Railways around Coventry

Hi Philip, I didn't know the Ordnance loop was owned by Courtaulds. Thanks for that info

Hi Adrian, The Foleshill Railway was an independent railway company, until becoming a subsidiary of the Ctlds Group. I am not sure about dates though. Best wishes

Hi all Food for thought. Railways are much in the news again of late, mostly for things going wrong. That kind of news has not changed much throughout my life time, as you will see that I have shared some of this before. Some ideas are & have been good in principle, but let down by poor development & research. The shambles regards the franchising issue I will leave out for now as that is an issue on its own, but HS2 is my biggest worry for COVENTRY. I actually believe that the principle idea to speed up travel times safely, must be strived for, because if we don't, our competitors will. It's the joining up of ideas between the various groups involved with the development that is so 'not joined up', almost as though the sharing between groups is completed either on a match box, or exchanged with such complex vocabulary, that it is not fully understood by anyone, & gaping holes & gaps are missed at this crucial stage. This is no joke, but I honestly believe that the building of the Great Central railway around the turn of the previous century was more responsible for a huge differential in living standards of people in Leicester to those in Coventry, where we benefitted from the industrial black country wealth, whereas Leicester was Locked into the north country textile, lower wage economy. My mother, along with many traders in Coventry, exploited this & made a good living by buying from Leicestershire & selling in Coventry. I saw this at first hand, so I do not need to be hoodwinked about the risks to Coventry & its trading position if it is left out of direct access to HS2. HS2, in concept, is little different now, to the then scenario of when the Great Central Railway was built over a hundred years ago. Leicester only started to recover from its earlier trading disadvantage once the M1 was built, along with the linking network of motorways & road transport started to surpass rail after the fifties & into the sixties.

I noticed as I walked along that footpath by the cutting in Earlsdon how quiet one of those Pendolino EMU's are, you could just hear a bit of wind noise and a whistle of the Thyristors in the power control (if they still use Thyristors). I would prefer to see a BR Standard 2-10-0 9F accelerating with a full load of coal wagons but then that's me (and most likely some of you), but does annoy me when someone buys a house next to a railway and then complains about the 'Noise'.

The last time I saw Castle class 5051 'Earl Bathurst' was at Banbury, on a 'down' special, it was about 1981 when I took this and sorry it's not in Coventry but it's pointing our way at least This was the first time I had seen a steam locomotive on a BR main line as at 48 years old I'm a bit too young to remember the 'real steam' days unfortunately. I'm envious of those that were around to see it in the 50's/60's Note Banbury South Signal Box in the background, I'm not sure if the signalling has changed as it was mostly semaphore GWR lower quadrant but around that time the were ripping it out and there was a huge pile of signals, lamps, pulleys and all the stuff needed for the semaphore signalling dumped on what was Banbury's loco shed.

I say to folk from the Steam era that 'MY' era was the last of the big diesels like the Deltics, I used to go down to KX the see the last of them, I don't need to list the classes as you will know them all but it was a shame for me to see them disappear although some are being resurrected for departmental use, and a Deltic was used to haul freight for a company only last year, I think it was from a preservation society, not what they were made for but would have been nice to see and hear that unusual Napier engine sound. I'm unsure of the type of diesels that used to run through Coventry station as I was a Rugby 'gricer'

They were almost exclusively English Electric Type 4 1Co-Co1 in passenger days, before being replaced by electrics. Coventry didn't really have a 'diesel era', having gone straight from steam to electric. The EE Type 4s then replaced steam and other diesel types on the coal run between Nuneaton and Rugby.

Hi all, For those of our members not familiar with these works of art, they were called Auto Trains, like a DMU but powered by steam. We could say a SMU!! They could be driven from either end of the train. Examples of these pieces of engineering can be seen at most of our local preserved railways. I never saw one in Coventry, but they worked all over the West Midlands & Warwickshire right up to the sixties.

Were they the ones that 'sort of' remotely controlled the locomotive if running in the opposite direction ? There was also 'Slip Coaches' wasn't there that used to uncouple a coach at a station without stopping. BTW the layout is looking good Philip

A two-coach push-pull train regularly worked the Nuneaton-Leamington run until 1959, usually hauled by an Ivatt 2MT. During peak hours it was often doubled-up to four coaches. Sadly there is no Stanier driving coach available in RTR model form at present.

Hi Dutchman Thank you so much for that. I travelled to school from Foleshill on Tuesday & Thursday mornings but I never saw an auto train. I travelled in one on the now removed line from Leamington to Rugby a couple of times, trainspotting. Thank you. I feel better now about ours in Longford Park.

Hi Catshed Some were mechanically linked to the loco & some were hi-tech later linked. The mech' linked had the regulator & brakes linked in the loco with rods that went through the floor of the loco and with universal joints came up at the front of the coach. It is fun to watch them being linked by the crews. The fireman always stayed on the loco, whilst the driver would drive either from the loco or walk to the driving cab of the coach. Slip coaches had a means, whereby the guard could release the coupling between the slip coach and the forward coach. He would then bring the free rolling coach to a stop at the weyside station, without the rest of the train having to stop.

That was the theory. In practice either the station pilot had to shunt the slip coach into the station or the passengers had to walk several hundred yards to the platform!

Hi again A couple of my pics from Winchcombe 2007. Above is the auto coach. Below is the driving cab inside of the coach. The lever that appears to be hanging down is connected to the loco regulator. The control on the right is connected to the vac' brake on the loco, whilst the control in the middle is the screw brake. Hope this helps.

This site might be of interest to Philip as we were talking about bridges and construction,it is an interactive OS map of the Great Central Railway showing its construction around 1885-1887. I was fortunate to be lent the large negatives of most of these about 1979 by the owner (then) of Catesby House where the tunnel went underneath their stable block, and printed my own set those days but you now see the images pop up all over the place now. This is now a common image but was one I developed from the original plate negative. The house in the top right corner is Catesby House where I borrowed the negatives from a Mr and Mrs Darby, whose permission I used to ask for so I could walk on that section of railway line they owned. I believe the photos are called the Newton Collection these days.