[Tech1] TV History

[patheigham]

I do so agree with Geoff Hawkes’ mention that the reminiscences should have been recorded.
You don’t say what year this took place – maybe video handycams weren’t around? I should have loved to have shot on that.
(There has been a super programme made with Go-Pro cams (?), think it was the Scotsman, which covered the work of the footplate crew).
I posted earlier, a story of riding on the footplate while on a filming job.
(attached again).
Every kid wanted to be an engine driver in those days – I remember being taken up to the front of the train to say hello to the drivers who were unfailingly cheerful and chatty.
My maternal grandfather had been an engineer of some description, and lived on Watford Way – one night I was taken to see a train dash across a bridge opposite his house. It was there and gone in a shower of sparks, but I think it could have been the Flying Scotsman.
He also took me to King’s Cross to see the trains – it had been raining and the carriages came in with water dripping off their gutters. Very evocative, and I remember wondering from where it was that they had come. Perhaps that was the first seeding of my interest and future love of travel to distant climes, subsequently fulfilled by the film industry!

There is a huge nostalgia for the age of steam, witness the healthy proliferation of preserved railways and the plethora of railway programmes on TV at this time.
Also attached - a Discovery at Bulmer’s Cider!

I took a girlfriend for a day out on the Bluebell Line - when she saw the steam engines, delightfully exclaimed: “Choo-choo’s!” Says it all!

Best
Pat

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Alan Taylor via Tech1
Sent: 03 July 2020 12:09
To: Tech-Ops-chit-chat
Subject: Re: [Tech1] TV History

There is usually documentation and photographs for equipment, but the way it was used in the real world is rarely documented.

Some of you will have been told about the grandfather of my ex-wife.  He was an engine driver on GWR in the final years of steam and often used to talk about Caerphilly Castle as though it was his personal loco.

We discovered that it was a static exhibition in a museum and took him to see it.  He was very moved to see it in pristine condition and one of the museum staff allowed him to go onto the footplate.  It was obvious that he knew the what even the most minor controls did.

A more senior member of staff was called and at one point asked if he knew what two tapped holes in the surround for the driver’s window were for because they aren’t seen in similar locomotives.  He immediately explained that they were for the display of a dynamometer while they were doing efficiency trials in the 1950s.

This impressed the staff as it had puzzled them for years, but made perfect sense and even fitted in with some of the paperwork. We were then invited upstairs to see photos of that loco in operation and it was quite obviously him driving it in many of those pictures.  They asked him all sorts of stuff about driving it because although they knew what all the controls did, in many cases they didn’t know why or how they were used.  He talked at great length about how you operate the loco differently in cold weather, how you temporarily boost the power when approaching gradients, how to read the track to keep things running smoothly, how certain long left hand bends cause problems at high speed while similar right hand bends don’t, what you do when starting up and shutting down, but most of all he explained that you don’t go by the dials, but how it feels and sounds.

The museum were thrilled to get such a comprehensive description of how the loco was operated and much of it was new to them.  Grandad just shrugged it all of and couldn’t imagine how “so called experts” didn’t already know such trivial matters.

Alan Taylor






-- 
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tech-ops.co.uk/pipermail/tech1_tech-ops.co.uk/attachments/20200704/21f567b8/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Eye of the Needle.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 13960 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://tech-ops.co.uk/pipermail/tech1_tech-ops.co.uk/attachments/20200704/21f567b8/attachment.docx>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Freelancing Stories.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 329687 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://tech-ops.co.uk/pipermail/tech1_tech-ops.co.uk/attachments/20200704/21f567b8/attachment-0001.docx>