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Category: Diesels

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It's been a while since we published new pages on the Tracks through Grantham website.  This is mainly because we've been fixing a performance issue with the site, which has been quite a challenge.  We've also been carrying out some 'housekeeping' to check that external links, some created several years ago, continue to find their intended destination.

Today we are launching five series of photographs taken by Colin Walker when he travelled with the footplate crew on express locomotives.  Pacifics of classes A3, A4 and A1 appear, along with a Deltic diesel electric.  Locations range from Gas Works Tunnel, leading out of London King's Cross station, to Scrooby Water Troughs, north of Retford, and Doncaster station.

You can find the introduction page here.  From it there are links to the groups of photographs taken on the five trips.

We're sure this latest group of pages has been worth waiting for.  Comments will be very welcome – there is a box at the foot of each page.

Some of you may also receive this update in a direct email from Tracks through Grantham.   This will be because you are both a Subscriber to our website and a direct email Contact for our project.  Please bear with us on this because eliminating overlap between Subscribers and Contacts is much easier said than done. 

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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

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It's time for our second selection of photographs taken exactly 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 16th August 1962.  Go to the Sixty Years and Counting header page and scroll down to the link.

John Clayson

Published on Leave a comment on Sixty years and counting: Grantham station photographs on their diamond anniversary

We're publishing some new pages of photographs taken at Grantham in the early 1960s.  Each group of pictures was taken on a visit made to the station by my father and me on a Thursday afternoon, and it will appear in a new page on or around the 60th anniversary of the trip.  The time span is between August 1961 and July 1964.  Our visits took place between spring and autumn, on 19 occasions in total.

The photos will be added to the Grantham Railway Galleries section of our website.  To find the first group, from Thursday 12th July 1962, go to the header page and scroll down to the link.

On the header page, with the note of each new group of pictures, there will be an invitation to look out for the next group.

We hope you enjoy the photos as they appear.

John Clayson