New member intro
 

Hello One and All,

My interests lie entirely in the past but that doesn’t mean that I live there! As well as my own photographic efforts from the 50’s and 60’s I’ve been accumulating archive negatives for about five years with some interesting subject matter amongst them. Well, they’re interesting to me as they’re not limited to purely British material. My most recent scanning project included nearly 100 quality negatives of 50’s Australian steam. I also have a special interest in Dutch steam related material which doesn’t exactly grow on trees.

As well as the above I have more than a passing interest in buses from the half-cab era as well as archive trams and trolleybuses from whatever country.

A small proportion of my scanning efforts can be viewed in my web gallery at :
http://gallery62603.fotopic.net/

The road transport material in that gallery is gradually being moved to a separate gallery:
http://psvarchive.photos.gb.net/ and will be removed from the railway gallery once the transfer project is completed.

As if the above isn’t enough to take in I’m also a keen collector of luggage labels and have several web pages, all self-coded, on the subject with more to be added as and when time permits.

One hopes that I might at some time be in a position to contribute positively to this group.

Regards,

Mike M.

Mike
Welcome to the forum i hope you enjoy it,if you have any question's give us a shout.
All the best and good luck,Ian

Welcome aboard Mike. You certainly have an amazing collection of photographs. I particularly like the Austrian Kreigslok in sunset at Breda. :)

Welcome, I've just spent a happy half hour in your photo collection. The shots of locos being actually towed away at the end of southern steam are quite rare.

welocm Upney...i was going to be Wishing you Well but I had to put a Halt to that when i realised it didnt say Upwey.....:cool:

Hi Mike,
Welcome to the forum.
You are obviously from my era. Have'nt we seen some wonderful things.
Regards,
Paul.

Welcome Mike !

I also have spent a fastenating hour looking at your fotopic site - some brillant pictures

john

New member intro
 

Nice one Arthur and unintentionally tinged with irony as I live only about 4 miles (7km for the modernists) from the site of that erstwhile location.

I've used the Upney sidings pseudonym ever since I became web connected and have a logo captioned with "A bit beyond Barking". Gerritt?

Cheers,

Mike M.

Alan,
That was an amazing weekend with sunshine all the way. A steam tour in Germany on the Saturday that linked up with another such tour at Brochterbeck where the two trains swapped engines which meant that we had at various times haulage by classes 38, 41 and 44.

I lived near Amsterdam at the time which made the second day's trip a bit easier. So, back home at 0130 and then off to Rotterdam at about 0730 for a trip that involved runpasts, parallel running (a never-to-be-forgotten experience), the last overhead semaphore gantry in action (@ Bergen-op-Zoom), lively double-heading behind a 41 and a 52 all capped by a glorious sunset.

Rgds,

Mike

I've been amazed at how much attention they've attracted but you're right as they do seem to be quite rare. Let's face it, if that happened today the lineside would be lined with football ground sized crowds but back then they were almost totally ignored. The only reason I knew about them was because Len's of Sutton had access to working timetables and told me about the workings. I'm pretty sure that I was the only spectator as they passed me at Wimbledon on two occasions. It was a very different story the following year when Shepherd's locos moved to Longmoor and crowds of linesiders were on hand at every vantage point en route.

New member intro
 

Responses to earlier messages . . . .

andersley
I’ve also had a look at your own Fotopic gallery and have passwed the link on to diesel-minded friends. I also noted amongst your archive steam material that you have shots of Scotish Directors taken at Polmont in June 1959. I, too, saw the line(s) of them in the August but wasn’t in a position to actually go and photograph them.

paul miller
“haven’t we seen some wonderful things.” We have and one wonders how on earth a GBRf 66/7 through Dorchester could arouse the amount of attention it did only a few weeks ago with loads of photters at the only viable viewpoint in the town. My own childhood and teenage viewpoint was the footbridge near Norbury station where steam on passenger workings was pretty tedious (Fairburns and later Standard 4MT’s) but the goods workings elicited Brighton 0-6-2Ts, Maunsell W’s, LNWR, LMSR and GNR locos but did ever photograph them? Of course not as they would be there forever wouldn’t they? Perhaps my greatest sin was that I didn’t photograph the the pre-war EMU’s which I’ve regretted to this day.

robbo
Thank you for viewing my Fotopic material. I should be able to set some time aside during the next month to upload around 50 archive shots of non-SR material as the Southern brigade has been a bit spoiled of late.

Hi Mike Welcome To The Forum

Hi Mike,

Welcome to the Forum,

John H-T.

Hi Mike,
Thanks for the reply to my comment,"Have'nt we seen some wonderful things".
I took my grandson to a model railway show at Grantham a week ago, and of course I had to revisit the station to relive my childhood.
How little the buildings have changed amazed me. I remember running from one platform to the other via the footbridge. The footbridge has been replaced but the stairs are the same ones we ran up and down. The last time I ran over those was 50 years ago. Well I did'nt run over them this time of course!
The point you made about not photographing anything because we thought that they would last forever, well we are all guilty of that.
Regards,
Paul.

Mike ,

A fantastic selection of photos.

Thanks for sharing.

John H-T.

Welcome to the forum Mike. Nice pics! :)

Hello Mike, welcome to the Forum, I will have a look at the piccies later, all the best. Chris.

Hello Mike. I have been on holiday so can I take this opportunity to add my welcome to those from the other members.
Whilst catching up on what I've missed I've already come across many of your excellent photos. Great stuff.

Thank you, John. I had an order yesterday evening for 20 tannies from my collection of 'unusual' loco types, preferably Scottish, for a slide show. I'll probably post a couple of them to the Forum's gallery over the weekend.
Mike

Hi and welcome to the forum