Guest Book: Page 16

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I visited your site as I was looking as my Grandfather came from Nuneaton and he and his family ( brother and father) all worked on the Railway. My grandfather was a signalman and his father a ticket collector. They appear to have moved to London during the late 1890s. I shall visit the site again as it looks interesting.

Mary

I was pleased to come across your excellent site recently. I wondered if you could advise how to obtain a copy of the photo of 7301 (gwrw382) on the Banbury to Wolverhampton section of the site. I have owned one of the cab side plates from this loco for over 40 years and that is the best photo I have seen of the loco yet! Thanks for any help you can offer.

Malcolm Garner

Mike, Reference to Martin Beckett in the Guestbook, Page 9 (referring to A3 'Windsor Lad' heading into Catesby Tunnel on the GC main line. Another occasion to rival that was in 1956 when we were informed that a streak would be passing through the bird cage. After a two week wait Saturday 12th May arrives - what was it going to be? Silver Link with a rake of Pullman's. Absolutely jaw dropping!. My second item photograph miscfr010. The location is Stoney stanton Road as line crossed under the Foleshill Road between Courtaulds works the canal bridge. Constructed in 1901 to serve Websters brick works extended 1902 to Mullinets Ltd. which became Coventry Ordnance Works. My friends father Arthur Franklin worked on the footplate of Henry and Rocket during the 50's.

Regards, Barry McGory

I have a number of black & white photos you may be interested in adding to your site. Whilst they are later than many of your shots (they were taken circa 1978), almost all of the traditional railway infrastructure they show has long since gone. The main pictures of interest are a series of 15 photos I took at Abbey Junction, Nuneaton, showing; the (LMS or MR?) goods sheds the signal box, operational at that time, the loading facilities of Judkins quarry, the extensive PW yard, the Nuneaton to Birmingham line including the then active Abbey 'flyover', the truncated branch line to Ashby, including an apparently operational semaphore signal.

As I said, very little of this remains today, just the highly rationalised main line. If you are interested I will have them scanned and forward them on. I also have colour photos taken in the late 70's / early 80's around Nuneaton which are of less interest to you, but there are a few featuring the goods shed at Nuneaton (demolished for Asda), the PW yard on the west side of the station (highly rationalised), the signal box just north of the station (gone), trains on the abbey flyover (now diverted / closed), and the sidings off platform 5 (now built upon as platforms 6 & 7).

I would also like to write a small update to one of your captions to photos of the goods shed at Stockingford - I remember playing on the remains of the shed's foundations as a boy.

Ian Bishop

Ian - Whilst my declared time line for the site is 1968 there are occasions when I bend this rule, primarily when there are photographs showing the county's railway infrastructure little changed to the end of steam on British Railways. Therefore I would be delighted to take you up on your kind offer of the photographs.

With reference to captions please feel free to provide extra/correct information and in particular, past memories of the railways. - Mike

Hello Mike. I have just been pointed to your web site and it is great. Although I now live in Buckinghamshire I was born and brought up in Leamington. I have thoroughly enjoyed scanning the photographs - they bring back many happy memories of my time photographing and "spotting" in the area. This was mainly during the last years of steam in the early to late 60's.

Having bunked Leamington Shed for example on many occasions I am sure I have some photographs of it as well of course many others taken on this route. They will mostly be 35mm black and white film. Whilst the site welcomes additional contributions I am sure you don't want to be flooded out. Do you have particular gaps etc that you would like to fill? I guess you would prefer them ready scanned but as JPEGs? Look forward to hearing from you in due course.

Very best wishes - Gerry Batchelor

Hi Gerry - We are obviously of a similar age as my memories of steam are from the very late 1950s to the mid-1960s too. The ending of my interest in railways was as much to do with the discovery of 'girls' as with the end of steam in the area. However I did my 'spotting' at Tile Hill station on the ex-LNWR Coventry to Birmingham line. The Western Region, with locomotives carrying brass boiler fittings and bearing four digit number plates, was altogether another and rarely visited world for me.

With regard to your kind offer of copies of the photographs you took (something regretfully I never did) and your query as to whether I want to be flooded out or not, without wishing to be seen as greedy I welcome as many photos as you have available although where they fill gaps they are doubly welcome. The site currently has about 4000 images but this uses only about 5% of the available disk space so its not so much as to how many can I handle, its more about the time required to create the files and upload them on the site. Images are best supplied as JPegs preferably un-sized so I can crop accordingly or 'zoom' in for a close up.

Remember every photo is a unique record of what happened (close to fifty years ago now for the late 1950s) and can never be recaptured. Someone somewhere might just want to model a particular locomotive in this area and it might just be your photo that proves it was prototypical. If you can provide captions it will speed things up because then I only need to copy and paste the text and insert the photo into the HTML page. If you are providing a caption of a locomotive you could add, as I do, some historical facts about the locomotive by visiting British Steam's database of locomotives at their website which will help to put some 'meat' into the text. I very much look forward to receiving your photographs.

I would be grateful to anyone who could help by writing more informative captions. This is one of my biggest chores as after writing captions for the best part of 3750 pages it becomes very difficult to make them fresh. Similarly its time consuming and I would rather spend more time adding new photos to the site and revisiting old photos to increase their size and improve their quality. Robert Ferris made a big impact recently on the GWR (around the Bearley area). Robert hopes to recommence writing captions soon.

I am the webmaster for Alton Douglas, the Midlands best selling author of local history books. His books are image-driven and contain over 200 photographs in each edition. Our client base is of course mainly comprised of people who have an interest in images of times gone by within the Birmingham and the West Midlands area. We have often thought that these images should be seen by a wider audience – so we have constructed some “free pages” on the Internet aimed specifically at certain subject areas.

Our first little feature is entitled “The Magic of the Railways” – and it can be found at our website. We were therefore wondering if you might like to link to this feature which we feel would be an interesting addition to your website. We will be creating an additional category in our Links section called 'Sites we like' and all sites that link to this feature will have a reciprocal link placed there. Thanking you for taking the time to read this unsolicited communication and we look forward to hearing from you.

Ken Windsor

My pleasure Ken - I have long admired the work of Alton Douglas. I am in the process of revising the links page so will add your link soon.

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