Tunnel is closed and getting home at the end of the trip was impossible.  Ah well - September on the South Coast

P.S. Want a quick journey across the Severn without a car the week?  Best way - P.S. Waverley

 

When I bought my current car the only "free" colour was red - other colours were "available", inc black, at £500 + extra. What was it that Henry Ford said about his cars ?

 
From the BBC ...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20250529-britains-five-best-slow-train-journeys

 
A brand new railway cycle route in western territory - though an LNWR line this time rather than GWR. Carmarthenshire Council is building a cycleway along the old Carmarthen–Llandeilo line. The first (Carmarthen-end) half is now open: https://www.carmarthenshire.gov.wales/business/development-and-investment/tywi-valley-path/

Completion to Llandeilo by the end of the year, including two new river bridges. I think this is the biggest new railway path project in the UK for some years, though there are a few short paths bubbling under.

 

That's probably a text book example of where removing stops is an excellent idea.  Not having to take the detour via Weston and a scheduled 11 mintue layover at Taunton all contributing the that dramatic delay recovery.

I have seen other examples where it has been completely pointless.  It's taken extra time to get passengers off the train that wanted the missed station(s) at the previous stop and the train has then followed something else, a freight for example, and not made up any time at all.

It's a bit of a guessing game.

 

Was there ever a siding or head shit there, these types of poles on the SR with only 2 insulators often had lighting on them, or it could have been an electricity supply for the local electricity company / board 

 

49 minutes late from Gloucester - 1 minute *early* into Exeter St David's

 

Gloucester - Bristol Temple Meads - Highbridge and Burnham and all (4) stations onwards to Exeter St Davids, 12 stations left out.    With 17 calls scheduled along the way, there were 153 journey opportunities scheduled, but with 6 calls left that's reduces to just just 21 opportunities - however, with it being half an hour late and with services much of the way running event half hour, many of the lost journey opportunities will have been replaced by something that's not too different to what would have been offered by the delayed train.

It will be interesting to see how much time (if any, he says pessimistically) will be made up. JourneyCheck is simplistic and suggest "once delayed, always delayed" and forecasts a 10:04 rather than an 09:34 arrival into Exeter.   Real Time Trains tells us it was 50 minutes rather than 30 late as it left Gloucester, and predicts a 10:03 arrival into Exeter.

 
Excellent!

 
With the Severn Tunnel Closed ... could this happen at a worse time?

 
We may not have any wires but, just next to Wokingham station, we do still have a few poles. They had been hiding in the dense woodland that had been allowed to invade the slopes by the railway. As you can see, a lot of trees of similar girth were cut down and I was impressed that the chainsaw brigade could spot which ones were poles and leave them - even when camouflaged by ivy leaves.

 
It is possible that some of the wires shown are not for railway purposes, but are part of the local telephone system.
Since the right of way and the support poles already existed, it was often economic to use the existing infrastructure for phone lines, rather than building a new route.
This was done in the UK and overseas.

A minority of UK telegraph line routes along railway lines had red insulators. These were used for a mains voltage electricity supply to remote signal boxes. Only a small current was available, limited to lighting and sometimes to battery charging.
Space heating and cooking was generally by coal or paraffin.