Jan Ford's World

On the 28th and 29th June 2008 Tyseley Depot celebrated the 100th anniversary of its opening by holding 'Tyseley 100'. The event al...

My very incomplete diagram from 1955. In 1955, I made the occasional journey by rail from Wolverhampton to Stafford. The station was ver...

I've always thought the Fletcher Double Needle Combined Block Signalling Instrument produced by Fletcher for the London & North Wes...

In an earlier post I introduced Deepfields signal box. Here's the simplified box diagram:- The official signal box diagram was mounte...

A friend who'd read my post on Sedgeley Junction asked about one of the adjacent boxes, Horsley Fields Junction. This was situated on...

The Hoover Dam is one of the World's iconic man-made features. It was built during the Great Depression, came into service in 1936 and ...

On 2nd May 2008, Cyclone Nargis (the name is the Urdu word for 'daffodil') struck the delta region of Myanmar (formerly Burma) cau...

It must have been in the 1950s that I started to travel from Wolverhampton to Birmingham on my own. Steam still reigned supreme and the expr...

Driver Eddie Jones and I shared the driving and firing on 'Sir Gomer' at the Battlefield Line on Sunday 8th June 2008. It must have...

I've always had an affection for the London & North Western Railway. Francis William Webb not only provided them with their motive p...

The first railway to join London and Birmingham was the London and Birmingham Railway, opened in 1838 and only the third main-line railway t...

In March 2008, I made my first visit to Myanmar (formerly Burma). This was before the tragedy of Cyclone Nargis, which has brought such deva...

View of the Pumphouse from the street (from a photograph by David Neish). In 1992, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside conducted ...

A great deal has been written about the history of the locomotive 'Lion' over the years, much of it by the 'Old Locomotive Commi...

When I was rather younger, I was very impressed to discover that Grand Central Terminal, New York had a Track 117 (I never fathomed why we ...

'Lion' enjoys the sun during the 'Riot of Steam' in 2005. What is the Old Locomotive Committee? In explanation, I can do ...

Visitors to preserved railways are often interested in what's involved in becoming a working volunteer, so here's a description of ...