One of the benefits of having an online presence at Tracks through Grantham is that it encourages collaboration with other projects where they overlap with the Grantham area's railway history.
Malcolm Rush has been in touch to tell us about an album on Flickr where he's publishing his hand-drawn signal box track diagrams, photographs and other information.
In 1965-67 Malcolm visited nearly 200 signal boxes up and down the country. Each visit had a purpose - to create a record of the box and the lines it controlled. What wonderful foresight, as a 13-year-old, to record details of so many signal boxes while they remained operational! Five of the boxes he visited were in theTracks through Granthamarea.
AtTracks through Granthaman ambition is to prepare a page on the website for every signal box in the Grantham area. Several boxes are already covered, but in few cases have we found copies of a track diagram, a vital item in every box showing the purpose of each lever along with track circuit and other important information. A key purpose of Malcolm's visits was to create a hand-drawn copy of the track diagram displayed in each box. Thus his project is a perfect complement to five of our signal box pages and we're delighted to recommend it to you.
Malcolm himself explainsherehow his interest took root, andhereis an index of all the boxes he visited.
Thanks to the support of the then Grantham Station Manager Alec Wise, on Friday 4th January 1967 Malcolm visited the five Grantham area boxes under his supervision. Follow the links below to find Malcolm's diagrams, notes and photographs.
Four of the above boxes were previously featured on our website, the exception being Gonerby Siding box - until now. Encouraged by Malcolm's project we've put that right and you'll find our new Gonerby Siding signal box page here.
We have today upgraded Tracks through Grantham with 'SSL', which means that you will see 'https//' instead of 'http//' at the start of our URL on your browser address bar. This also means that various automated warnings about the website being 'not secure' should no longer appear.
Checks seem to show that the change has gone smoothly. You shouldn't notice any difference in performance, but if you do pick up anything odd (for example images being replaced by little icons) please let us know by using our Contact Form and we'll investigate.
We've just added a new page to the website describing a marathon 24 hour period spent on the platforms at Grantham. It's based around the 1961 Summer Working Time Table (WTT) and includes a selection of suitable photographs to illustrate some of the 300+ workings and movements taking place between midnight and midnight. You can step back in time and watch the action here.
Above: A1 No 60158 simmers in the sunshine before departing from Grantham with an express passenger train bound for London King's Cross. This locomotive first entered service on 17th November 1949 and as can be seen in this 1950 photograph it has yet to receive its nameplates. The name chosen was 'Aberdonian' but the ceremony did not take place until early 1951. Initially allocated to King's Cross, No 60158 had two spells at Grantham (35B). The first allocation was between 9th September 1951 and 7th June 1953, before returning to Grantham again on 2nd May 1954 to 6th June 1957. No 60158 was withdrawn on 26th December 1964 and finally scrapped early the following year.
From the Tracks through Grantham photograph archive (see below)
Hello all,
A very Happy New Year and all the best to everyone for 2022!
Below is an update on our activity during the last few months of 2021. We hope everyone will find something new and of interest.
First, though, we’d like to thank everyone who attended our get-together at the Grantham Railway Club on Wednesday 13th October, our first since October 2019. There were over 40 people and we especially welcome everyone who joined us for the first time. Our friends at the Club pulled out all the stops to ensure that all appropriate guidance was followed so that everyone could feel comfortable in the room. Our special thanks go to Richard Cumming for his presentation Steam on the Elizabethan 1953–1961, several times delayed but certainly well worth waiting for.
Our next gathering is planned for April 2022 – provisionally on Wednesday 20th April. Confirmation of the date and the programme will be circulated late in February or early in March.
We’re sorry not to have published our bi-annual Newsletter during 2021. As with many things, the Covid situation has upset normal routines and it’s not been possible to bring everything together, but we do hope to start again with another issue next summer.
1. Some New Pages on our website
Signalling and Signal Boxes
Rob Clipsham remembers a unique experience - travelling from Highdyke to Skillington Road Crossing in 1973 while standing in the tender of the preserved locomotive Pendennis Castle:
Other recent additions are aimed at developing the Tracks through Grantham sub-theme Railway People and Places. Grantham is a town where the railway has been influential in many ways, and we’re glad to demonstrate this by illustrating connections that may not always be immediately apparent:
The Grantham High Speed Accident of September 1906: the passenger casualties
On the morning of Sunday 21st November I visited Grantham cemetery to look for the grave of Georgiana Baguley, the only victim of the accident who was buried in Grantham. It wasn’t too hard to identify because it was repaired and cleaned in 2006 to mark the centenary of the disaster:
How did the town’s emergency services cope when an express train was wrecked and ablaze on an embankment near the station at 11pm at the end of what had, until then, been just another ordinary day? We discovered a write-up in a respected weekly medical journal describing hospital’s response:
The following pages have benefitted thanks to new photographs becoming available:
Turntables and Triangles we’ve added a photograph from the M.L. Boakes Collection of class A2/3 No. 60515 Sun Stream on the 70-foot turntable in the late 1940s
Sam Pearce there’s now a photo of the south apex of the turning triangle, which was opposite Sam’s house on Springfield Road. It has evoked more memories of his grandparents from Chris Pearce.
3. Some recent magazine articles
Steam World
The editor, Chris Leigh, has featured more selections of colour photographs taken by Noel Ingram on the East Coast Main Line in the early 1960s, mainly south of Stoke summit:
November 2021 (Issue 413):
Front and rear cover photos on the main line, plus pages 4 and 5 on the Woolsthorpe Branch.
across the top of pages 46 and 47 there's a shot of Grantham's A3 No. 60046 Diamond Jubilee departing from Leeds in August 1961.
December 2021 (Issue 414):
page 3
pages 54-55: Christmas Pick ’N’ Mix - scenes in the snow, January 1963
Steam Days, January 2022
Beginning on page 40: Travelling from Walsall to Grantham: 1958-62 by Mike Page
4. A recently published book
A Pictorial History of the B12s by Richard Anderson and Dennis Greeno includes many photographs of the former Great Eastern section locomotives which were based at Grantham in the 1950s. They were used on local services on lines radiating from the town, covering the period between the withdrawal of many 4-4-0s and 4-4-2s of GNR origin and the introduction of diesel multiple units (see, for example, the photograph below). The section ‘From Grantham’ is on pages 126 to 135. Published by The Midland and Great Northern (M&GN) Joint Railway Society, price £23.25.
5. For the future
24 hours at Grantham station in 1961
We're continuing to gather information for an upcoming article that will describe events at Grantham station over a 24-hour period. This is set against the background of the Summer 1961 Working Time Table. We hope that the new page will be published early in 2022, so if you have any memories, spotting notes, or even photographs from 1961 there's still time to contribute. Of particular interest is information relating to the practice of engine changes during this period.
Tracks through Grantham Photographic Archive
On another front we have now created and continue to add to a 'Tracks through Grantham Photographic Archive'. This is to ensure that we always have a sufficient library of suitable Grantham related images to call on when needed for future articles. If you have anything that you think could be included in our archive, no matter how insignificant it might seem to be, again please do contact us.
We leave you with two images selected from the archive, one below and another at the head of this post.
It's springtime in 1953 and here we have a lovely pastoral scene out in the countryside north of Grantham, with B12 No 61541 working tender first and having just left Peascliffe Tunnel with an assorted rake of coaching stock. The cows in the adjacent field are probably used to the passing trains and continue to graze unperturbed. No 61541 was introduced in 1920 and spent most of its working life at Stratford before being allocated to Grantham (35B) in November 1949. The locomotive stayed at Grantham until withdrawal in January 1957.
6. Keep In Touch
Something for everyone, we hope. We’ll look forward to receiving your comments and feedback either via the Comment Form which appears at the bottom of most pages or, for more general feedback, use the Contact Form form on this page.
(Comments are responses to the content of a page or to previous comments on that page. If approved, a comment may be published and become part of the page. On the other hand messages left using the Contact Form are directcommunications to the Tracks through Grantham team, and they will not normally appear on the site.)
Early in August a website contact form arrived from David Page who enquired, "If you would like some reminiscences of a lifelong steam enthusiast from c.1950 onwards, including a few photos from the early 1960s to the present day, please feel free to contact me."
The very pleasing result is our latest new page, simply titled Grantham!, which connects David's earliest experiences of the railway at Grantham, in the early 1950s, with his enjoyment of 21st century main line steam.
The story begins with the memories of a young lad who in the early 1950s travelled by train from Nottingham to stay with an aunt and uncle. Recollections include an A1, Kittiwake, in BR blue livery speeding north with a Pullman service; David also records his disappointment when the aunt and uncle moved away and he could, at least for the time being, no longer visit and enjoy the excitement of east coast expresses.
We look back at some local news items which illuminate the wavering relationship between loco spotters and the railway authorities at Grantham during the 1950s.
Happily, in the early 1960s David's relatives moved back to the town and he describes his reacquaintance with the Grantham railway scene. Now he had a camera and a growing interest in photography, and also a feeling that he should try to make his own personal record of the last few years of east coast steam. His endeavours extended to taking photographs from the windswept andchillystation platforms early in February 1963, in the midst of the UK's record-breaking arctic winter.
The early 1960s may have been the finale, but there has been a curtain call. The narrative and photographs extend into the age of digital imaging. The page concludes with three superb pictures of northbound specials taken by Davidat Belton Lane. They are hauled by A3 No. 60103 Flying Scotsman, A4 No. 4464 Bittern and A1 No. 60163 Tornado …and the A1 was in early BR blue, just as Kittiwake had been bedecked some six decades before.
The new page is in our Spotters' Corner section; the link above will take you directly to it.
Our next get-together for people interested in Tracks through Grantham takes place in Grantham in mid-October. 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 but, inevitably, they have been 'on hold'. The last was nearly two years back, in October 2019.
If you are already on our list of email and postal contacts you should recently have received the programme and invitation. Please remember to let us know if you hope to be with us.
If you're interested in attending but have not received a programme please get in touch, using the Contact Form here, and we will send you information - date, time, venue and programme. We don't publish these details on the website because we and our host venue need to know how many people to expect.
We are currently working on a new article for the TTG Website that will specifically focus on the 1961 Summer Working Time Table (12th June to 10th September 1961). Lots of information has come to light during our research, but we are now actively seeking details relating to Grantham 34F Locomotive Diagrams for the A3 Pacifics at this time. Another avenue of our research covers the engine changes on express passenger trains at Grantham during the same period, so if you can assist with any of the above please do let us know.
Two recent issues of Steam World have items which might interest Tracks though Grantham subscribers:
August 2021 (Issue 410):
pages 24 to 27 is a four page photo feature titled Through Noel's Lens: Freight on the ECML. It's a selection of seven colour photographs by Noel Ingram, prolific recorder in the early 1960sof traffic on the East Coast Main Line between Grantham and Peterborough.
across the top of pages 46 and 47 there's a shot of Grantham's A3 No. 60046 Diamond Jubilee departing from Leeds in August 1961.
September 2021 (Issue 411):
at the bottom of page 26 there's a letter from David Rollins in Australia who recalls being fireman on a V2-hauled Up fitted freight which came to a halt near Saltersford with a broken side rod in May 1959. He describes how the incident was dealt with.
pages 48 and 49 are a further two-page spread of Noel Ingram's colour photographs, this time five pictures of A4 Pacifics on passenger traffic titled Through Noel's Lens: 'Streaking' the ECML.
Friend of Tracks through Grantham Chris Leigh has recently resumed the role of editor of Steam World. We wish him well and hope that a sprinkling of Grantham-related content can be maintained.
Tracks through Grantham have recently been in touch with Phil Wilson who lived in Grantham until the late 1960s. Phil has kindly allowed TTG the opportunity to share some of his photographs and detailed notes made during many spotting trips around the area in the early 1960s. This is the latest page to be added to our Spotters Corner section. If you have a story of your own, then please do get in touch. You can visit Phil's page here
