SOUTHERN REGION MEMORIES

Photographs from the Bluebell Museum Archive from the 1950s and 1960s are collected in this special picture book with extended captions and a special thanks to a gentleman named Chris Turner who first contacted the author about the collection which without his intervention would have ended up in a skip! Around the end of 2007, they opened one of the storage crates to find shoeboxes full of negatives, neatly stored with date and location written on the outside containing over 6,000 negatives, pictures nearly all of trains or locomotives. The photographer was John Smith who worked for British Railways at Croydon in the Divisional Office who had taken many signalling exams and worked for much of his time in the Special Trains area. This was the reason he knew about the interesting workings he photographed, not only superb pictures of the Southern Region era but also many other unusual pictures, never before published. See a Pullman Brake Car no. 80 with fresh paint passing Kentish Town West in September 1955, filming for The Railway Children TV series February 1957, milk trains, new electric locomotives, a Tyneside parcels car, track testing trials, ramblers? excursions, the Merlin which was used in a TV train crash sequence but suffered relatively little damage, a C-Class 060 no. 31297 emerging from the gloom at Holborn and entering a bomb-damaged area September 1956, weed-killing trains which were fascinating if an irregular sight on country routes, a level crossing and a visit to Lewisham one Sunday to photograph the Golden Arrow, 2pm Victoria to Folkestone Harbour. Battle of Britain Class Pacific no.34085 (501 Squadron) is in charge. 5-Bel Pullman Unit no.3051 is an unusual sight leaving Blackfriars in April 1961 with extra passengers in the cab. And there were exhibitions such as Eastbourne in June 1951 and the Modern Railway Exhibition opened 1st July 1957 with a surprising visitor to Southern Metals, the prototype Deltic in company with diesel no. D8000 from Willesden Junction to Battersea for display. Glossy white heavyweight paper has been used to showcase these restored archive photographs to their best possible quality. An album to bring the joy back into nostalgia, finding new photographs of the UK railway seen in the 1950s can be difficult and this is a totally new source. 28 x 22cm, 64 pages, illus.