I was very fortunate that, during the late 1960s and early seventies, my parents were able to rent a former railway house the year round as a holiday home. We could escape our council housing estate in the west end of Newcastle almost every weekend and most of the summer holiday, to our house at Smeafield, north of Belford in Northumberland. The bedrooms looked out across the sea to Holy Island. Smeafield had been one of the original stations on the line between Newcastle and Berwick, but had never generated much revenue and closed in 1930, although local trains continued to make unadvertised stops for some years, for the benefit of the four railway families who lived there, and to deliver supplies to the signalbox. By 1966, part of the old railway house was derelict; two other railway houses were rented out by the British Rail Property Board as second homes, and the fourth house was lived in by one of the signalmen and his sister. On his retirement, that house also became a holiday let.
On arriving on a Friday night, our job would be to pump some fresh water from the well - there was no running water, the well still provides the water supply to this day. Over the weekend, we would often "help" the signalman. This usually involved topping up the parrafin lamps on the crossing gates, and then climbing up to the box with coal for the fire, and turning the big wheel to open and close the gates for trains. Steam had already gone - Deltics ran on the ECML, and you could hear the northbound ones coming as they accelerated after Newham Bog. That was four miles and two signal boxes away, so despite the fact that you could hear them, it would be some minutes before the bell codes from Belford box announced them.
Smeafield had a traditional lever frame with an interlock to the crossing at Fenham Low Moor - a lady lived there, who would pop out to open the gates for road traffic when summoned by a bell (usually just the postman twice a day!). The lever frame operated the four-aspect colour light signals. Once the crossing was closed and locked, the distant and home signals could be pulled off, and the signal ahead of Fenham Low Moor cleared if the crossing was closed and locked. The lever frame also operated a trailing crossover just to the south of Smeafield. Two levers were also able to place detonators on the up and down lines close to the box.
Tucked away in the signal box was a hand-coloured diagram showing the previous semaphore signalling layout. I do hope somebody snaffled that before the box was demolished (which happened some time in the later seventies).
Further excitement was provided by the "whisky train" - a complete train of wagons, each bearing the colourful logos and emblems of the whisky manufacturers - which usually went north on a Friday night, and engineers possessions, which would necessitate the use of the crossover. Northbound Deltic-hauled expresses would be brought to a halt before the level crossing, proceed slowly until they had cleared the crossover, and be signalled to reverse over the crossover by a flag, before proceeding wrong road to Beal.
Smeafield and Fenham Low Moor are modelled as they are today on my ECML route for BVE 4. Much as it would be nice to have a 1960s version, it would be so very different (lots of signal boxes, four-aspect signalling rather than three, different curves south of Beal, no overhead, different trackwork around Newcastle and at Heaton and Benton, no North East Curve at Morpeth, extra branches to/from various collieries, the old four-platform station at Heaton, and the huge station that was Manors, to name just a few off the top of my head) that it would be a completely different BVE route, so essentially a full, time-consuming rebuild... and, of course, I haven't got access to drawings, etc, to work from...
Regards
eezypeazy
or I can certainly remember travelling on (VERY VERY SQUEAKY) Regional Railways 101s on the Hope Valley Line
know what you mean though - on hot days on the way over to the GCRN I often wish the bus will be a dennis trident (or a Scania omnicity) which has lots of opening windows, compared to a Scania Omni city which has only about 4 or 5 opening ones 
ad:
and 45005 back:grin:
