TIM SHACKLETON looks at some of the many and varied passenger classes that worked in East Anglia in steam days, from tiny ‘Buckjumpers’ to the mighty ‘Britannias’.
Above: It’s only 25 miles as the crow flies from Southend-on-Sea to Margate and Hornby has done Great Eastern modellers proud in its choice of ‘OO’ gauge motive power. ‘Namers’ were a bit sparse in the eastern counties but a rich diversity of pre-grouping types more than made up for this.
The Railways of East Anglia were among the first in the country to be fully dieselised, but this didn’t stop many of them falling off the map even before Dr Beeching set to with his axe at the behest of Ernest Marples, who as well as being our Transport Minister at the time just happened to be the majority shareholder in the largest motorway construction firm in the country, Marples Ridgway.
Across Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and rural Essex, scores of allegedly unremunerative lines were closed and yet, ironically, few major improvements have been made to East Anglia’s road network in the intervening 60 years, while public transport is now all but non-existent. The only motorway is the lightly-used M11, serving a vast acreage of empty fields. So little has changed in the part …
