Steam Days

Steam Days is a monthly magazine dedicated to all steam railway enthusiasts. Each issue covers the six regions of British Railways: Western, Southern, London, Midland, Eastern, and Scottish, with the occasional article on Irish railways and the industrial scene. These well illustrated articles in the magazine cover the history of the railways of Britain from the early days of the 1800s through to the end of steam on British Railways in August 1968.

Steam Days

TRAINS of thought

Two Somerset & Dorset school trips • Travelling with the Cotham Grammar Railway Society, John Buxton made two journeys from Bristol (Temple Meads) to Bournemouth via Bath (Green Park) and the Somerset & Dorset line in 1965, upbeat in May, but melancholic in December, the S&D being down at heel and thought unlikely to survive the year.

Industrial interlude: 1965 • For some enthusiasts, the quest to witness steam at work in 1965 embraced the industrial scene, which offered variety in motive power, the type of traffic and the setting, be it within an industrial complex, urban or rural.

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Summer Saturday at Ryde St John’s Road shed • An extraordinary invite to spend the night and early shift on shed at Ryde saw young enthusiast Andrew Britton at the beating heart of Isle of Wight locomotive operations amid its provision of motive power for services on the last Saturday of June 1965.

British Rail – a future-proof British Railways? • A decade on from the Modernisation Plan, Maurice Hawthorne looks at BR upon its rebranding and corporate facelift of 1965, with motive power and some working practices in transition and network changes ongoing.

‘The Notts & Lincs Rail Tour’ • The last steam trip to grace London’s St Pancras station, was on April 24, 1965. Leslie R Freeman enjoyed this LCGB multi-locomotive outing that reached Mablethorpe as its northern extremity. Transcribed from diary notes, these and the photographs all appear courtesy of Transport Treasury.

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