The Great British Railfanning Trip - London in Summer

Frank writes...

This is Part III of our recent trip to Britain. After seeing Acton Depot on Thursday, we awoke Friday in London and set out to see the town - or at least a couple of the highlights. You could probably spend a year in London and never have to see the same historic site or tourist attraction twice.

We were staying near Hammersmith so we took the Underground to Kings Cross-St Pancras; here's the latter station, which is awfully impressive. From there it was a one-mile walk to the Postal Museum, located across from the Mount Pleasant Sorting Centre. Andy would be proud.

Truth be told, we weren't really there to see the Postal Museum proper. But it was kind of an interesting little museum to walk through. Here's an early post office carriage.

And here's a later postal lorry, seemingly built for a hobbit. A typical American Zach is shown for scale.

The real reason we were there was to see and ride Mail Rail. Several of London's larger postal facilities were linked with a small underground railway, the dimensions of which made the Chicago Tunnel Company look generous. It was an automated system, generally with driverless trains, that worked constantly from 1927 until 2003 when it was shut down. But a small section of it has been maintained and opened to the public under the Mount Pleasant facility. Here's a large photo showing the original repair shop area, which is where the current museum is located.

And here's the train boarding area, located just to the right of that pillar which is centered in the above old photograph.The exhibition is extremely well done and the boarding area uses a floor, visible in the foreground, which sits directly over the original tracks. There are some grates in the floor that allow you to see that all of the original tracks in the repair shop area are still there. Nothing was removed; it's just been covered over.

Did I mention the trains were small? The museum seems to have heavily rebuilt some of the original carriages and fitted them to be driver-operated. This shot is taken looking forward; Zach, facing the camera, has his back to the driver while Greg, looking over his shoulder, is facing in the direction of travel. The plexiglas windows hinge upwards to allow for access but are electro-magnetically locked in place once the train is ready to go. You really don't want some passenger opening the door while you're moving through the tunnel!

Here we are descending into the tunnels. The ride follows a balloon route, so the train wyes itself each trip, and there are a couple of stops at loading platforms where videos are projected onto the walls. There's an interesting running commentary played on the train's speakers that describes a little about how Mail Rail used to operate. It was all extremely well done.

And then after you finish your ride there's the museum, which is mostly located in the space to the left of that in-service photo I posted earlier. This is a battery locomotive that was used to haul engineering trains. You could sit in the cab; talk about cramped!

This is one of the original cars for carrying mail. Evidently they decided the wheelbase was too long and was wearing out the track and wheels too quickly, so early on they switched to shorter-wheelbase cars. The current cars they use for carrying passengers are similar to this (and may be rebuilt from some of these original cars) but they're in far less intensive use.

I thought this was neat - an exploded view of one of the diminutive automated motors that Mail Rail used, underneath one of the original cranes. As mentioned earlier this was the original repair shop area for the system.

Here's one of the early locomotives. I think this one dates back to the 1930s, or maybe the 1920s. The locomotive itself is basically a motorized Maximum Traction truck and the flatbed mail cars behind it sit atop the pony axle like a semi trailer would rest on the back of a semi tractor.

This is one of the newer locomotives, built in the 1980s to replace the earlier ones which were getting worn out. It's got the exact same design principles.

I thought this was pretty neat. Mail Rail, of course, used third rail so they had to figure out how to move the trains around the repair shop area without having energized third rail everywhere. Rather than using battery locomotives they used an overhead troller system, shown here. Over each set of two or three tracks there's an I-beam down the ceiling with a positive wire suspended underneath it to the side. A troller, with an extension cord suspended from it, rides along the bottom of the I-beam and maintains contact with the wire. That extension cord can then be plugged into the locomotives to allow them to be moved around. Brilliant!

And now for something completely different.

A quick trip back to Kings Cross-St Pancras, a quick Underground ride to Tower Hill, and a quick walk across Tower Bridge brought us to HMS Belfast, a preserved light cruiser anchored in the Thames and one of only a few surviving warships to have participated in D-Day.

Full speed ahead! I'll admit that I'm less of a ship fan than a train fan, so I didn't take a ton of photos, but the tour of the Belfast is truly excellent and I'd highly recommend it to anyone in the area. The tour really takes you everywhere on the ship and between the signage and the audio tour, both excellent, you learn an awful lot about the ship's history and how it functioned day-to-day.

Some of the most interesting parts were the tour of the engine room. The boilers on this thing are huge, as you might expect, as are the steam turbines and their associated parts. Joel, can you count the gear teeth on this thing and get back to us with the ratio? Thanks...

One of the interesting exhibits is a smaller turbine, called the cruising turbine or something like that, which they actually have motorized and turning as a display as seen above. Pretty neat!

And here's the obligatory shot of Greg and Zach under the White Ensign with Tower Bridge in the background. The weather was gorgeous for our entire trip, in the 70s and 80s and we never felt a drop of rain.

Then, following an excellent lunch at a pub located under the railway viaduct carrying the approaches to Fenchurch Street Station, it was off to Covent Garden. And as luck and planning would have it, there was a unique way to get there - by traditional 1950s Routemaster double-decker bus. As it turns out, London Transport has a heritage bus route between Tower Hill and Trafalgar Square, calling at or near such tourist highlights as Saint Paul's and Covent Garden in between. They use these old 1950s Routemasters, albeit re-engined. It was something of a kick to ride a bus with a conductor.

We had the upper deck to ourselves, so naturally we sat up front. This bus has been restored inside, with old-style tartan moquette (upholstery) and enameled ceiling, though with modern touches like the security camera barely visible over Zach's head.

This wasn't a PAYE bus - the conductor roamed the bus to collect fares, just like in the old days, though he didn't carry one of the old wind-up registers. But our conductor did say that he had been to Chicago a couple of years previously to visit family in Homewood. They use five of these Routemasters to hold down service, though of course there are a few extras in the fleet as spares. Here's a shot of another bus headed the other way; in the distance ahead of us is a modern double-decker bus, of which they use a lot in London.

Our next stop was the London Transport Museum at Covent Garden, the public face of the same organization whose home base we visited at Acton. I'll cover that in my next post. After that we stopped for a quick bite to eat (a steak-and-kidney pie for me) there at Covent Garden before heading back to Tower Hill to ride the Docklands Light Railway, or DLR. The DLR is a light rail system that was started in the late 1980s to serve the east side of London and has been steadily expanded since, as the area it serves has been developed. It's an automated system, so there are normally no drivers and it functions more like the people mover at O'Hare. I didn't get any photos but I did get the above video from the railfan seat.

We rode to the junction at Canning Town and from there north to Stratford, where we disembarked to take a tube ride back. But first Zach spotted the tank engine pictured above sitting on display in front of the station. It's a 1933 Avonside-built 0-6-0T from Beckton Gasworks. Interesting!

Click here for Part IV of our trip.