Great Western Coffee Shop

The disappearing sounds thread triggered other thoughts.

Growing up on Hayling there was using the Hayling Bridge (Langstone Bridge to those who lived the other side). It was a toll bridge with the tolls collected by British Railways staff. The decreasing weight limit on the old wooden bridge meant walking across, the aural effect would have been the wind (sort of thing they said "harden you up"?). Later on I used to cross Shoreham Brdige, another bridge where tolls were collected by British Railways staff. I would imagine that LBSCR weren't the only company that had these close links between road and rail which caused these arrangements.

Visits to Portsmouth usually meant an opportunity to look at, and sometimes use, the British Railways ferries. Were Poole - Channel Islands and Scilly Isles ferries run by British Railways?

Services to the channel islands were run by BR(Sealink) from Weymouth and, later, Portsmouth.  the Poole service only commenced after privatisation of Sealink.  The Scilly isles service has always been private as far I  know

Running Hotels .... running buses ... running car parks (oh - they still sorta do that) ... hiring out arches ... selling advertising and franchising space ...

........funny isn't it ?  After not doing the things that you mention above any more - you might expect that they might be able to concentrate their efforts on running a railway .........huh !

Don't hire out arches anymore, that business has been sold off by NR, NR still own the freehold but no longer get revenue from the rents

And don't I recall them taking over and running canals too?

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Air_Services

There was a period immediately after nationalisation when almost everything that moved in the UK (including the railways) or anything connected with transport were all under the umbrella of the British Transport Commission.

Their bailiwick included 32 ports, Pickfords, British Transport Films, Thomas Cook, Caledonian MacBrayne and London Transport.

That also included BRITISH ROAD SERVICES in their red liveried vehicles.

Some early railway companies operated gas works or electric power stations.
In the absence of an existing gas or electricity supply, they had to build their own gas works  or power station if anything better than oil lamps and candles was to illuminate a large works.

Large stations in urban areas generally had gas or electricity available, and small country stations could manage with oil lamps, but a large engineering works or depot really needed gas or electric light.

Having gone to the trouble and expense of building a private power station or gas works, then railway homes within a reasonable distance were often supplied.

Let's not forget the company health service,I believe that the GWR companies medical operation was used as a blueprint for our NHS .

Surely it's not the current GWR risen phoenix of the original GWR. the current one doesn't seem to be able to organise a hen party in a winery.

My first Summer Jobs were at the Motor Works at Slough where the WR cartage fleet was maintained.    A lot of Scammel 3 wheel tractors.

Working in the store we used to barrow across the mainlines at Slough to connect with a parcels train from Padd which stopped, on the  down main  at slough and delivered spare parts whilst we loaded parts for refurbishment.

Swindon made lots of odd things including Sand Soap for cleaning hands before Swarfega, including I believe fences out of old boiler tubes.

Yeah, them were the days. I remember the sand soap, we used to rub it into our hands and then splash GUNK onto our hands to more or less liquify the sand soap and it was easier to remove all the oil and grease before finally washing our hand with big chunks of coal tar soap cut from even bigger slabs. Then they brought in barrier cream which one should rub into ones hands before starting work and this was supposed to stop the oil, grease and dirt from sticking to ones hands, but the downside of this was that it made handling of items slippery. Do they still sell Swarfega ?

They do still sell swarfega it's dreadful stuff, what is needed is lanolin hand care cream of which many brands are available.

One thing the railway did in my time as a youngster was the transport of a circus from one town to another. An advanced party from the circus would arrive at a venue, set up a temporary fence around the site and erect the second big top. On a Sunday the circus train would arrive at the local goods yard, in my case it was Ashley Hill Goods Yard on Muller Road and all the animals would be paraded from the goods yard up Muller Road to Horfield Common where the circus performed. Animals such as Lions, Tigers, Bears and Monkeys would travel in open caged lorries to which they had been transferred by bridging from the specially adapted and reinforced rail vehicles to the road lorries within the goods yard.

If I remember rightly the regular performing circus on Horfield Common was Bertram Mills Circus which used this mode to transfer between venues but Chipperfields Circus also visited and performed at the same location.

Another Bristol circus venue was the (Durdham) Downs and for that location, Clifton Down stations goods yard was used.

Have to browse YouTube to see if any film of such occurrences are on there.

Being a bit pedantic, but wasn't it founded by and paid for by the staff rather than the company?
Although I believe that Gooch did donate £1000 to help kickstart the medical fund and GWR donated the building that became the hospital.

At least up to the last war, the railway operated clothing factories for the manufacture of uniforms and overalls.
During the war, prisoners of war were used as the labour for this work. Under the Geneva convention, prisoners of war can be put to work, but must not be made to perform work directly related to the war effort.
So making military uniforms is not permitted, but railway uniforms would be OK.

(Some army uniform was made in prisons, but by ordinary criminals, not POWs)

It was Billy Smart's circus that over wintered at Winkfield and loaded at Ascot.

SR had special Elephant vans with strengthened floors and higher roofs.

There were also farm moves where all the equipment and animals would be loaded on a special train/s. There is a BTP film of such a move.

I thought GWR WERE the other circus in town, with Ringmaster Mark Hopwood in doubtful control. High wire acts from Hitachi and Network Rail and persons trying to be clowns manning the gatelines at Paddington and Temple Meads. Lion tamers used to quell disgruntled passengers and if that doesn't work, try the custard pies. Knockabout fun to be had by studying departure screens, and have the chimps running all over the platforms, causing mayhem, but not actually doing very much.

The railways did an excellent job of moving parcels.  Most impressive was the Red Star station-to-station service, which offered same-day transit from sending station to receiving station.  Add ons for collection and/or delivery were available.

I would frequently find myself sending an urgent parcel by Red Star from Evesham to (usually) Leeds in the early/mid 1970s.

My dad was very distrustful of the railways and parcels handling, referring always to what he said was eyewatering levels of pilferage in the post WWII years.

Companies like Kays of Worcester built their mail-order empires on the back of a great rail parcel delivery network.

Completely separately, the railways were also used to transport (filled) coffins about the country.  Bit of a dead-end, I suppose, for the railway.  I found the instructions for this in a very old WR Regional Appendix that was propping something else up at Moreton in Marsh when I was a signalman there. 

BR Research:

SSI.  First Computer-based signalling interlocking in the world.  Until then, it was all either mechanical (levers) or huge rooms of safety-critical relays.

Also APTIS and PORTIS ticket-issuing machines.  CATE - Computer-assisted timetable enquiry.

Birmingham Airport's MAGLEV.

All cutting-edge at the time.  What would the boffins in Derby be doing now if privatisation had plumped for "BR plc"?

Direct Railway Electric At Melksham - DREAM

And:

The first prototype cellular (mobile phone) telephone network built in 1977 operating in the Derby Area and connected to the railway ETD telephone network less than 10 years after the patent. 

Stoneblowing tamping machines (though never built a real one as they had refused to patent then let the staff member who invented it patent it himself - so they did nothing till after the patent had run out).

Vibro-compaction machines for stabilising track after relaying and tamping.

Active tilt technology. Developed by BR Research for the APT project. The patents were sold to Fiat Ferroviaria in Italy and they combined the BR research with their own experiments with passive tilt to produce a series of 'Pendolino' trains. After FIAT Ferroviaria was acquired by Alstom in 2000, the BR derived tilting technology returned to the UK in the form of the Alstom built Class 390 Pendolinos that now run on the West Coast Main Line.

At the other end of the speed and comfort scale BR Research, in conjunction with British Leyland, gave us the 'Pacer' series of rail buses. Only really welcome because they kept lines open and marginal services running. In all other ways - hideous things!

Yes - back in the mid-1980s Red Star was the courier service, and I remember sending important documents around the country.

However WB's dad's mistrust of using rail for parcels and other small loads was well-founded. A friend of mine who is a "name" in the world of show poultry judging, now in his 80s, told me that as a young poultry fancier he sent some of his prize birds to a show in Stratford upon Avon by rail from Earley, only to call there to collect them after the show to find only an empty poultry basket waiting for him......

Roast chicken with all the trimmings in the Red Star messroom that night. :o

I did a stint in Red Star Parcels myself back in the 80s.  A shame to see it go as it was an excellent service and the logistics using early BR computer systems using a similar framework to the ancient old TOPS machines that clung on until the early 21st century in some places.

I remember well the noise that several crates of live chicks made and the stench from having the weekly fish consignment sitting in the back waiting its allocated train!

I think you might have to qualify as in the UK. Considerable work was done by US DoD (DARPA) and UK MoD were working on similar. I worked for one of the contractors who were refining the base station code.

Yes, theft of both railway property, and of freight and parcels was regrettably common decades ago, and IMHO was so widespread as to contribute to the decline of the railway industry.
As a school kid, I was shocked when visiting the home of a school friend to see the amount of presumably stolen railway property in the house.
A microwave oven, a hugely costly item back then.
Railway light bulbs (SR type, 75 volt, three in series on the mains)
Toilet paper.
AD28 batteries used to work portable radios.
On the washing line, bed sheets marked "BTH property"
And for school metalwork classes, the kid wore an overall coat marked "SR" as did other kids.*.
And that was only what I saw on a brief visit.

One of the advantages of electrification was said to be that the "staff cant steal the traction current, like they do with coal"

I was not blameless, I wore a similar overall but mine was marked "Kingston power station" much better than the railway ones.

Yes - by 1947 (i.e. immediately pre-nationalisation), the great majority of the canals were owned by the railway companies.

Some railways were better stewards of the canals than others, and the GWR was not one of the kinder ones. (For the GWR's 150th anniversary, Waterways World ran a series of articles headed "No cause for celebration"!) Usually the railway companies bought the canals either to eliminate the competition or to get their hands on the useful land. The Wilts & Berks Canal's most profitable years were when it was used for carrying building materials for the new railway being constructed nearby...

A few canal companies remained independent and profitable right up to 1947, such as the Staffs & Worcs and the Aire & Calder. They, too, were nationalised - but the Rochdale and the Derby (perhaps a couple of others?) were not. When a waterway campaigner quizzed a civil servant about this a few years later, the answer was "oh, that was one we forgot".

(And then there's the Hereford & Gloucester Canal, leased to the GWR in 1862 and partly used for construction of the Gloucester-Ledbury line. The canal is now being restored and the plan is to reuse the old railway alignment around Ledbury, with the water flowing between the station platforms...)

In a reversal of the normal fortune of the day, the Lancaster Canal Company took a lease on the nascent, parallel, and freshly bankrupt Lancaster & Preston Railway - now part of the West Coast Mainline.

At Worcester, there was once a works that made and supplied sheets (tarpaulins) for wagons

There must have been Railway laundries, somewhere.  Bed linen for sleeper services, that kind of thing.  When I was a signalman, we'd send off each week whatever dusters and hand towels (roller kind) we'd used in the 'box, and receive back the previous week's laundered ones.

That sort of thing was part of the BTH  BritishTransport Hotels  as far as I know.

There was a railway laundry in Swindon! It's where the antimacassars were cleaned - see earlier thread....