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Category: Express Passenger

Published on

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. 

Published on

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:

Grantham - The Rise and Decline of a Railway Centre

Published on

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