A mix of some ‘not to miss’ tours on the Western and Eastern Regions, plus experiencing everyday steam on both the Southern and London Midland regions, has Peter Chatman recalling some highlights of rail travels 60 years ago.
I had been a very active trainspotter through the late 1950s right up until I started work in 1960. For the next few years, trains took rather a back seat, to be replaced by cars, motorcycles and other more social activities involving the opposite sex. Then I saw that Ian Allan was arranging a special high speed train to Plymouth to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the record run of City of Truro on 9 May 1904, hauled by ‘Castle’ class locomotives.
As it happened, in 1964 the anniversary fell conveniently on a Saturday, although tickets at £6/12s/6d were a bit expensive to someone on an apprentice engineer’s wages, albeit this did include lunch and high tea, and really this was just too good an opportunity to miss. The train would be non-stop from London (Paddington) to Plymouth (North Road) with one ‘Castle’, then non-stop from Plymouth back to Bristol (Temple Meads) using another ‘Castle’, and finally a non-stop run from Bristol to Paddington with another ‘Castle’, with stand-by ‘Castles’ placed strategically in case of any problems. Considerable testing and fine tuning took place to provide locos capable of hard running at this late stage of steam on the Western Region, together with other special arrangements such as ensuring that the train would receive a clear road, and that water troughs were still operational. With dieselisation now so advanced, firemen were no longer used to continuous hard running on long non-stop journeys and so the sensible step of providing two firemen was taken.
So on the day, I caught a local diesel-multiple-unit from my home station to Paddington.
