Roger Harrison’s East Anglian Railways

Presenter: David Pearce

Virtual Meeting via Zoom

64 members and guests, including one from South Africa, enjoyed David’s excellent presentation by Zoom of Roger Harrison’s work, which followed-on nicely from our January show.

Roger, a leading light of the Norfolk Railway Society, provided some high-quality black and white images and the wherewithal to publish them in a book after his death.  David and Richard Adderson put the work together and the resulting images were the subject of his talk.

Following the format of the book, David took us on a tour of the railway scene – mostly Norfolk – from nationalisation until the demise of steam in East Anglia in 1962.  Forgive the rose-coloured spectacles but it was a very rich time for railway enthusiasts in terms of variety of motive power and full of interest.  The railways were busy with all kinds of traffic and it was gratifying to see that many of the photographs showed the railways in context; so not just a series of ¾ views of engines and trains, because the lineside paraphernalia and surrounding environment was also in evidence. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven” (W. Wordsworth).  So we saw branch lines that are no longer extant and whole systems – The M&GN – closed as it were at the stroke of a ministerial pen.

Norwich boasted three terminus stations and some of us visited them by special train.  David reminded us of the nonsense of the 60 mile “trip working” between the Victoria and City station (one mile apart as the crow flies) to maintain coal supplies to the latter after the closure of the M&GN.  Yarmouth too had three terminal stations.  There was so much material in this presentation – the interesting motive power and rolling stock; the local headcodes, the buildings – signal boxes, engine sheds – and infrastructure.  The book is available from Blurb. https://www.blurb.co.uk/