Here’s the first part of an evocative article from Railway magazine, June 1950. Giving a vivid account of Stoke and Hanley stations in the days of steam, circa the 1920s-1940s. Had from an eBay listing of the paper magazine, and the hasty and low-res eBay page-scans proved an interesting test for the current state of OCR text extraction. The open-source NormCap, a Windows screenshot utility that runs Tesseract OCR, did the job well even though the text was tiny and the .JPG compressed.
“North Staffordshire Memories”
By R.E.G. READ.
OCCUPYING a strategic position in the industrial North Midlands, and hedged in by two of our largest railway systems, the old N.S.R. [North Staffordshire Railway] was never widely known and one imagines was often too hastily dismissed with contempt solely by virtue of its size, which, incidentally, was not quite so small as it would appear at a first glance.
Nevertheless, the line was far from despised by those who knew it best. On the contrary, among even its season ticket holders — most critical of travellers — there were many who would point out with pride its achievements, such as the possession of a higher proportion of electrically-lit rolling stock and stations than most of the great main line railways could then show, its fine punctuality, and freedom from accidents — in this last respect it claimed that throughout its history no single passenger had received fatal injury — and, last but not least, its readiness to meet the special needs of the district it served.
The focal point of the system was Stoke, and here the platforms (of no great length) plus one short bay, had to deal with the passenger traffic, mainly local in character but of a density that gave ample point to the local boast that the station handled more passenger trains in the working day than Crewe. For some years prior to the amalgamation, the management had been making strenuous efforts to overcome the competition of the “Potteries” trams on the inner suburban sections and, amongst other things, had opened a number of “halts”, of which Mount Pleasant between Stoke and Trentham, and Basford and Hartshill between Stoke and Newcastle-under-Lyme, stand out in the memory. Railmotors were built to cater for this traffic, which was of short duration, for they, and most of the halts, disappeared quickly under the L.M.S. regime [London, Midland and Scottish Railway, est. 1923-].
Stoke station was a lively place in those days. There were no platform indicators then, and destination boards were conspicuous more often than not by their absence, so that the human voice, served instead. Only the [Potteries] “Loop” line trains were conspicuously marked. In the “rush” period when the short trains would follow each other along the platforms, each moving up in turn as the place before it became vacant, the noise would become a Bedlam, with the porters cries alternating between train announcements and warnings to “mind the doors” “stand clear” “train drawing up” and so forth. The train announcements, by the way, included all the intermediate stops, reeled off fortissimo and seemingly in one breath, and to the unitiated would sound the most utter gibberish. Some of the staff were rare characters, and are remembered by name to this day.
The “high spot” of the day’s working was undoubtedly the 1.14 p.m. to Euston (the 12 noon from Manchester, London Road) and forerunner of the ‘Lancastrian’, which of course filled the whole length of the up platform. To the normal activity was added an unusual dignity, reflected from the presence of the station-master and the train itself in its fine North Western colours. Until the early 1920s when a War Memorial arch was built across the circulating area on the up [east] side, together with platform gates, the station was an “open” one and a huge fire used to burn in the vestibule entrance to the down [west] platform. The refreshment rooms were deservedly well patronised and the whole station had the air of being what it in fact was, the hub of a railway system.
On the whole, the N.S.R. stations were quite substantial affairs, with a brick wall usually taking the place of the fencing at the rear of the platforms. The characteristic station house situated above and around the Booking Hall, Waiting Rooms, etc., seen perhaps to best advantage at [the town of] Stone and to a lesser degree at Sandon, was of a style delightfully summed up by Mr. C. Hamilton Ellis as “Victorian Tudor.” That at Longton was unusual in that it had both a short allover roof and platform awnings adjoining and spanning but two tracks, while Hanley station lay well below the level of its approach road, and access to the platforms was by means of a boarded slope — down which tardy passengers would chase full tilt into the waiting trains below, to the accompanying cries of the staff at both ends. Trentham was built in a style that matched the coach-houses of Trentham Hall — once the seat of the Dukes of Sutherland. Those outside the smoky towns often went in for gay flower borders and I particularly recall Radway Green, Sandon, and Alsager in this connection.
The intensive suburban service was seen at its most characteristic on the old [Potteries] Loop line, whose trains were distinguished by the carrying of that name on an oval plate above the front buffer beam. This sinuous and sharply graded [i.e. often steep] line, constructed after the opening of the direct route from Stoke to Macclesfield via Longport, left it at Etruria and serving Hanley, Burslem, and Tunstall together with their off-shoots, finally rejoined it at Kidsgrove. It was a tough locomotive proposition, triumphantly overcome by the designing of a locomotive stud for passenger train working with its special difficulties ever in mind. […] The hill-climbing ability of some of these machines was given eloquent testimony by Mr. Cecil J. Allen in his British Locomotive Practice and Performance articles of that day […]
The rest of the article is unavailable to me, but the Railway magazine now has full archives available online. The original article also has images of working railway engines.
