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The Drink Tank 229
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All aboard
an Introduction by James Bacon
Trains have always been fascinating to
me. From an early age I would year to watch
or ride on trains, and trips in old CIE AEC
1950’s
railcars, reconigured in push pull sets with
re-engined Class 201 Engines from Tara St to
Dalkey, as a youngster in the late seventies
and early eighties was brilliant.
I remember being taken in 1979 to
see the Railway Collision in Dalkey, between
two commuter trains and running in Tip-
perary near where my Aunt and Uncle lived,
to see the train go under the Bridge near
Solahead, that went from Tipperary Town to
Limerick Junction.
My father lied to get us into Wesley
College and see a Model Railway Exhibit in
1979, we are still unsure what the lie was
and he bought us a GNER A4 Paciic 4-6-2
with teak carriages. We had already played his
Hornby Dublo trains, and he even had some
Triang American styled coaches until they
were worn out. I played with Lego, but only
found Lego trains in 2001. Thanks to a model
shop who had loads of it, and no one else
was
interested.
And then I became a Train Driver. or
something like that. I am very greatful to all
contributors, nice to see Tony Kean in print,
as ever, and hope you enjoy this Drink Tank.
If it proves popular, I may pester Chris to do
another one, next year or something.
The Comet: Living in a Photograph
by
Christopher J. Garcia
in the past and forgotten until what was then
the present. Emerson bought it and we moved
in my Junior year. It was a beautiful building, not
quite completely inished when we moved in,
but it was delgithful. To get us into the mode
that this place had a history they put up a series
of photographs. There were photos of Boston
celebrities, a recreation of the Boston Massacre
from the 1970s, a big photo of the Building as it
was being inished, and then a photo of a train
pulling out of a station. It wasn’t a regular photo,
it had obviously been touched up. It was like
something from the not-so-distant future. This
was a train obviously pulling into South Station,
but it looked like no train I’d ever seen. And, as
a budding Historian, I now had a quest. The only
writing on the photo said The Comet- 1940
The chase beginning at the Emerson
Library, a former brownstone that had been
converted into a library, which was a really nice
thing. It was actually Mrs. Gardner’s, that is the
same Mrs. Gardner who founded the Isabella
Stuart Gardner Museum, irst house, right up
on Beacon Street. I had been a regular on the
internet from the Library,, but they’d gotten
tired of me printing out long lists pf Wrestling
Champions so they banned me from the com-
puters. I had to use the Card Catalog. I was no-
where near sure where to start, as I igured The
Comet would lead me to everything from the
irst Fanzine to the worker’s periodical that was
the biggest thing in Liuthuania. I decided to start
with the general study of trains. I found a book
that listed train lines from around the world. I
was amazed at the detail they went into. Every
line had dozens of details about everything from
departure stations, number of stops, number of
It’s impossible to say which is cooler: the
reality of a photo or the surreality of it’s connec-
tion ot the real world. I have experienced many
great moments through photos that I could
never have been at. The photos of the Falling
Man from September 11th, the evacuation of
the American Embassy in Vietnam, the greatest
sports moments recorded by incredible photog-
raphers from around the world. I can tell stories
about how things went down at events I was
not born for simply because I’ve examined the
photos. It is in this vein that my love for a cer-
tain train that had been dismantled years before
I was even born.
Emerson College bought the Little Build-
ing: 180 Tremont Street, right on the corner of
the Boston Common. It was a lovely building built
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cars, wheelwidth, etc. Sadly, it was arranged by
company name, so it took me a while to ind it,
but there it was: The Comet.
The New York, New Haven and Hartford
Railroad paid for The Comet to be made by the
Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation. It cost a hun-
dred thousand dollars, which is a lot of money.
It weighed about 100k pounds, which was con-
siderably lighter than the average locomotive.
It made heavy use of aluminium, which led to
the light It featured two Westinghouse Diesel
engines, 400 HP and all. It was something of a
marvel. There were three cars, and they shared
couplings, so as to save weight. The train moved
on hydraulic shock-absorbers, so it gave a gentle
ride, which is always a pleasant thing. The early
promotional material said that it ‘loated around
bends in the track’, which may be a slight exag-
geration.
They put a ton of other features, in-
cluding stairs that came down with the door,
so there was no way to close the doors if
there was someone on the stairs and the train
couldn’t move unless the doors were closed.
This did lead to occasional problems, but it was
a nice safety feature. The whole thing was very
futuristic, including little touches like no visible
light sockets and air-conditioning. That’s a nice
touch when you’re trying to make things look
magical to simply hide the plugs and cords.
I was in love with this thing. I found tons
of references to it all over the place. When I
could access the internet again, I managed to
ind a couple of sites that featured information
about the Comet, which was awesome. It was
the earlyish days of the Internet. so knowing
that you could ind this kind of info was still an
amazing thing. I read all I could get my hands
on and then I noticed something. It was a line
between Boston and Providence, and I was in
Boston. While it ended its run in the early days
of WWII (after running from 1935), it was put
into local Boston service until 1951. Someone
around town that I could talk to must have had
some experience of the train. I had one feeling,
a professor who had a wicked bad Boston ac-
cent. He was in his 70s, so he must have known
something. Tony, as he insisted all his students
call him. He was my history of Jazz teacher, my
favorite class, so it wasn’t weird that I hung out
after class.
“Tony, you ever take trains when you
were a kid?” I asked
“All the time. Haven’t in 30 years.” He
answered.
“You ever ride The Comet?” I asked.
“44 miles in 44 minutes.” He said.
“So you rode it?”
“I loved that thing. I used to go to
Providence with my dad. sit up front. Everyone
dressed up to ride it. It was the nicest train I’d
ever been on.”
I loved talking with Tony about stuff, and
he got this odd look in his eyes. I wasn’t sure
what it was, but it had something behind it that I
had to call beautifully distant.
“One thing about the Comet,” Tony said,
that look still on his face, “is that it was a mo-
ment in time when that could have been the
Fututre. “
I totally got where he was coming from
then.
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Thumpers
By Tony Keen
my grandparents felt their allegiance was to
Portsmouth.)
But what excited us most was that there
was a railway line at the bottom of their garden.
We were young boys, and we were into trains.
The line ran on a raised embankment across from
the track that ran along the back of the gardens,
and provided access to the road for their garage.
Looking back, part of the appeal was the mystery
of the spot. We couldn’t see the track, and had
only a brief space of about two hundred feet in
which we could see the trains, before trees or
other buildings hid them again. Since we never
actually travelled on the local trains, I had no
idea what Fareham station, which lay to the west
of my grandparents’, looked like until much later.
I used to have dreams about what I might ind if
I ascended the embankment and explored along
past in the dark with a pantograph on its top
– one of British Railways’ Southern Region’s
locomotives that could run off third-rail
electricity on the mainlines, or off overhead
power in yards, where third-rail was too
dangerous to staff. I recall the locomotive being
large and box-like, which would make it a Class
70, one of three locomotives built between
1941 and 1948 to a design by legendary lunatic
Southern Railway locomotive designer O.V.S.
Bulleid, best known these days for the Merchant
Navy, West Country and Battle of Britain Paciics,
and (and James won’t thank me for bringing this
up) a peat-burning steam locomotive for Irish
Railways. But my memory can’t be trusted;
the Class 70s were all scrapped in 1969, so
it’s a very long time ago. Furthermore, I recall
the locomotive pulling the train, but as the line
between Portsmouth and Southampton wasn’t
electriied until the 1980s, it isn’t possible
for any of the Southern Region’s dual-voltage
locomotives to have hauled a train over that line
back then.
Anyway, I, in particular, with the selishness
only an eight year old boy is capable of, always
used to resent the fact that the bedroom we
slept in was at the front of the house, away from
the railway – I wanted the bedroom facing the
railway. Why shouldn’t my grandparents give up
their bedroom so that I could watch trains long
past my bedtime?
What I most associate with those days
are the DEMUs, the Diesel-Electric Multiple
Units.
My grandparents, my dad’s parents,
lived in a terraced council house in Fareham,
Hampshire, one of the towns that line the
Solent between Southampton and Portsmouth,
which even in the 1970s formed a continuous
link between those keen rivals. They had bought
a house in the 1930s, but its proximity to Lee-
on-Solent airield led to its destruction in an air
raid (my grandmother used to tell a story of an
earlier raid spent sitting inside the Anderson
shelter in the garden, my father in her arms,
as the machine-gun bullets bounced off the
corrugated steel roof). They’d never been able
to buy again. Margaret Thatcher’s council house
revolution, well-intentioned in theory, but put
into practice in a way that
inevitably led – as I recall
thinking at the time – to
today’s housing crisis, came
too late for them.
It was, nonetheless,
a nice house, properly
looked after, and
comfortable. Every
summer, pretty much, me
and my brother would
be sent down from our
home in Derbyshire, and
be spoilt rotten for a
week, driven around the
sights of southern England.
(Though we rarely went
to Southampton – I think
the trackside; great vistas
of multiple tracks, station
platforms and locomotives
(none of which, incidentally,
was borne out by the
reality, when I later found
what it was).
I remember an
exotic variety of trains
– Inter-City services going
into or out of Portsmouth,
late-night Freightliners and
goods trains of continental
rolling stock, which had
come over on ferries in the
days before EuroTunnel. I
have one clear recollection
of seeing a locomotive run
I have to pause now for some boring
technical stuff. Please bear with me; it’s
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necessary, and I’ll try to keep it short. 1 There
are two main methods employed in which the
power of a diesel engine is used to move a train.
In mechanical transmission, the diesel engine
powers the driving wheels directly through
crankshafts and the like, as a car engine drives
a car. In electric transmission, which is more
powerful, but tends to be bulkier, the diesel
engine acts as a generator, and the electricity
is fed to traction motors that drive the wheels.
Most diesel locomotives, except for some small
shunters, have electric transmission. 2 Most
irst-generation diesel multiple-units, those built
in the 1950s and 1960s, aiming to maximize
passenger space by slinging the engines under
the carriages, had mechanical.
Except on the Southern Region. The
Southern Region didn’t use diesel multiple
units much at all; an intensive electriication
project, begun and largely completed by the
Southern Railway, and continued by Southern
Region, meant that what were needed to cover
their suburban services were electric multiple
units. One or two lines, however, had yet to
be included. So for these, the Southern Region
acquired diesel multiple units. But instead of
diesel-mechanicals, with the underslung engines,
they chose, for reasons I know not, diesel-
electric, with the engine illing a signiicant area
behind the driver’s compartment.
Portsmouth-Southampton was, as I said,
one of the lines yet to be electriied. So every
day, about twice an hour in each direction, Rail
Blue DEMUs passed by my grandparents’ house.
(Except on Sundays, when locomotives and
push-pull rolling stock, a rarity in Britain in those
days, worked the services.)
A diesel-mechanical unit pretty much
sounds like a bus. A diesel-electric unit sounds
like nothing you have ever heard before, certainly
not a diesel-electric locomotive. It’s very dificult
to describe (especially for a non-descriptive
writer like your correspondent), but one thing
that always struck me was the sheer enthusiasm
of the engine sound. Your average DMU sounds
like it is simply doing a mundane job – a DEMU
sounded like it loved to carry passengers about.
It was a sound that rose above the general
morass of railway sounds; people turned their
head when a DEMU passed.
Years later I discovered these units were
commonly referred to as "Thumpers". The
name itted them well; there was a distinctive
thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump
from Fareham were a different matter. We
heard them about ive minutes away as they
struggled up the incline, over a distance which
must have been (indeed in all probability still is)
less than a mile. Thump-thump-thump-thump as
they stormed up the incline, my brother and I
watching as they rushed past.
Some DEMUs were Class 201, 202 and
203 ‘Hastings’ units, built for narrow loading
gauge lines running out of Tonbridge, an area I
was soon to become more familiar with, as my
girlfriend (now my iancée) lived there (and now
so do I). The narrow loading gauge problem was
the result of shoddy construction. The tunnels
along the line were built without suficient lining,
and after one collapsed, had to be relined. As
a result, four tunnels ended up with narrow
clearances, too narrow for standard rail
when they were running,
especially when they
were straining.
Leaving Fareham,
they had to strain.
There is a signiicant
incline out of Fareham
station heading east.
The trains coming from
Portsmouth heading
towards Fareham we
had hardly any warning
of – they glided almost
silently down the incline,
before dashing past at
speed, leaving nothing
behind them but ringing
rails. The trains coming
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