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London North Western
Railway:
Midland
Railway:
Stratford
Midland Junction Railway
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LMS Route: Trent Valley Line
LMS Route: Nuneaton to Leamington
Nuneaton Station: lnwrns3794
Looking beneath Leicester Road bridge towards Nuneaton
station's Platforms One and Two in 1933. This was one of two photographs taken
by EHC Shorto, who was a railwaymen based at Saltley at the time, the other can
be seen in image 'lnwrns3793'.
Peter Lee writes on 'Nuneaton Steam Club' Facebook page,
'One day on a day off he travelled over to Nuneaton to have a wander around
and take some pictures of unusual operational items and I think the reason he
took these was to record something of particular interest to him, the engine
release roads which butted up to the Leicester Road bridge which allowed
engines released from trains to park up and hook on the back of an incoming
train to save running round of engines hauling the Coventry and Leicester line
trains into the station. There was a similar arrangement of engine release
roads the other side of the station for Leicester line trains out of platform
5. It was an arrangement that worked as it obviated the need to run round and
allowed a quicker turn around of trains. Running around would obviously cause
an adjacent platform to be blocked and it restricted the very busy station with
this going on all day. Mr Shorto left the railway and retired to Budleigh
Salterton, I think we last corresponded in the 1980s'.
As you can see an ex-LNWR 2-4-2T 5'6" tank is parked ready
to nip on the back of an incoming passenger train and make a quick get away.
All these intricate movements in the station were controlled by Nuneaton Nr. 2
box. It is hard to imagine today how labour intensive mechanical signalling was
on the railway with no less than 5 signal boxes controlling the complex layout
through Nuneaton TV station. Nr. 1 box on the up side at the south end, Nr. 2
box controlled movements in the station, Nr. 3 at the north end just before the
rocker bridge, and the up and down sidings boxes releasing access to the down
goods and up marshalling yards. All this was scrapped when modernisation and
dieselisation started and the old Coventry line steamers were replaced with
bright new diesel units. (A retrograde step in my view because 5 coach trains
were replaced by 2 or 3 car DMU's, with the subsequent overcrowding on morning
and evening commuting trains not factored in, so factory workers in Coventry
stopped using the railway and went by road as they were fed up with the scrum
on the new fangled diesel trains). With these engine release roads no longer
needed, Nr. 2 box's days were over and this lovely double bayed but otherwise
LNWR bog standard Type 5 pattern box was demolished. Someone told me that this
was a unique box on the LNWR, there was only one in this configuration on the
entire system, but I cannot vouch for the certainty of that information.
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