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Interesting. After I left home my parents moved away to Lee in a 'down-size' so there was little reason to return to Woolwich. So I hardly ever went near it again until my mother moved into almshouses near to St Mary's Church until her death in 1999.

There was a 1990 series "Steam Days" by Miles Kington on BBC TV. One episode was about the A1 and A4 Pacifics and entitled "A Tale of Two Scotsmen". A more likely candidate is the 1985 Yorkshire TV programme "Yorkshire Steam". This includes the Flying Scotsman loco hauling a train from York to...

I was brought up in the BR Southern Region and most EMU trains had a public-facing route code number. Do services in that area still have them?

My brother-in-law used to work on such signs and tells me that most signs have been converted to LED ones for greater reliability and less power consumption.

It was the old tunnels originally, but as soon as the Woodhead line closed completely in 1981, the CEGB rerouted the cables through the 1953 tunnel as it was in a much better condition than the 1845/52 single bore tunnels.

This photo from 1959 shows tram tracks in Beresford Square, Woolwich, seven years after the last tram ran: Woolwich Market 1959 © Copyright David Wright and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence. They were still there in 1974: Woolwich market © Copyright rafflesbear and...

There are separate lamp units - our 'CD/RA' unit has two, one for each indication, but I don't appear to have any photos of that one's interior.

The 'OFF' and 'CD/RA' (Close Doors/Right Away) platform indicators used to help dispatch trains were also fibre-optic before the wide-spread use of LEDs. We have samples of each at St Albans South on display. An interior view of the 'OFF' indicator: This shows the 55w halogen bulb, a vented...

They were not on the HRA list, only the Spa cliff lift!

This reminds me of a ford I came across on the edge of Clee St Margaret in Shropshire (not my picture): Ford at Clee St Margaret © Copyright Jeff Buck and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence. It's on the edge of the village, so doesn't have any houses along it.

A comprehensive list of heritage railways and museums can be found at https://www.heritage-railways.com/index.php This website is run by the former webmaster to the Heritage Railway Association (HRA) who have their own listing at https://www.easymapmaker.com/map/HRA-members - it is less...

While the London Underground has used cables with low smoke emission and more resistant to ignition for some while, I suspect this is not true of the surface lines, so their cables probably are more susceptible to fire.

West Hampstead Power Signalling Box completely took over signalling on the Midland Main Line in December 1979 as a precursor to the electrification of the line to Bedford. It covered from St Pancras to north of Bedford, the change-over to other signalling point varying a bit over the years...

I haven't written here for a while; I used to regularly comment on the number of unwanted calls I got, particularly on my landline. I moved over to handsets incorporating 'Call Guardian' some years ago. These ask people calling from numbers not listed on the handsets to announce themselves. This...

John Walton, the 'englishfords' originator, also posts his photos on the Geograph website. Indeed, the first photo in my post #44 above is one of his.

As you saw it through the gap between train and platform, perhaps it was to draw your attention to the said gap while boarding the train? There are noticeable differences over the network in platform height and edge-train distance and this may be a way of warning people to be careful when the...

I certainly never drove along it with water that deep! And I would not have done it at night either. That run was from the north end heading south. The deeper bits are mostly where there are entrances to fields and the river bed is deeper where farm machinery has turned into or out of the field...

Reputedly the longest ford in the UK; it is called "Violet's Lane" and runs from Furneux Pelham northwards along the bed of the River Ash for around 1 kilometer (five-eighths of a mile) - first picture is from the south end looking north: Furneux Pelham Ford © Copyright John Walton and licensed...

In the Harrow incident (and Lewisham in 1957) the cranes were needed on site urgently to help lift carriages off each other to assist the release of trapped passengers, the carriages being far less 'crash-resistant' than modern rolling stock.

'Mobile Load Banks' were introduced by the LMS in 1947 using motor coaches whose motors acted as generators and could thus imposed a controlled load on the loco pulling them. But finding space on the tracks for test trains could be a problem, particularly for constant speed tests. "Rolling...