End of the Line

Yes these days there most likely to be agreement in place when the item comes to the railway, but most likely in the early days the railway was glad of any stock which might be of use sometime and just it just arrived and filled up some siding space. So the railway will have its hands tied behind its back over rent for storage etc, as they wont have any say over the item and its future.

 

Hmm, I know of a coach owner who bought a coach eons of years ago, he restored it, let the railway use it for the best part of a decade and half...
When it inevitably came to needing overhaul/repair, it was dumped to a siding as it wasn't one of it's own. The owner was too late in years to be able to restore it, never got anything for it's use.
After a couple of years the line then told him to take his coach and sling it...so it went to scrap.
Being a MK1 no one cared, the owner was somewhat sanguine, he got more for it in scrap than he paid to buy it / restore it last century.. but thats not what the spirit of it is supposed to be about.

lets not just be painting preserved railways as being covered in glory against well intentioned but futile stock owners who dump their no-hoper in their sidings to rot... its gone the other way too.

Thing is, there's likely to be more of this "cashing out and sod it" happening in the future.

 

That surely works both ways though? I can totally understand the situation back in the early days, but circumstances change and the chance of preserving something well diminishes as time goes on.
'Rent' might not be money after all, if the railway can make use of an item then that can be taken as payment, as long as this is in a signed agreement.
If there was no agreement in the first place to put an item on the railway, then does anyone know how that affects the legalities of eviction, or restoration-without-permission (In the case of being unable to contact the owner)?

 

There's a lot of discussion about ownership, as if the only reason specific vehicles are mouldering in sidings is because they are in the wrong siding!

However, is that necessarily true? Is it not more likely that, in most cases, the reason vehicles aren't being restored is because there simply isn't the capacity (across the whole industry) to restore them? There will always be individual cases (such as the Bulleid that went from the Bluebell to the MHR; or a decade or so ago, the SECR Birdcage that went from the KESR to the Bluebell) where a transfer - either sale or lease - enables a carriage to move up the "industry-wide" restoration queue. But I am sceptical that wholesale changes in ownership will do very much beyond moving large numbers of unrestored carriages from one railway to another, without fundamentally improving the likelihood of restoration of those vehicles.

Tom

 

I am sure I am reading more into your comments than you intended but the old alarm signals tend to go off when I read such as this. If you are not even going to start "contemplating work" until "a few years time" then there won't be much left to restore.
PH

 

Given that most candidates will have been outside deteriorating for the best part of half a century, a few more years wouldn't hurt IMO, most of them were stored out of site behind other things before you ask

 

Ah! the years that the locust hath eaten.

PH

 

Reverting back to the purchase of locos large or small.
Back in the 70s when involved in a small way with some appeals for the purchase of locos out of Barry.
I tend to get the feeling that we went for what we thought we could afford as much as what we wanted.
If something was smaller the asking price would be more achievable than that for a larger engine.
The factor of Where would we keep it and where would we be able to work on it ? often played a small part as did Who knows anything about this?

Towards the end at Barry the choice was more limited so you had to go for what was there or look elsewhere.

Remember that this was the era when fund raising ideas centered around Jumble Sales, Pens, Key rings and other highly "Lucrative"() ideas.
Big achievements where filling bottles with coins or selling postcards to sponsor the mileage for haulage from Barry.

 

Oh stop showing off! Don't think that got included in the list.

 

WRONG QUOTE

 

Did you include 2701 CK - Iask because although a teak its GNR BUILT

 

I don't think so, as you say it's GNR built so wouldn't have come up, as I did it simply by calling up all vehicles built for the LNER.

 

Oops, sorry, it came out wrong! it looked fine when I pasted it in the reply box! Now edited, I uploaded the table as an image to Photobucket. Pre-grouping companies can wait, I've got other things to do!

 

9 is still substantially less than I trawled through of the bog four companies! And the bluebell is more of an exception because of its earlier start anyway.

 

Bog four? A consortium of Irish peat railways perchance?

 

LOL! I was typing on my phone at the time, body spill-chocker...

 

Are you meaning to refer to "bog standard" (i.e. Mk.1 stock)?

Paul H

 

What does ECJS and GN&NE joint stock come under?

 

Bit ironic that we all seem to want to replicate the 50s and early 60s and are bemoaning the lack of pre-grouping carriages to do this. In fact the pre-grouping stock still in use in the 50s did nothing to retain passengers and were one of the major causes of the collapse of passenger numbers on branch lines in the South at least. On the Horsham - Brighton line I can assure forum members they were truly awful with leaky doors and roofs, wet rotten seating and no lighting or heating that worked. The Thumpers were then introduced which were space age technology with lighting and heating, in fact better than the 4CORs and 2BILs on the Mid-Sussex. Passengers numbers shot up to the point it was standing room only in the peak from Brighton, our family went back to using the line for one. However it was too late to save the line in spite of this and the planned expansion of the villages it served into towns by SERP as the decision to close had already been cast when the horrid steam service was still operating. Cue the arrival of a Ford Mk1 Cortina in '66 and a Series 2A Landrover for me when I got a license at 17.

Brian