War memorial, Woburn Sands

Woburn Sands (which until Victorian times was known as Hogsty End) is on the Buckinghamshire-Bedfordshire border. This memorial was erected for the inhabitants of Woburn Sands and Aspley Heath who died in the First World War.

Birmingham Snow Hill in 1914

Birmingham Snow Hill, one of the city's three railway stations, was the Great Western Railway's main station in the city. The station still exists nowadsys but it is very different to how it used to be. These three photographs are from the Railway Times in 1914 (via Archive.org) and show the station just following a major rebuild.

The station was closed in 1972 and became a car park for a while until it was finally rebuilt and re-opened in 1987, though looks very different now. It is a shame that both Snow Hill and New Street have lost their overall roofs. At least Moor Street is still close to it's original state. More old photos from Snow Hill (from the 1950s this time and showing the lines just outside the station) can be seen here.

Telephone Jukebox

Whilst watching the 1942 movie X Marks the Spot the other day I was taken by surprise by a rather interesting piece of technology in the movie. In a bar a man walks up to a large jukebox in the corner and puts in a coin. Instead of manually choosing a record he spoke into a microphone and was connected to an operator in a central office. Then his choice of record was found and put on a turntable, the music then piped to the jukebox in the bar.

These Telephone Jukebox systems ran in a number of US cities for a while in the mid-twentieth century including Manhattan (setting in the film). Music was transmitted over premium quality phone lines to the jukebox and while not what we would consider high quality these days was probably sufficient bandwidth for a 78rpm record.

Rock-Ola was the producer of such a device, the rather fine looking Mystic Music Jukebox. The central office served up to thirty jukeboxes. The Rock-Ola boxes also had up to twenty records stored inside it locally so users wouldn't always have to use the remote service (the machine in the movie seems to have a list on the front of it, maybe these were the records stored on it). The key advantage of a telephone jukebox being, of course, the much wider range of music that was available, from a few dozen held locally to a few hundred [1].

One of the most successful of these devices was the Multiphone by Kenneth C. Shyvers which at one stage had eight thousand machines in use. This system required two dedicated phone lines, one to speak to the operator (based in Seattle) and the other for the music [2]. These systems began to appear in the US in the late 1930s and survived in cities like Washington until the late 1950s. By then the improved technology of 45rpm singles (which of course had better sound quality than 78s and also were more compact) rendered the Telephone Jukebox (which wasn't a cheap system to run) obsolete.

Scenes from the movie

The operators look for a record 

A considerable collection of 78s

[1] Barry Ulavov, "The Jukes take over swing", American Mercury (October 1940) p. 177
[2] Gert J. Almind, Coin-Op Telephone Music <http://juke-box.dk/gert-telephone-music.htm>

Two old postcards

Postcard from the Past is a wonderful twitter account (and book) which is about old postcards and random snippets from the messages on them. As I recently received two postcards via eBay (included free with something else I had bought) I thought I would scan them and post them here. Unfortunately it would be very difficult to find out more about these messages, did Aunt Mary ever get up again for example?

First off a postcard from Branksome posted in 1950, a simple holiday message: "We are having a nice time and weather up till this week."

Secondly from Westcliffe-on-Sea in 1908: "I am sorry to hear that dear Aunt Mary is not yet able to get up"

Churches (18) : St Christopher, Haslemere

The Church of St Christopher in Haslemere is an early twentieth century Anglican church built as the Surrey town expanded westwards following the arrival of the railway. The church was consecrated in 1903 though not finished until the following year. It was designed by Charles Spooner and built to the Free Late Gothic style.

The church was built mostly out of bargate stone and is a nearly perfect rectangle. The interior draws heavily on the Victorian Arts & Crafts movement (of which Spooner was a member of). A chapel was added to the North in 1935. Unusually the church was built by Haselmere Builders - owned by a Quaker who operated the company on a co-operative profit share basis.

The gyroscopic car

This is an interesting oddity I discovered today while searching for something else in the Electric Railway Journal. In 1910, in Brooklyn USA, a monorail railway car was tested that used gyroscopes to keep it from falling over [1]. The Scherl monorail car (built in Germany) was tested at the Clearmont Ice Rink and could carry up to six passengers. The car was powered by a pair of two hp electric motors supplied by 110v DC from copper conductors either side of the running rail. The current being collected by shoes mounted on the bogies - the wheels having double flanges.

The car was kept upright by a pair of gyroscopes, these consisted of a steel wheel rotating in a near vacuum. Emergency props could be deployed by the motorman if the gyroscopes failed!

The car ran on an oval test track at up to 4mp/h and apparently worked perfectly fine with passengers not dumped unceremoniously on the floor!

More about Scherl's gyro monorail cars can be seen here.

Bogie detail, notice the collector shoe and double flanged wheels

[1] "Gyroscopic car in Brooklyn", Electric Railway Journal Vol. XXXV No. 3 (January 1910) p. 116

The Birmingham Tram

Long before the Midland Metro Birmingham, like many towns and cities, had a street tram network. It was one of the largest networks in the country opening in 1904 and lasting until 1953. At its height the network stretched for nearly 130km growing as the city grew in the Interwar Period. The Birmingham network, operated by Birmingham Corporation Tramways, had a narrower track gauge than many networks and it was the largest narrow gauge tram system.

As with nearly all the systems in the UK, decline began in the 1930s as trolleybuses and later motorbuses proved to be cheaper and more flexible. With hindsight of course it was a big mistake to close down the tram systems though made sound financial sense at the time. Most of the Birmingham network was closed just after World War 2 with a number of lines surviving until 1953 and the final closure.

There are not many traces of the Birmingham tram network now. Two tramcars survive and bits of track here and there plus some of the old depots. I remember when Erdington High Street was resurfaced in the 1980s, some of the old tram track which had been tarmaced over could be seen. In 1999 the Midland Metro began operation and in 2015 with the extension to New Street street trams returned to Birmingham at last.

Tramcar 395 at Thinktank

Tramcar 170 at the AMRTM under restoration

Interior of Witton depot, at the time used as a bus museum, notice the rails

55 Broadway (Hidden London)

Another Hidden London tour, however this one i wasn't 100% sure about when i booked it earlier in the year. 55 Broadway is the headquarters of Transport for London so it was a tour of an office block not railway tunnels or a disused station. An old office block mind you, 55 Broadway was the first skyscraper built in London back in the late 1920s but still... an office block. Would this be as interesting as say Charing Cross or Aldwych?

I needn't have worried, the tour was fantastic. Maybe even the best Hidden London i've been on yet! 55 Broadway is a wonderful building in the Modernist style with Art Deco flourishes. If i could choose an office to work in it would be here. The views from the roof of central London were also fantastic. I highly recommend this tour when they run it again next year. You can see my photos here.

Churches (6) : All Saints, Shard End

After the end of World War 2 Birmingham needed new houses to replace the bombed out suburbs and Shard End was changed from rural farmland to a new housing estate as a result in the late 1940s. The new suburb of Birmingham needed a church and All Saints' was built in the mid-1950s to serve the new community. The new church was consecrated in 1955.

The church was designed by local architect FJ Osbourne and was the first new church built in Birmingham in the post-war period. The church has a modern and fairly striking design if maybe not as pretty as churches from earlier centuries. A statue of Christ, sculpted by William Bloye, was installed above the main entrance.

Personal note: the author's parents were married here!

Electric canal boats

The traditional way to haul canal boats was using muscle, usually horse muscle but sometimes human too. Steam and later internal combustion engines later powered barges but there was an experiment to power barges via an electric overhead line. This Pathé newsreel shows an experiment held in Kidderminster (the photo below is of the canal at Kidderminster so maybe near to where the experiment was).

I don't know about you but powering canal boats this way doesn't seem all that safe. A live electric line and water is an accident waiting to happen, plus all of those overhanging trees and bushes arn't helping the safety case much.