The Gricer

Time & Twizell  There are many parallels between the steam age railway and the World Wide Web, both grew from technology bubbles, both created quantum leaps in the speed of communication over vast distances, almost, but not quite, as far as we can daydream. These steam age blogs are the result of the meeting between my steam age youth and the cyber century of today. However, I should also mention that, yesterday is as unreachable as Alpha Centauri and tomorrow is even further away. We forget more than we remember and we imagine the rest, we make up little tales and stories and imagine, and imagine. This isn’t ‘how it was’ its how it is, at that moment, right then, that very instant. ‘On this day in ….’ what does this mean exactly? When you begin to dig into the past, the bigger the explanation becomes and the further away the original question is. Each daydreaming train of thought is of its day, sunny day photos and gloomy ones too, men, machines, changing times and changing ...

  Passing the time Funny stuff time, goes faster when we’re enjoying ourselves, slower when we’re not. We measure its passage using atoms, divide it into fractions of a second when the Stig does a lap on Top Gear  are paid for ours hourly, and probably poorly, and if that wasn’t enough – there’s never enough of it. The image above is of a slice of time 1 – 320th of a second thick digitally frozen, launched into cyberspace, to be reproduced, around the globe, in bytes of time even thinner than 1 – 320th of a second. Draft saved at 1:55:48 I’ve just been advised. Do I need such levels of time accuracy when typing an essay?  Trains run on time, to a timetable,  though sometimes they do neither and ‘on time’ can mean anything up to ten minutes after the time advertised as being the time of arrival – what Alice in Wonderland would have made of that only the Mad Hatter could tell. There’s a great deal about the modern railway which only someone as mad as a hatter could...

Semaphore Signals Signals, signs, indicators, instructions, directions, to be read, interpreted, acted upon, and only a very few are actually railway signals. The signs are all there, to be ignored at your peril, fined for disobeying, signed By Order, Private do not enter, Not to be moved, Penalty for improper use £25. All the signals in the photograph are set at danger, but the danger only happens if you pass them in that position. We are frequently told that this, that, or something else, sends out the wrong kind of signal, metaphors for semaphores, they’re disappearing rapidly, their stiff arms and solid posts, though they could just as easily be lattice,  replaced by twinkling fairy lights. It’s a very long way from trundling along behind a man carrying a red flag, via Bobbies with a watch, which may be quicker, but way more hazardous, to today’s  signaling  centre : Many wrong signals have been given and taken along the way. On today’s franchised out, customer focu...

  Snap Time Unconcerned by the spectacle in front of them, a group of line side photographers sit talking, the footplateman on the Jinty appears to be watching them. Meanwhile, through a gap in the fence, another photographer stands, camera to eye, ready to shoot. I liked the way the red of the signals and buffer beam all linked up, the way the figures in hi-viz on the left and in the background were picked up in the collar of the coat being worn by the figure standing next to the railings and all this in a very ‘railway  running into town’ setting. Railways never enter town through the nice bits, either side of the line is, usually, the wrong side of the tracks. There are exceptions, the entry to Dundee station from the south, for instance, is across the estuary of the river Tay over the famous Tay Bridge.  The line out of Dundee to the north is much more typical of the railway’s entry into town, you leave the station...

  Made in Yorkshire Doncaster, today, isn’t a name which readily brings to mind the finest of British workmanship. Doncaster’s town jail, a privately run affair, is known to the locals as Doncatraz, the loss of railway, mining and engineering work has taken a toll. When you look at the engine in this photograph, which as most of you know, was built in Doncaster, do you think, what a handsome and stylish machine it is, or do you think about all those men,  forging and hammering, filing and milling, measuring and checking, riveting and bolting, and much, much, more before she finally rolled out of the Plant and into history, probably not the later and, most likely, the former. Entire families and often several generations of those families laboured much of, if not all, their working lives creating the parts and assembling them into a thousand steam locomotives both large and small, the speedy and the less so. When Joe Duddington, a Doncaster engine driver, the man who dro...

  Trains of thought (‘ Time flies by when you’re the driver of a train’ )   It has been my intentions in writing this article to try and illuminate some of the major, quirky, or interesting aspects of social life which owe their existence to railways. I chose the title ‘Trains of thought’ because, hopefully, it will cause you the reader to take your own thought journey along the lesser known routes, making your own connections to our shared railway past. Trains of thought should be considered as a ‘slow train’ trundle along some of the less well known branch line connections to our railway heritage. Railway history is one of those fraught and highly contentious issues which raise partisanship to new levels and almost everyone has their own cause ‘celebre’. In this article I am not going to examine the histories of individual companies, or particular lines or enginemen, instead I am going to look at an area of our railway history which seldom gets an airing - the relati...