This Man Had A No(ta)tion! His name was Frederick Mathvan Whyte (1865 to 1941). He came up with a cunning plan to classify the wheel arrangement of every possible type of railway steam locomotive and it was a plan adopted world wide. Those of "a certain age" know it so well that it is hard to believe that anyone had to invent it. But he did. This particular list was distributed to locomotive builders in 1906. Whyte may well have come up with the names but only a few of those made it into general use, certainly in the UK. Even today steam loco aficionados still refer to Pacific, Mogul and ..read more

And There's More Near Millsands Around 20 years ago, the area to the west of Millsands was mainly warehouse businesses butt for most of the 20th century it had been small industrial manufacturing companies, eg Dixons.  The first bit of development was the building of Sheffield's new Crown Court building (above aerial shot, bottom left). This stood on a road called West Bar which runs across the bottom of the above view. Historically, this was narrow inner city clutter, boty residential and retail. Of course by the mid 1900s auch property was long-since condemned and demolished and th ..read more

Mystery History? fbb was stoutly upbraided by No 3 son for not telling readers, at the start of yesterday's blog, that he was writing about Sheffield. So now you know. There are road name boards at the southern (city) end of the road, but the northern access is anonymous. Helpful! The best way to grasp what Millsands was is to look from Lady's Bridge upstream on the River Don. It was an area of heavy industry, mainly steel works and fabrication companies. The road, back then, was little more than a lane leading to various yards. It led nowhere else. Over the years the grimy works ..read more

Three Bridge Streets? We are looking at the area below and east of "Kelham Island", the area with "Govt" and "Courts" highlighted. If you drive, walk or use a passing rickshaw to make your way ...  ... along West Bar past the courts (above map, just off bottom left) ... ... you come to a junction just before a city centre road called Snig Hill. You will be turning into a road called Bridge Street. Just a few yards further on there is a second left hand turn (white car) ... ... which is into Bridge Street! ... meanwhile, the main road - Bridge Street - goes straight on. Sounds odd ..read more

Page Reads : Perplexing : Ridiculous! There is something very humbling about being just 1 out of 572,000,000. It certainly deflates any sense of self importance! If fbb took 6 hours to write each daily blog there might well be divorce proceedings! But what, pray, are these "great results"? So the chubby one is part of a 17% class of bloggers! fbb has no idea what this blogging "jargon" means. What in earth is "organic traffic". Maybe it refers to vegetables excitedly reading a blog? But all over the internet you can find web sites full of advice as to how the poor stressed blogger can inc ..read more

 From East Croydon Station So it was that No 3 son arrived at East Croydon station for a tram replacement bus to Beckenham Junction. Opposite the station and its conveniently located tram stop is a small bus station. So, naturally, you would expect xpect that the tram-bus would pick up there. Access was difficult ... ... due to barriers for the track replacement work which provoked the trams closure. There were signs ... ... to the buses. It was not clear to our intrepid on-the-spot correspondent whether the signs led to any buses or to the special one he wanted. In fact the TR2 route ..read more

We Will Have A London-Style System The noise emanating from the Mega Metro Mayoral Minstrels is almost deafening. What the public needs is a transport system just like London's; under Local Control with the Authority setting timetables and fares and the nasty commercial operators, in it for the profit, just turning up and running the buses. (P.S. and the trams and the trains!) Actually, the operators will still be making a profit, possibly a bigger profit than they did under the "commercial" regime. Leaving aside the fact that Steve (left) and Tracy (right) haven't  started yet and the ..read more

 A Tram Ride To Beckenham Jct The pattern of service on the Croydon Tram system has changed over the years. Currently trams from Wimbledon are shown as LIGHT GREEN on the above diagram. The "one way" loop also carries the DARK GREEN route which is for trams to New Addington. Today our interest is with the route to Elmers End and, even more specifically, to Beckenham Junction, a route chosen by No 3 Son for his expedition (of which more tomorrow). There are several videos of this route on YouTube but they are a bit long at over 25 minutes. So fbb has taken some slightly fuzzy screen sho ..read more

From Tram to Train To Tram Back in the day, there were real trams in Croydon, run by Croydon Corporation; thus before London Transport was invented. The local network was quite small but longer distance routes ran to ... ... places off the map whose names are too small for the fbb eyes to read. Today's tram network should have been the start of a rapid growth of trams in Greater London, but, alas, despite a few bright ideas, no further routes has appeared.  Docklands Light Railway started as more of a tram than a train, with a fleet of just 11 cars. The network has grown well beyond t ..read more

Govan Grew Greatly ... ... from a quiet rural village, with archetypical cows grazing (archetypically!) in the archetypical vilage green, to this aerial view. The River Kelvin enters the view top right. Or this map which shows the ferry. Move on to 2002 and there is very little left except some warehouses on the north bank.  Or maybe, in the past, you could take a wander down Govan's Water Row ... ... where you might join the queue for one of those decidedly odd looking ferries. But if you walk down Water Row TODAY ... ... you will find lots of the above. Likewise were you able t ..read more