Thanks for sharing your films Philip, they show how we are often led by people who don’t appreciate what we have till it’s gone, your final winter records how dismal conditions could be for footplate crews and provides a good historical record for future generations.
Staff and crew struggling in difficult weather conditions but it was more in an effort to keep supply lines going in isolated communities. I doubt that there would have been many passengers.
Another fantastic video 👍 its great you've captured the S&D during some of its hardest times so today we can see what it was like back then. Hopefully the S&D can maybe one day be brought fully back to life!
Yeah McMetro. Hard filming/recording in winter conditions too. Sad that we could see lots of people taking still and movie material, and others recording the sounds, yet no-one working together as we did. Even the greatest of them all, Ivo Peters, did not have a sound camera, sound fx being added at a later date. Best Wishes, Philip
@@philipfowler5280 Yes, it would have been great to have more audio/video combined and its great that you took the initiative to do it! 😀 and many train enthusiasts around the world thank you for it!
@@McMetro Thanks McMetro. I was lucky to find amateur cameraman Ken Barter - but it took some persuading to convince him we could achieve a post-synchronised sound track We were just in time to cover the S&D's eleventh hour . That eleventh hour, or more accurately twelfth month, did come with WEATHER though! Editing film - 2 years. Editing & synchronising audio - another year. The Premiere was amazing. The Somerset & Dorset Circle (as it was then) weren't expecting three 400 foot reels of fully edited and sound-synchronised film to turn up..... Best Wishes, Philip
Hard to believe i was only 13 back in 1966. Living where i did, it wasn't hard to access this railway, and i seem to remember a trip on it as far as Shepton Mallet (thanks largely to my dad who gave me the interest in railways in general ), i also knew someone, much later in life, who was a fireman based at Bath, who worked the line. Since then, there have been many who wanted to see a complete restoration of this line - this, in reality, will never happen - just 'pipe' dreams sorry to disappoint them. The trackbed has mostly been obliterated and in lot's of places, built over with houses and commercial structures. It brings back real memories of the cold (miserable) winters, when 'town' gas still cooked meals, the front doorstep ( brass sheet covered) still had to be religiously polished with 'Brasso' on sundays ! When the radio ( no television ) made for family entertainment - Workers Playtime, Journey into Space and suchlike made lasting memories of an era, which although not the 'romantic and yearned after' life anyone would tolerate today, was nevertheless very personal to me, so thank you for bringing back part of my life, which seems almost fantasy now, in this insane world of non existant 'plagues', so called 'space' travel and all the heinous lies which this present time is rife with.
Many Thanks! I used to enjoy Workers Playtime gratis, courtesy of the Management, in factories where I had the pleasure, and it was a real pleasure, of working. Eventually had to silence one, though, by bashing it hard, for being way too loud. Only one of those workplaces still stands - now Don Cameron's balloon factory. Best Wishes, Philip
Another example of a secondary route that should never have closed, although I think the closure of the S&D had as much to do with internal rivalry/politics within BR as to do with economics. In my opinion whilst the writing was on the wall for many of the branch lines even before the Beeching report the closure of many of the secondary routes, the S&D, the GC, the Mid Hants route and the Waverley route to name but a few was ill conceived and short sighted, what should have happened is that these routes should have been rationalised with lines being single where appropriate. Had these routes not closed we would not be struggling for capacity on the railway in the way we are today. As someone else here has said the possibility of reopening many of these routes is an impossible dream much of the track bed although still visible was sold off at the time piecemeal to farmers and land owners and large parts have disappeared under modern development and although the present government made great fanfare about allocating £25m to reopening old routes this is a drop in the ocean when you consider it costs approximately £1.2m to reinstate each mile of track. Unfortunately our railways were the victim of shortsighted and and corrupt governments ( I refer to the transport minister of the day owning one of the largest road building companies of the day) followed by nearly thirty years of under investment and it is now impossible to get back what we've lost.
Philip Fowler HS 2 would probably not be necessary had the secondary routes specifically the GC not been ripped up with such indecent haste, I can remember in the sixties they said that the entire network would be electrified by the mid 1980s but then the seventies came with turbulent industrial relations and rampant inflation when the railways were neglected then compounded by the conservative administration of the eighties and early nineties that felt that railways were old fashioned and for poor people so they didn't invest either. Then in the 2000s we had nearly ten years of disruption and billions of pounds upgrading the WCML with the government assuring us that it was going to be a 150MPH railway only to discover that for passengers there was no discernable difference while the West of England and southern mainlines where largely neglected. What is needed is a clear business/investment plan that will transcend the various governments but that won't happen because they all need their flagship projects such as HS2 and Crossrail which cost billions of pounds which certainly in the case of HS2 could be better spent elsewhere.
@@philnewstead5388 I'm inclined to think that the way "Democracy" works doesn't always put people with expert knowledge in positions of power. Regards, Philip
