1 note

1 note

1 note

Richard Mellish on the same website comments: "both front tenders", does not make sense. "both injectors" would make sense, but...the most plausible original is "both front sanders",
1 note

The Robert Burns was built and launched in 1819 so was not particularly new when the poem was written.

1 note

“paul” on the Mudcat Cafe website (i) says "Moses of the Mail", is I think a sarcastic title. We can imagine Old Mr Poyser pootling along on his decrepit Lancashire and Yorkshire locomotive doing his nightly freight trip from Manchester to Warrington and back. Thorpes Bridge Junction, just south of Newton Heath, is where the Oldham Loop diverges from the Calderdale Line. Mr Poyser took the Calderdale Line. Presumably "Moses" was white-haired and bearded. His hair may have been "wildly waving", but he wasn't "speeding through the air" at Thorpe's Bridge Junction as he stopped straight after the junction for an "on" signal opposite the loco sheds at Newton Heath. His old locomotive will have needed regular oiling round as it chugged through the night and its sandboxes would need sand to spread onto the wet rails for extra grip. Moston cutting is dreary. If the fire was full of clinker, then the engine wouldn't have steamed very well. This is probably a more sensible version but doesn't sing so well. If both injectors didn't work then the boiler wouldn't have got any more water and the train would have been stopped. "Front tenders" is meaningless... Perhaps "Both front sanders" is the better option: maybe the sand got wet as the fireman was filling the boxes at Newton Heath. Perhaps the engine wouldn't steam as the fire had got low while the fireman was out of the cab. Hopwood was a suburb of Heywood, which is now Oldham. Castleton East signal box is (or was) there, and controlled a diverging line which is now the East Lancashire Railway and which used to go to Bury. By implication one of the slower moving bearings on the engine was "growling" and so needed a bit of lubrication. That's why "Moses" reached for the tallow pot... He'd have had to stop again to lubricate the bearings... This Castleton is a suburb of Manchester, not the lovely Castleton of the Peak District. I don't know why they wanted to reload wagons at Hebden Bridge, perhaps it's because "reload" rhymes with "road". I imagine the train would stop if some of its wagons had derailed
1 note

The song is "respectfully dedicated to Sir Daniel Gooch MP". Gooch (1816 - 1889) was as a railway locomotive and transatlantic cable engineer; the first Superintendent of Locomotive Engines on the Great Western Railway from 1837 to 1864 and its chairman from 1865 to 1889. (i) He was thus Chairman of the GWR when this song was published.

(i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gooch

1 note

The fine of 2 shillings for a days sickness suggests that wages were about 2 shillings per day. That figure is in line with the 11 shilling and 9 pence per week earnt by Gloucestershire weavers in 1840 [Ref: Knowles LCA The Industrial and Commercial Revolutions in Great Britain during the 19th century p86]
  1. [Note 318.1]
  2. [Note 318.4]
  3. [Note 318.3]
  4. [Note 649.1]

Page 38 of 128

Please publish modules in offcanvas position.