Unknown location we need help on!

An unidentified Class 47 powers a fully loaded car transporter train at an unknown location. Nice photo though!

Unknown, Unknown and Unknown!

Every now and then you come across a photograph and think – ‘I like that!’ Looking for images to support an article I am writing for my new magazine (more about that soon….), I came across this negative. The only thing that was in the description was – ‘Class 47’; everything else was unknown.

So given the number of amazing people out there on FaceBook and Twitter, I thought it was worth another go at seeing whether anybody can recognise the  location and possibly the train.

My guess is that this is either a train of Ford or Vauxhall cars some time in the late 1970s. Now that would mean that they cars have come from a UK factory in Essex or Merseyside possibly, or maybe the Midlands if the cars are in fact from the Birmingham area…. See what I mean about unknowns!

If I was pushed I would guess that because of the hills in the background that this is possibly in the Yorkshire or Lancashire area. The train appears to be joining the lines on the far left and is climbing an incline from a line that disappears to the right. Not much help, but I am sure some ex-railwaymen or folks interested in signalling may recognise the junction layout.

So any help in reducing the number of unknowns would be most gratefully received!

This begs the question, do you have to know everything about a photograph to like it? I ask myself that regularly as I plough through my old slides trying to remember when it was taken, or what the train was. I rarely took notes, and most were thrown out when I left home.

If I had my time again I would have taken more photographs and taken better notes; and most importantly of all insisted to my Mum that they were important!