Great Dorset Steam Fair 2022

I went to the Great Dorset Steam Fair for the first time in a few years.

Here's some of what I saw

It's really to big do do it all in a day trip, one year I'll stay over again.

I did take some photos too, in this Flickr Album 

Engines and ironwork, Crossness.

20th October 2019

I took a drive around the M25 to Bexley on Sunday, not the nicest road trip but rail replacement buses made going by train a bit impractical on this occasion, to visit the Victorian sewage pumping station at Crossness on the banks of the River Thames.

 The Crossness Pumping Station is a former sewage pumping station designed by the Metropolitan Board of Works's chief engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette and architect Charles Henry Driver at the eastern end of the Southern Outfall Sewer.

It was built between 1859 and 1865 by William Webster, as part of Bazalgette's redevelopment of the London sewerage system, it features spectacular ornamental cast ironwork, and still contains four large beam engines. one of these has been restored to working condition. On Sunday this engine, named Prince Consort, was in steam. Interestingly the reason the four engines are still there is because the cost of dismantling them when they were no longer required in the 1950s was considered too high. Which was lucky for us six decades later.

 If you want to know the history of the works I suggest having a read of the Wikipedia Article which gives far more detail than I have space for here, however since 1987 the Crossness Engines Trust, a registered charity, has been overseeing the restoration of the site. They have a huge job on their hands frankly.

What was the boiler house now contains a museum with displays of information about the subject of London's sewage problems and solutions. Also quite a lot of "toilet exhibits". And a cafe and gift shop obviously, which always helps when trying to restore what is really a huge money pit!

Surrounded by toilets it took me a minute to spot the signs for the actual conveniences, which are tucked away behind the cafe and rather disappointingly modern 🙂

Off the boiler house is the engine hall. This is a mandatory hard-hat area and volunteers are on hand to issue suitably sized titfers to visitors. (It was nice to see that they were cleaning and sanitizing them when they were handed back before reissue too.)
The engine hall is where the real action takes place. Nikolaus Pevsner described Crossness Pumping Station as "a masterpiece of engineering – a Victorian cathedral of ironwork".

He wasn't wrong. As well as getting Prince Consort running a lot of work has gone into restoring the decorative ironwork. The Victorians didn't do plain and functional engineering. A nice humourous touch is that the capitals of the iron columns are decorated with fruit and leaves - figs and senna plants 😀

Even had the space not been busy with hard-hatted visitors and volunteers the scale of the steam engines (strictly speaking, steam pumps) means that it's impossible to adequately photograph them. From basement to upper deck they're three-storey behemoths of 19th century engineering. And yet when Prince Consort is running it's actually quieter than the crowd watching it.

Outside the main building there are machine workshops and in the former Valve House a collection of smaller engines and pumps, some of which were also running albeit on compressed air as the works now only has a small boiler producing enough steam to run Prince Consort.

Once you've visited that you can take a scenic (depending on your definition of scenic) walk along the Thames Path. I wandered down as far as the pier that was used to bring in coal for the boilers and later to take away sludge for disposal at sea before that was outlawed in 1998. Oh and there's also the RANG Railway.

For a flavour of visiting Crossness watch:

And there are more photos too:

Tram, train, rain, tram.

Friday 6th September 2019

Manchester's Metrolink Tram system extends far beyond the city to the surrounding suburbs and nearby towns.

Such as Bury, 8 miles north-west of Manchester on the River Irwell and famous for black pudding and as the birthplace of Sir Robert Peel, founder of the Metropolitan Police and the Conservative Party. One of which facts probably makes him a hate figure, you can decide for yourself which.

The Metrolink trams are not low-floor vehicles, surprisingly since they run through the streets, and so require stops that are more like railway stations with quite high platforms. unlike the trams in Croydon where the platform is little more than a raised height kerb.

Handily for the visitor the system allows contactless payment with daily caps, almost like London's Oyster except that you need to touch in and touch out again at the end of your journey. Failure to touch out will result in a £4.60 incomplete journey charge. Failure to touch in will get you a stonking £30 "standard contactless fare". Since I can't see any journey that would cost that much why don't they just be honest and call it a penalty charge? Either way, don't forget to touch in and out. So I touched in using G-pay at St. Peter's Square and hopped on a "green line" service to Bury. The trams run for part of the way over what was the East Lancashire Railway line and there are some far reaching views of Lancashire along the way. The line terminates in the town centre at Bury Interchange. 

The original East Lancashire Railway however terminated at Bury Bolton Street station, about 5 minutes walk from Bury Interchange and the current East Lancashire Railway is still there.

The street level building dates from 1952, the previous one having burnt down after the war. The rest of the station and platforms are below in a deep cutting.

There was about an hour to wait before the next departure to Rawtenstall so I walked across Bolton Street and down the slope to the Bury Transport Museum which is connected with the heritage railway and housed in a former Castlecroft Goods Warehouse. Entry is free although as with any free museum they are donation-hungry. Chuck a few quid in if you can.

It's not a huge museum but they have managed to pack quite a lot in there. They have a wide selection of vehicles including buses, lorries, tractors, vans, cars, and even a steam roller.

There's plenty of hands-on stuff for children to play with too, though as it was Friday there weren't any, at least while I was there. I expect it's different at the weekend.

It certainly kept me interested until it was time to wander back to the railway station, purchase a return ticket to Rawtenstall (£12.50) from the traditional ticket office window and go down to the platform and await the 1455 departure.

It was a pleasant trip despite the weather coming over all "northern" and I made this video which covers the trip there and back.

Having returned to Bury it was Friday evening commuter time. It was also time for something to eat. Bury isn't short of fast food outlets which provided amply for that requirement.

I singularly failed to get any black pudding but I had nowhere to keep it until I went home anyway.

So I touched in at Bury Interchange and rode a somewhat busier tram back to Manchester city centre and walked back to my hotel.

Considering I'd forgotten that the steam railway was there until I actually got to Bury I consider that was a good afternoon all round.

Victorian Steam Pump (A Big Machine for Shifting Sh*t)

22nd April 2019 - Easter Monday

In a corner of a park in South Tottenham, next to the River Lea, is a survivor from the era of grand nineteenth century engineering. The Markfield Beam Engine is a rotary beam engine believed to be the last engine produced by Wood Bros. of Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire. From 12th July 1888.  It saw continuous duty until around 1905, when it was relegated to standby duty for storm water pumping.

Rated at one-hundred horsepower the engine drives two pumps, of the plunger type each capable of moving two million gallons-per-day.

That's an awful lot of sewerage, to put it politely.

The engine house and engine is all that remains of the former sewerage treatment works built by the pioneering Tottenham Local Health Board in 1852 and expanded in 1888 after the original had fallen into disrepair - resulting in Tottenham once again discharging its waste into the River Lea, to the detriment of Londoners downstream.

An increasing population required increased pumping capacity. ‘New Extension Works’ were opened in 1905 including three new additional sets of steam-driven pumps in another new engine house. The 1888 engine then became a standby pump for storm water.

The engine is impressive in size - the beam 21 feet long and 17 feet above the floor, the flywheel 27 feet in diameter and weighing 17 tons.

It's big scale engineering and being Victorian it's big on decoration too. Doric columns and Acanthus leaves abound.

The rest of the works were demolished after it became redundant in 1964, the works at Edmonton having supplanted it, leaving only the 1888 engine in its house.

It was then bricked up until the 1980s when a trust took it on but didn't have the resources to restore it. 

In 2007 Haringey Council regenerated Markfield Park and restored the Grade 2 listed Engine Hall. The Trust restored the beam engine to full working order in 2008 and the Markfield Beam Engine and Museum opened.

Since the original boiler house and coal fired boiler is gone steam is now supplied by a gas-fired boiler in a new boiler house to the rear of the building.

Entry is free but they really welcome donations - every time they steam the engine cost £500. On this sunny Bank Holiday Monday (which are of course rarer than working steam pumps) it was very popular and the engine was run three times for around 40 minutes each time.

There's a very handy cafe next to the engine house too which was doing good trade with many families partaking of chips, tea, and ice cream. They do a nice cappuccino.

Photos cannot do the engine justice so here's the video I shot on the day.

More information and history on the Markfield Beam Engine & Museum web site.

After visiting the museum I took a pleasant walk south along the adjacent River Lea towpath, busy with afternoon strolling Hasidim, many sporting large shtreimels which looked like an unsuitable choice for the warm weather.

At the Lea Bridge Road I hopped onto the threatened 48 bus to London Bridge for a bit of a rest and a chance to recharge my phone which having been used to record the above footage was getting a bit low on juice. Having crossed the Thames I had an early evening pint in the Mudlark in Southwark before heading for the Jubilee and Piccadilly lines and home.

More photos as usual in this Flickr Album

Rain , Wind, and Steam

3rd March 2019

Many heritage railway places are closed at this time of year but a chance mention on Twitter alerted me to a special out-of-season open day at the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre near Aylesbury. For some reason I'd never visited this place despite it being only an hour and a quarter away. I'm quite surprised that we didn't go there with the school railway club, which was even closer. So with nothing else planned why not?

The reason for the special open day was to launch the newly restored Wightwick Hall locomotive back into service. (GWR, 4-6-0, No. 6989 if that sort of thing is important to you.)

They've spent more than forty years rebuilding this machine, which is incredible. That means I was still at school when they started. That's commitment.

At least the sun could have come out for the event. But unlike last weekend February had returned, wet and windy. Ideal for making pictures of trains but only if your name is JMW Turner. For those of us working in bits and bytes rather than oil on canvas it was a bit more challenging trying to keep the water out of the electronics.

The Railway Centre covers quite an area. Based around the disused Quainton Road Station built by the Great Central Railway and the Metropolitan Railway which ceased to see passenger services in 1963. It was also the junction with the excellently named Brill Tramway until 1935. The main entrance is in the building transplanted here from Rewley Road Station where there's a cafe and gift shop as well as the ticket counter. Admission was £14 Adult, £13 senior, and £10 child as this was a special event. It's slightly less on normal days.

Mildly depressing (apart from the weather) was being asked "adult or senior" when I bought my ticket. Cheeky bugger was almost certainly older than me as well 😄.

As were many of the visitors, especially the Men-Who-like-Trains™ although there were quite a few families out too.

No Thomas the Tank Engine, thankfully.

You could spend a few pleasant hours exploring this place which has a large collection of locomotives and rolling stock and several tons of bits and pieces dotted about the site, many with information boards adjacent. There's also two restoration sheds and a museum shed with more formal displays including a good collection of signs.

A return visit will have to be planned.

Today they had two trains running, the star of the show Wightwick Hall pulling a couple of carriages up and down about half a mile of track - it's a shame they didn't have access to the single freight line that still runs through the site - and a small Bagnall 0-4-0 saddle tank locomotive doing similar with an open ended brake van. It wasn't the weather for standing in an open brake van but I did ride on the Wightwick Hall hauled special. Standing room only which limited opportunities for photography.

I did manage to get some photos though which are in this Flickr Album.

And this atmospheric video with the atmosphere mostly moving sideways 😀

South Devon Railways

3rd September to 7th September 

Went to Torquay for a week, stayed at Atlantis Holiday Apartments which was good and very handy for the railway station - I decided to leave the car at home - albeit uphill. South Devon was busier than I expected for September, lots of "SAGA Louts" 😀

Anyway, I seem to have spent some time riding on the heritage railway lines in the area and here's some video evidence:

Epping & Ongar Railway 12th August 2018

New video. Trains, Buses, and Traction Engines.

Experimentally shooting with my Panasonic bridge camera rather than mobile phone. Except for one clip - see if you can tell which 🙂