and plenty of Queen Elizabeth Class too.
I think you’ll find, Rep, that the Princess class were a Stanier design that worked the West Coast LMS line to Glasgow, you would have been very fortunate to see one on the ECML. But no doubt somebody will pull out their old spotting notebooks from the bottom of the wardrobe and prove me wrong, and my apologies if I’m being pedantic.
I would lay claim to having had a fairly good spotting position during the late fifties. This was a bridge over what is now the Midland mainline into St. Pancras, and was about 300 yards north of Napsbury station, south of St. Albans – both the bridge and the station have long since gone. The bridge led to a narrow strip of allotments, and a gate in a high wire mesh fence. If all this sounds rather unremarkable, the saving grace was that Radlett Airfield was on the other side of said fence. More specifically it was the hard-standing at the NE end of the airfield i.e. the end where the products of Handley Page wound themselves up to full chat before launching into wind and out over Park Street and Radlett villages. So my train spotting was punctuated by watching various Hastings, Heralds, Canberras and the mighty Victors do their thing. The locomotives on the St. Pancras line were not the biggest and most powerful in the land, Jubilee’s and Stanier 8F’s being the biggest, but towards the end of my interest in such boyish pursuits the introduction of the Blue Pullman DMU rakes and Peak class diesels added a bit of interest. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camerea in those days.
You can still see working Jubilees and Peaks on preserved lines and the occasional main line excursion, what wouldn’t we give to see a real Handley Page product flying.
Sign In
