December 30, 2012

Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding

What's the video equivalent of dog-earing? Whilst finding details about the recent Golden Age of Steam documentaries, I stumbled across the BBC Four Collection on Steam.

The BBC Four Collections are a fantastic way to start opening up the archives, and it's lovely to be able to watch old documentaries again. I have a feeling I'll be leafing through some more of them in future, this Panorama documentary from 1966, for instance, looks interesting - predicting what the tech industry in California will look like in the year 2000... There's also The Great Railway Cavalcade: Rocket 150 at Rainhill, looking at the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Rainhill Trials, which I remember attending as a boy.

Anyway. I've just watched the Tuesday Documentary: Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding. First broadcast in November 1969, it's a look at the railway network and men who worked on it, particularly the area around Sheffield and Manchester but also touching on London.

It's from a time when steam was on the wane and the electric and diesel engines were taking over. Commenting after a section showing old railwaymen sharing stories and banter in the railwayman's club, the narrator says:

"when they argue the superiority of steam, they don't mean at all that it was more efficient - because they know it wasn't - but steam to them is better because it was a more demanding thing. It was a difficult thing to do well, and they take pleasure in remembering how they did it."

Lovely.

It also shows some of the forward-looking thinking of the day - shots coming up the escalator from the tube into a gleaming new Euston station; mentions of containerisation and how it simplifies the freight interchanges; and shots of a new "electronic marshalling yard", where trackside sensors allow the movement of the wagons to be controlled by "computer tape". Apart from the punched tapes, it doesn't sound all that far from some of the Internet of Things projects being proposed now.

I'll finish with a quote from one of the drivers, who describes a cafe that I'll bet hasn't featured in eggbaconchipsandbeans, probably because it will have died with the passing of the steam engines...

"you can't get a better feed than bacon and eggs fried in a shovel"

Posted by Adrian at December 30, 2012 09:08 PM | TrackBack

This blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.

You can receive updates whenever a new post is written by subscribing to the recent posts RSS feed or

Comments
Post a comment









Remember personal info?





Note: I'm running the MT-Keystrokes plugin to filter out spam comments, which unfortunately means you have to have Javascript turned on to be able to comment.