Lineside and Station Sequences
Part Twenty Nine
Potters Bar – 11 September 1961

As I posted before in My Story, they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that was certainly true for the next few films I used. Up until now I’d mostly used Plus X (21 DIN) or FP3 (23 DIN) but I read in a magazine that if you used a slower film, exposed it as a faster film and increased development times you would get less grainy negatives. So I bought a batch of Adox KB17 (17 DIN, loaded some cassettes, and set about the experiment. I ended up with very thin negatives, which I could only really retrieve anything from once they had been scanned around fifty years later.

I was back at school, in my second year in the sixth form, before I went back to the lineside at Potters Bar, in September 1961. I clearly hadn’t learnt the lesson about my 1/300th second fastest shutter speed – it still wasn’t fast enough to stop the motion of the faster trains.

Over the three and a quarter hours by the lineside I had taken twenty four photographs of eleven classes, seven steam and four diesel. Of the steam locos, nine were LNER designed Pacifics, two A1s, three A3s and five A4s, and then there were one Britannia, three V2s, one WD 2-8-0 and three 9F 2-10-0s. The diesels were an English Electric Type 1, two Brush Type 2s, two Baby Deltics and two Deltics. I didn’t bother with the DMU stoppers, and I may have missed other trains, though I suspect not.

Few of these are good images, but they do record a busy main line in the period when steam was giving way to diesel. Giving way far faster than I understood at the time, in spite of all my reading of Trains Illustrated/Modern Railways.

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All Photographs by Alan Lewis Chambers ©