We've just added two photographs of the 1874-1942 GNR signal box at Great Ponton. Photographs featuring that box appear to be quite rare and we haven't had one on the website before now. Here's a link to the page. Scroll down to the heading 'The 1874 Signal Box'.
Author: TracksthroughGrantham1
Tracks through Grantham: April 2024 meeting
Our next get-together for people interested in Tracks through Grantham takes place in Grantham in mid-April. These events are an opportunity to meet for a few hours to enjoy a varied and, we hope, enjoyable and informative programme. Our meetings are usually held twice a year, in spring and autumn.
If you are already on our list of email and postal contacts you should recently have received the meeting programme and invitation. Please remember to let us know if you hope to be with us.
If you'd be interested in attending but have not received a programme/invitation please get in touch, using the Contact Form here, providing your name and email address. We will add you to our list of email contacts and send a programme and invitation which gives the date, time and venue (and requests a reply if you intend to join us).
We don't publish the meeting details on the website because we and our host venue need to know how many people to expect.
A Recent Incident at Highdyke
The Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) has issued a news report on its website titled:
Train damaged by collision with an object at Highdyke Junction
The accident happened in the early morning of Tuesday 19th December 2023.
Highdyke Junction is about 4 miles south of Grantham station. It is where the up slow line joins with the up fast on the approach to Stoke Tunnel.
Click here to go to the report.
Highdyke was once also the junction for an ironstone branch (c.1917-1973). For more about the Highdyke branch see here.
Marking LNER’s 100-year Anniversary at Grantham station
Above: LNER staff at Grantham in 1920s costume with the CENTURY Azuma train (named at York on 15th May) passing by on the main line (The Grantham Journal)
On Thursday 28th September there was a big surprise in store for people travelling through Grantham station.
During 2023 today's LNER has been celebrating the centenary of the formation of the original L&NER, on 1st January 1923. There have already been events at some of the route's major centres of operation, but the company wanted to include one of the smaller stations in the programme and they chose Grantham. Penny Bond, LNER Internal Communications Manager, explained that "The event is about celebrating our centenary with our customers, who are the very heart of our business."
Tracks through Grantham supporters were invited, and between 09.00 and 13.00 we were treated to:
- a jazz band playing 1920s music
- LNER staff from across the business dressed in 1920s attire
- an exhibition of photos from the 1960s in one of the customer lounges (waiting rooms) prepared with the support of Tracks through Grantham
- a newspaper stand with a copy of the LNER Gazette with LNER facts and history
- historian David Turner in attendance to talk to people about railway history
- a group of re-enactment actors playing 1920s passengers
- re-printed LNER posters from 1923-1924 on display
- London King’s Cross customers receiving replica ticket modelled on a 1923 Edmondson-style ticket.
LNER's Managing Director, David Horne, was present throughout, and the Mayor of Grantham, Councillor Mark Whittington, called in.
To see more of what went on follow these links to online and broadcast coverage, including photographs and video:
- The Grantham Journal LNER flashes back to 1920s at Grantham station as part of 100 year celebrations by reporter Katie Green (with photos, video and two pictures of the customer lounge photo display)
- LNER The Fast Track podcasts by David Dunning – Episode 9: A Journey back in time (see also Episodes 1 to 8 published occasionally since February)
- BBC Radio Lincolnshire Melvyn Prior 28/09/2023 from around 02:19:45 to 02:24:44 (available on BBC Sounds until Saturday 28th October)
Tracks through Grantham: September 2023 meeting
Our next get-together for people interested in Tracks through Grantham takes place in Grantham towards the end of September. These events are an opportunity to meet for a few hours to enjoy a varied and, we hope, enjoyable and informative programme. Our meetings are usually held twice a year, in spring and autumn.
If you are already on our list of email and postal contacts you should recently have received the meeting programme and invitation. Please remember to let us know if you hope to be with us.
If you'd be interested in attending but have not received a programme/invitation please get in touch, using the Contact Form here, providing your name and email address. We will add you to our list of email contacts and send a programme and invitation which gives the date, time and venue (and requests a reply if you intend to join us).
We don't publish the meeting details on the website because we and our host venue need to know how many people to expect.
Grantham – The Rise and Decline of a Railway Centre
With the kind permission of the Railway Correspondence and Travel Society (RCTS) we are very pleased to re-publish, here on Tracks through Grantham, an article written by John F. Clay in 1966 for The Railway Observer. The article draws on the author's extensive local knowledge as he relates how the town and its people contributed, collectively and individually, to fostering the widespread recognition of Grantham as a premier railway centre on the East Coast Main Line.
The writer concludes by pondering the desolate, cleared site of the loco sheds and yard, querying the wisdom of 'Dieselisation' and wondering, from the perspective of the mid-1960s with the prospect of continuing post-Beeching closures, what future profile the railway would have in Grantham.
This link will take you directly to the page:
Peter Wilkinson
Above: Cleaner Peter Wilkinson in the cab of Class A3 locomotive No.106 'Flying Fox' at Grantham Loco in May 1948.
Dear friends,
We have been saddened to hear that Peter Wilkinson passed away last Sunday, 19th February, at the age of 90.
From the earliest days of our project Peter was a great friend of Tracks through Grantham and he supported our project in many ways. He always shared a word of encouragement when we chatted at our meetings, which he attended regularly.
Peter began his working life at Grantham ‘Loco’ in March 1948 as an engine cleaner, progressing to fireman until, in August 1954, he left the railway to follow a career in the police. When we got to know Peter in 2011, shortly after our project began, he delighted in recalling the formative six years of his life spent on the footplate at Grantham. He kindly allowed this entertaining and keenly observed story to be published on our website (see below).
Peter had many interests, and he lived a very full life. Mel remembers exploring the Lincolnshire countryside with him:
I first met Peter at one of our Tracks through Grantham railway events and I found him to be a very interesting man to talk with. Apart from the relatively short time that he worked on the railway he would also tell me about other periods in his working life. Like many others he was called up for National Service and later joined the Police force and went on to become the Harbour Master in Lincoln. Throughout his life Peter had a great love of aircraft and was an accomplished model maker. Peter's original family home was in Welbourn, Lincolnshire and, as I then lived in the next village, I was keen to hear about his personal memories and knowledge of the area. His father was a blacksmith in Welbourn and, when Peter was a child, he would sometimes accompany his father on 'shoeing' visits to a stable a few miles away at Temple Bruer. However, he could not remember the exact location. During one of our telephone conversations he brought the subject up again; so I said that we ought to try and find it. On one of the occasions that he came over to my house at Temple Bruer we decided to do just that. Arming ourselves with an old ordnance survey map, we made a few local enquiries. Eventually we did find the remains of the former stable block, and of course Peter was absolutely delighted to have finally solved the mystery. For posterity a couple of photographs were taken of him standing outside. Peter was a kind, thoughtful gentleman and I will never forget him. His book 'My Lincolnshire Life' (published privately by his family) is a fitting testament to a life well lived.
Peter Wilkinson’s funeral will be held at Lincoln on Tuesday 21st March. There’s a link to the family notice giving full details here.
Below are links to the pages on the Tracks through Grantham website where Peter relates the story of his railway life, supplemented by photographs he took while at work.
- Railway Life at Grantham - Peter Wilkinson
- Footplatemen’s Photographs (scroll down to halfway)
Mel and John
Sixty Years and Counting: Thursday 31st August 1961
It's time for our next selection of photographs taken 60 years ago on one of a series of visits to Grantham station by my father and me.
The Tracks through Grantham time machine takes us back to Thursday 31st August 1961 to catch up on the first of three early excursions to Grantham. Go to the Sixty Years and Counting header page and scroll down to the link.
John Clayson
Looking Back at the Era of ‘The Elizabethan’
At Tracks through Grantham we've been discussing how we might 'do our bit' to mark the close of the modern Elizabethan era.
It was in 1953 that the world's longest regular non-stop train service was retitled The Elizabethan to mark the coronation of the new monarch, HM Queen Elizabeth II. Since we heard Richard Cumming's presentation Steam on The Elizabethan 1953-1961 at our meeting in October 2021 it's been on our minds to feature The Elizabethan on our website. Now seems an opportune moment to realise this aim.
So we've gathered together photographs of The Elizabethan train service in the Grantham area from our website image library for a new page called At the Dawn of a New Era: ‘The Elizabethan’ in and around Grantham. We think it’s an appropriate gesture and we hope you agree.
You can find the new page here, in our website's Traffic and Trains section.
All the best,
John Clayson and Mel Smith
Tracks through Grantham: September 2022 Update
Above: The northbound 'Elizabethan' express from London King's Cross to Edinburgh Waverley, hauled by Haymarket A4 No. 60031 'Golden Plover' on Saturday* 14 June 1958.
© Photograph by Roger Bamber
Roger Bamber
We've been saddened to hear that our contributor Roger Bamber passed away on Sunday 11th September, aged 78.
Roger grew up in Leicester and as a boy he made several visits to Grantham station, usually cycling over the hilly A607 via Melton Mowbray. He became a celebrated professional photographer and photojournalist whose work appeared in many national newspapers and magazines. Roger won dozens of awards, most notably the British Press Photographer of the Year twice and News Photographer of the Year twice also.
Two years ago Roger got in touch with Tracks through Grantham from his home in Brighton to offer some of his earliest memories and photographs. They are on our page Haymarket Rarities - captured with a plastic camera.
Several tributes to Roger and his career have appeared on the internet. In one of them, for the Brighton paper The Argus, his wife Shan says, "Roger loved steam trains, one of the reasons he came to Sussex was for the Bluebell Railway but he ended up in Brighton and decided it was the 'best place in the world' and that's why he stayed."
There's an appreciation of Roger Bamber, illustrating the range of his work, on The Guardian website here.
Tracks through Grantham meeting, October 2022
Just a reminder about this event, which was the subject of a post circulated on Wednesday 31st August. If you intend to join us please don't forget to let us know.
A Recently Updated Website Page
Gonerby Siding Signal Box
- Back in March we published a new page about the box at Gonerby after Malcolm Rush told us about his visit there in January 1967 in the company of Grantham Station Manager Alec Wise. Malcolm told us that Gonerby was the only box, of 184 that he visited, where the operator was a signalwoman. This set us on the trail of trying to find out who this lady was.
A number of people helped, and we soon identified that she was Mrs Carter, the wife of signalman Albert Carter at Grantham South. Then, a few weeks ago, an email arrived from George Watson who, as a boy, used to visit Gonerby box.
To read George's fascinating account go to our Gonerby Siding Signal Box page and scroll down just over halfway, to the heading Bett Carter: signalwoman at Gonerby Siding.
Recent features of interest
We keep an eye open elsewhere for items of Grantham area railway interest. Here are some we've seen recently.
The Facebook Group Rail Thing - REAL Trainspotting (1945-1968)
Please note that the links to Facebook from this section only work if you are logged in to Facebook.
1. Patrick Clay is posting photographs taken in the Grantham area and elsewhere by his father, John F. Clay. Follow this link to find the Grantham area pictures, or go to the group on Facebook here and search ('search this group') for 'Patrick Clay Grantham'.
John F. Clay wrote the Foreword of Rev. A. C. Cawston's book LNER Steam at Grantham, in which he says that as a schoolboy photographer in the 1930s he met Arthur Cawston and Thomas Hepburn on the platforms at Grantham. In his Introduction to the same book Cawston tells us that John Clay was, for many years, a schoolmaster at Grantham. John F. Clay's photographs have appeared in a number of books and periodicals, and he wrote an article about Grantham's railway heritage in The Railway Observer.
2. Our regular contributor Richard Cumming has penned an absorbing account of a visit to his Uncle Arthur on Merseyside in 1955. Written in the same style as his popular articles for Tracks through Grantham (they're in our Spotters' Corner section), there's plenty of railway interest plus such things as his impressions of the docks and of attending Anfield to watch Liverpool FC.
Titled A train spotting holiday in Liverpool in 1955, Richard's essay can be downloaded as a Word document called 'Liverpool Holiday.docx' from here.
The Grantham Matters website:
In the past 3 months this local history website has published a few items of railway interest:
- Scrapping of Ruston's and Aveling & Porter's works locomotives in 1952 (note that the loco builder's name was Barclay & Sons of Kilmarnock, not Bartley)
- ...another view of one of the Barclay locos being scrapped
- A photograph on the Woolsthorpe ironstone branch taken from Woolsthorpe Lane bridge at Stenwith
- Improvements to the nature walk on the former High Dyke Branch
- Bishop of Nottingham's visit to the Loco in November 1961
- The station canopy collapse, winter 1947
- A photo of GNR 4-2-2 No. 1 at the Western Platform in 1952 sits rather uncomfortably over an item about cut-price rail fares.
Steam World magazine:
In the current issue of Steam World is an item which might interest Tracks though Grantham subscribers:
September 2022 (Issue 423):
- pages 26 and 27 is a photo feature titled East Coast Main Line Moments. It's a selection of four colour photographs by Noel Ingram, prolific recorder of traffic on the East Coast Main Line between Grantham and Peterborough in the early 1960s.
Remember that you’re very welcome to stay in touch with us…
via the Tracks through Grantham website:
- for feedback on a specific page, use the 'Comment' box under 'Leave a Reply', which appears at the bottom of most pages;
- otherwise, use the general Contact Form found here.
All the best,
John & Mel