Unknown location we need help on!

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

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!

London Freight in the 1970s

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In the mid-1970s, a Class 47 Brush Type 4 (D1637) makes up its train of fitted vans in the yard adjacent to Royal Oak underground station on the Hammersmith branch near London Paddington station.

Difficult to believe that well into the rail-blue era, the huge Paddington Goods Depot was still despatching trains to the west. Here, in the early-1970s, a Class 47 Brush Type 4 (D1637 later 47 483) makes up its train of fitted vans in the yard adjacent to Royal Oak underground station on the Hammersmith branch. The location was part of a bus depot, but is now very much an important part of the CrossRail Project.

London Freight in the 1970s

I cannot recall the London Paddington Goods complex  on the north side of Royal Oak Underground station, and even more so given that trains were still being handled there in the early-mid 1970s. In steam days a tank engine would have been shunting the vans, but I assume that D1637 would be taking the train forward to its destination, so Old Oak Common had left it to the Class 47 to shunt the train.

I do remember the odd freight train running through Kensington Olympia, Stratford and Clapham Junction in my early spotting days. Railfreight and Speedlink were still operated by British Rail then, but these days I think freight is normally restricted to Stone trains running to various depots in London, plus the many container trains running between the Great Eastern and West Coast Main Lines.

Peter Collins took some fabulous shots of freight trains in and around London, and they will be appearing in a forthcoming collection soon at Lineside Photographics.

The gradual fall away of freight on British Rail as the road transport lobby found favour with the Thatcher Government, seems to have been a decision that accelerated Privatisation. It effectively put the nail in the coffin of the railways transporting goods other than containers or bulk loads of coal and aggregates.

I dont suppose that the Railfreight or Speedlink concept would work today due to the necessity of building freight handling facilities to replace those that now were swept away and replaced with factory units or housing….