Railways Illustrated – March 2023
English | 85 pages | pdf | 57.47 MB
Recently, I found myself travelling back home by train when there was a serious signalling failure at Nottingham that severely disrupted my journey.
There’s nothing particularly special about this, you may think, but the reason for mentioning it is to highlight the excellent customer service I noticed from the East Midlands Railway staff at Derby – where my train was diverted – under what was clearly very challenging circumstances.
All of us who regularly travel by train have been affected by the strike action that has dominated the news agenda over the last six months, but no matter how frustrating the dispute can be for passengers, it must be remembered that the vast majority of our railway staff work incredibly hard to provide the best service possible.
When there are disruptions like the one I was involved in, confused passengers who have had their plans thrown into awry can get stressed and even become abusive to staff who are simply trying to help them.
The EMR staff I dealt with at Derby were excel-lent in extremely challenging circumstances, providing a high-profile presence and dealing with scores of people in a calm and professional manner.
I realise that railway staff up and down the country will have faced many similar situations throughout their careers, but next time you are travelling and there is a serious disruption, please spare a thought to all those professional railway staff doing their best in extremely challenging situations to get us to where we need to go.
Coming up in this Railways Illustrated Magazine March 2023 issue
One of the privileges of my job is being able to visit places that many enthusiasts cannot go to, and it is something that I never take for granted. One such occasion came in December when photographer Kevin Delaney and I paid a visit to Derby to meet with Loram UK’s maintenance and rail operations director Ross White. We discov-ered more about the company, which is some-what unique in the UK for its reputation both as a maintenance company and as an operator.
This month we also look at the main line oper-ations of preserved AC electric locomotive 86259 Les Ross/Peter Pan and speak to Les Ross MBE about some of his personal recollections from the past 15 years with the locomotive that was named after him more than two decades ago and which he preserved following its withdrawal.
Martyn Hilbert, in conjunction with The Class 502 Preservation Trust, tells the story of the Class 502 EMUs that used to run on the Merseyrail network and how the surviving two Class 502 cars were preserved to operate over their former territory, only to subsequently end up under the threat of scrapping. Thankfully, this story has a happy ending, and the unit is now undergoing a compre-hensive restoration to return it to its former glory.
In this magazine issue, 10 Pictures comes courtesy of Freightmaster editor Martin Buck, who took his pursuit of trainspotting to another level many years ago before helping to produce a number of books under the Freightmaster banner. As ever, his selection of images is diverse and spans several decades, serving up another large helping of nostalgia.
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