If you could...

12 hours at Dawlish on a summer Saturday in 1950 something armed with my Nikon D5100.

 

Carlisle Citadel station, (1959-1964) on the first Saturday of the Glasgow Fair and also being there on the last Saturday of the GF.

 

I'd go back to the Rainhill Trials, and would spend as much time watching the trains as I would watching the people and seeing how they reacted to being face to face with the future in a way we cannot imagine.

 

I'm a Southern man at heart, but I'd really like to see the Brunel Atmospheric railway in action, ideally when it was new and everything sort of worked! So I'd go back to Newton Abbot, ca. 1847. I think watching the station working would be fascinating!

Tom

 

I wonder if our overriding impression after we had our day out was, hmm, that was dangerous, or how grubby it was or how smelly or actually how slow life was then.

 

10th of July, 1858, to watch the second span of the Royal Albert Bridge begin its four-month journey into position.

 

Or to Conwy to see the first section of the tubular bridge rolled out with Brunel standing on the "prow" in defiance of his friend Stephenson's critics who predicted disaster.

 

1950 so those early pre grouping locos are just still around. with a BR priv pass. As bigger SD card as possible.

 

The Tattenham Corner branch in the days of steam, I've used it for the majority of my life and but never experienced steam on it

 

The Waverley Route, 60007, enough said.

 

A day trainspotting / photography around Manchester and it's suburbs c1920.

Would be fascinating to see what all the different railway companies looked like, locomotives and stock we have lost, what the railway centres looked like not too many years after their creation, when things were neat, tidy and undamaged by merger in the big 4, war etc etc.
I'd certainly walk between some of the stations too.

 

Way too many choices - but I would love to have seen the LNER Garratt flat out on the Worsbrough incline - maximum thrutch - sadly chopped up the year I was born.

 

Apart from the gricing of early locos there is one event in my railway wanderings that still niggles.
It was a rainy day in the early 70's when we went on a family day out to the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway. At Dalegarth we got talking to the crew of the loco and they offered a footplate ride back to Ravenglass, the deal being that my elder brother would go first to Irton Road and then we would change over. Well we stopped at Irton Road and I waited for my brother to get off and come back to the first open carriage but he never arrived... He was waiting for me to go there and I was waiting for him to come back.
If I could go back in time I would get out and go to the engine, but being brought up as English we were not taught to be pushy... Oh how things changed when I got to Italy and learned that those who don't stand up for themselves get walked over.....
That would have been the first footplate ride that I would have remembered. And it's all on cine film as well including me looking thoroughly racked off! My brother has paid me back many times over having me on the footplate of such beauties as Black Prince and Hartland so it's not all bad.

 

So many ideas ... and for my selection ...
Eastleigh in the spring of 1944 and the build up to D-Day. How did the railway cope with all the traffic? Visiting GWR locos, on loan S160's and 8F's and still the basic passenger service to operate. Plus the chance of a "new" Merchant Navy class loco on test from the works or working to or from Salisbury.
The Isle of Wight system in the 1930's. I was lucky seeing the final remnants of a proud system in the early 1960's.
As said earlier, Newton Abbot in the days of the "atmospheric caper".
De Aar - Beaufort West when the service was run with class 25 condensers in the 1950's. The Only 25 I saw in the late 70's were pottering around on trip work or cold on shed waiting components. I did hear one on the line at night and thought that the SA Air force were doing night flying over Kraankuil until I heard the rumble of the train.....
Steam over Kicking Horse Pass in Canada.

Cheers, Neil

 

Lineside on Stoke Bank in the late 1950's (with my current camera) to photograph the A4's charging around....especially 60017 which I never saw.

 

You beat me to it! Though to visit any of those early lines to see them in operation with all this new fandangaled technology. With Rainhill as the pinnacle of the period and the openning of the L & MR complete with it's illfated speed record [of a shocking 35+/-mph]. When George Stephenson drove Rocket and it's short train full tilt to Eccles [?] with the mortally injured William Huskisson aboard.

 

Monday 25th July 1898. Loughborough.

 

Summer Saturday late fifties, Newton Abbott

 

Having just re read one of Hamilton Ellis's books after a period of twenty years or so, i'd say anywhere in pre grouping days, up to WW1 . All the different loco,s in there different livery's , all the coaches too in the different company,s liverys, stations, lineside,everything neat & tidy! Somewhere like Carlisle!