The Northern Autumn Salvo
Incorporating Weekly Notices, Sectional Appendices, Salvo-over-Sands and Northern Weekly Salvo
Published at Station House, Kents Bank, Lancashire-North-of-the-Sands, LA11 7BB email: paul.salveson@myphone.coop
No. 328 October/November 2025
Salveson’s half-nakedly political digest of railways, tripe and secessionist nonsense from Up North
Rocketing along
Welcome to the Autumn ‘Salvo’ – gone are the days when I used to bring out weekly! But I hope there’s plenty of interest without overloading you.
As mentioned in the last Salvo I’m fully settled in Kents Bank, overlooking Morecambe Bay with some splendid views (actually saw ‘Duke of Gloucester’ steaming past Hest Bank before it came a cropper!). I’ve still got a foothold in Bolton though, at the Horwich sub-shed, which is currently a construction site for HS4, also known as Salvo’s Garden Railway. Unlike larger versions, it is on time and to budget. More on HS2 later in this issue.
Part of the reason I’m a bit busy at present is work around ’Rocket All Aboard’, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, as well as Bolton and Leigh 200, Station Library and getting back into writing. My latest collection of short stories – ‘The Loco Vanishes – Northern Rail Mysteries’ is now out (again, see later). It’s a big job getting it into shops, reviewed and generally promoted.
The Library is doing very well with a steady flow of visitors from far and near and some very welcome donations of books and model railway equipment. This gives us a very useful income which goes back into supporting the Library. Come and visit! We’re open Friday to Monday 11.00 to 16.00 (other times by arrangement).
I’m avoiding any political comment in this issue, you’re probably glad to know. I find it difficult to make sense of what is happening, both here in the UK and abroad. On top of that, I’m sick of the nastiness that has become a characteristic of all sides of the political spectrum. At least we’ve got something resembling peace in Gaza, hopefully.
Fingers in many pies
It was a pleasure to go along to a talk on food and trains, at South-East Lancashire Community Rail Partnership’s Community Room on Bolton station. Newly-appointed Community Rail officer Emily Oldfield gave a fascinating talk on the links between traditional food and railways, which we’re planning to repeat at Kents Bank on Saturday December 13th. The connection between food and community rail is vast and varied – and lots of interesting work has already been done. Community-run cafes on
stations are fairly common and in some places food is grown in vegetable patches at stations (e.g. the ‘incredible edible’ movement started at Todmorden). The Settle-Carlisle Line has a trolley service which offers local food and some train operators have promoted local delicacies, including beers. I’m sure there’s scope for doing a lot more.
The Loco Vanishes
My collection of short stories with an ever-so-slightly supernatural twist is now available, with official publication date October 31st. The Loco Vanishes – Northern Rail Mysteries is published by Kents Bank Station Library price £9.95, but you can get an advance copy for £8 post and packing if you order before Halloween (October 31 as any self-respecting spook knows). It includes a very kind foreword by Mick Whelan, general secretary of ASLEF, as well as endorsements by Phil James of Network Rail and the acclaimed railway novelist Andrew Martin. Mick Whelan said: “Paul’s knowledge of and love for the railway shines through both in the construction of the stories and also by introducing the reader to a world of which they would normally be unaware.”
Phil James, Managing Director of Network Rail’s North-West route said: “Paul’s stories capture the spirit of railway life in a way that’s both deeply personal and universally relatable. As someone who’s spent a career in rail, I see in these tales the humour, grit, and humanity that define our industry. From the signalbox to the supernatural, this book is a celebration of the people and places that make the railway—and the North—so special.”
There are ten stories in all, mostly set in the Bolton, Blackburn and North Lancashire area, including Kents Bank. ‘The Crossing Keeper’s Cat’ is set in and around Oxenholme. Many of the stories are based on tales I picked up when I worked on the railways, including the title story, based on an event which happened at Plodder Lane loco shed, Farnworth, probably in the late 1940s. ‘The Boggart of Kitson Wood Tunnel’ is also based on a true story from the 1960s.
The book is kindly sponsored by ASLEF and Furness Line Action Group. Details on the Station Library website: www.stationlibrary.org.uk or email me your email address and I’ll send you further details. One of the stories – ‘The Crossing Keeper’s Cat’ – is reproduced below. Timely, as it features the horrendous crash at Harrow and Wealdstone on October 8th 1952:
https://stationlibrary.org.uk/the-crossing-keepers-cat/
Instead of High-Speed Rail
Readers will be aware of my long-standing antipathy to HS2. It was an ill-conceived project from the start, of little benefit to the North. It only got worse with cost-over-runs and delays on a colossal scale. These appear to be continuing, the whole thing is a complete mess. Attention is now shifting towards ‘up North’ with Liverpool and Greater Manchester mayors pushing for ‘Northern Powerhouse Rail’ which involves a new route from Liverpool to Manchester, an underground station at Piccadilly with the route continuing east towards Bradford and Leeds. Whilst I’m a bit more sympathetic towards this than HS2, I’ve always had worries about the project. These concerns are articulated in a report by the right-leaning Policy Exchange which has been commissioned by Reform to produce a report called Instead of High-Speed Rail. It’s written by former Tory Government advisor Andrew Gilligan and includes a foreword by Reform’s vice-chair Richard Tice. At this stage some readers will be asking have I gone completely bonkers, with a lurch to the right? Surely anything even vaguely linked to the Faragist lot must be the work of the devil? Well, I think it pays to have an open-mind. The report is well-argued and basically says a lot of what I’ve been saying about HS2 in The Salvo for the last ten years.
The report doesn’t say much new about HS2, and my own personal view is that now the project is so far advanced it really has to continue to Crewe. The suggestions made in the report to make some costly upgrades to the existing West Coast Main Line after HS2 joins it north of Birmingham don’t really stack up.
Where the report gets interesting is its critique of Northern Powerhouse Rail. This project has had a very easy ride in terms of Northern opinion – or at least that part which has access to the media – e.g. politicians, business and the like. Yet how much support it really has is debatable. As Tice says in his foreword to the report, “Outside a bubble of politicians, journalists and construction industry lobbyists, also exposed by this report, the voters of the North do not want, and never have wanted, a handful of high-speed rail lines, serving a handful of big cities, at fares only business people on expenses can afford. They want the money to be spent on the often failing railways (and roads) that they actually use.”
The proposed new route from Liverpool to Manchester uses some existing alignment and some new formation taking it via Manchester Airport into central Manchester. There would be a station serving outer Liverpool, a low-level station for Warrington Bank Quay and a further stop at Manchester Airport (or near to it). As the report points out, the journey will take longer than the existing Chat Moss route! It’s hard to make a case for the new route free-ing up capacity as the two routes from Manchester to Liverpool both have capacity for more, and longer, trains. An interchange at Warrington wouldn’t do much either – why change to a train going north or south when you can direct trains in both direction from Manchester and Liverpool? Or am I missing summat?
More searching questions should be asked about the proposed new Trans-Pennine route. Currently Network Rail is investing heavily in the Trans-Pennine Upgrade (TRU) which will bring long-term resilience to the busy route. The route must be electrified throughout and further capacity improvements made to accommodate freight and local passenger services. A new route would, it’s true, bring useful capacity improvements for the long-term, but at an astronomic cost (the report suggests £30 billion). It would be immensely difficult, and disruptive, to build.
So what is the alternative? There are several options which should be looked at. The report makes some interesting suggestions which need further scrutiny. Abandon the chimera of high-speed rail, it argues, and put the money saved into improvements to the existing network. Agreed. The solutions need looking at and the biggest challenge that has to be faced is the central Manchester conundrum. The highly-congested corridor between Piccadilly, Oxford Road and Deansgate is carrying a level of traffic it was never built for; even with signaling improvements it will always be a massive headache for operators.
The report suggests a new ‘Elizabeth Line of the North’ tunneling under central Manchester providing connections to all parts of the network. It has echoes of the 1970s ‘Picc-Vic’ project which would have provided a heavy-rail underground link across Manchester from Piccadilly via Albert Square to Victoria, emerging onto the Bury Line near Queen’s Road. It failed because the Government wasn’t willing to sanction such major investment up North. In the end, we got Metrolink which did some of the things that Picc-Vic offered, but was a different beast – essentially for local traffic. Picc-Vic would have transformed local services but have been capable of linking up a more strategic network across the North – a sort of Manchester S-Bahn. We then got the Windsor Link which succeeded in joining up the north and south parts of the Manchester rail network and was immensely useful. Yet it was a sensible incremental solution that BR delivered. We’re now at the stage where it can’t cope with the demands being put on it, funneling trains onto the heavily congested route from Deansgate to Piccadilly.
An alternative option is to quadruple the line between Piccadilly and Deansgate. That wouldn’t be easy but might be less costly than a tunnel. However, I think the underground option would potentially bring greater benefits – especially if there was a spur, more or less following the original Picc-Vic proposal to Victoria and on to the Rochdale and Stalybridge routes across the Pennines. These things are easily said but the cost would be substantial. On the other hand the economic benefits would be massive.
The Policy Exchange report makes other recommendations which are less controversial – electrification of most of the Northern network, new rolling stock and capacity improvements. It makes very welcome suggestions for a fully-integrated public transport network across the North. The report deserves a good airing – just because you don’t like the body who commissioned it, or even the person who wrote it, doesn’t invalidate its arguments. But I suspect that will be the response from a lot of people up North, sadly.
The report is here: https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Instead-of-high-speed-rail_.pdf
Kents Bank Station Library and Gallery News
We’ve had a busy time these last few weeks sorting out the library collection and preparing for a major influx of books donated by the widow of a senior railway manager.
The books we are in the process of acquiring (some have arrived already) include a large number of books about railways around the world, particularly Scandinavia but also South America and Australia. When they are all here, we reckon we will have one of the best collections of ‘world railways’ in the UK.
The gallery has a new exhibition of work by a superb local artists, Peter Monaghan. Quite varied in style and content, but I love his painting ‘The Iron man’ set in a foundry in the Midlands. His work will be on display until the end of the year and Peter will be giving a talk at our Christmas Fair on Saturday December 13th.
We’ve re-started our ‘Platform Poets’ sessions, showcasing work by local poets. The next one will be on Wednesday – please book in advance as we have limited space. The same goes for our monthly ‘MIC’ (Mutual Improvement Class) talks. The next one is on Wednesday November 19th and will be with Ian Henderson, talking about the ‘Hengist’ locomotive project – building a new ‘Clan’ light pacific. Starts at 14.00.
We are open (gallery and library) every Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday – 11.00 to 16.00. However, if you are in the area take pot luck and ring us on 07795 008691. We may be able to open up for you. See www.stationlibrary.org.uk. Our ‘pop-up’ station buffet will also be open – visitors are invited to help themselves to complimentary teas and coffee – and sometimes biscuits!
Salvo shorts
- Great to meet up with several old friends at the TSSA North-West Divisional Council AGM in Manchester recently. I was asked to speak on ‘Rocket All Aboard’ and the Bolton and Leigh Railway 200. I stressed the importance of involving the rail unions in the upcoming railway anniversaries and got a highly sympathetic response.
- Carnforth Station Trust is developing nicely after going through a very difficult patch. The Junction Gallery on the old ‘up main’ platform is also doing well and worth a visit; and the Brief Encounter café serves up excellent food. Kents Bank Station Library recently donated several surplus books from its collection which are being put to good use supporting the work of the trust.
- Seems ages ago now but the Rocket All Aboard team had a strong presence at the ‘Greatest Gathering’ in Derby in August. We got lots of interest in plans for the 2029/30 celebrations and sold out on our branded t-shirts!
- The deadline for entries to the 2026 Community Rail Awards closed recently. Kents Bank Station Library has put in several entries and we hope we’ll get some shortlisted! The event will be in Derby next March.
- Our September holiday took us to Devon and Cornwall, having a great trip down on CrossCountry, returning from Plymouth to Reading on Great Western’s marvelous Pullman Dining Car. The food, and service, was fantastic. Long may it continue. We stayed over at Moreton-in –Marsh enjoying a journey on the Cotswold Line to Hereford. We then enjoyed traditional railway comfort on one of TfW’s locomotive-hauled Cardiff-Manchester trains, making good use of the catering facilities.
- Recommended places to visit if you’re in the south-west: Geevor Tin Mine, near Penzance with a regular bus service; South Devon Railway from Totnes to Buckfastleigh; a walk along the sea front from Teignmouth to Dawlish; the scenic train journey all the way from Exeter to Penzance.
- An excellent read, for bus or train, is Gray Lightfoot’s The Bus Drivers of Penzance, written by a bus driver from Penzance depot. I
Good reading for bus or train picked it up in the gift shop at Geevor Tin Mine, as I had a few minutes to wait before the bus took us back to Penzance. Sadly, the driver was not attired in any sort of piratical uniform, unlike the writer on the book’s cover. It’s the sort of book there should be more of – a well-told story about real life on our transport network. Published by Graylight, £10.
- Fancy being Chancellor of the Exchequer? You can indulge your fantasies for just£16.99 by getting Joe Mayes’ fascinating new book Can You Run The Economy? Joe is a journalist for Bloomberg News and has re-written this fascinating book about the hard choices that a chancellor has to make – between rival advisors, a demanding prime minister and hard economic and political realities. Highly recommended. Ebury Press, £16.99 (copies available in Beach Hut Gallery).
To the Sea by Train
Andrew Martin’s new book – sub-titled ‘The Golden Age of Railway Travel’ – arrived in perfect time for the Station Library’s summer exhibition, ‘Holidays by Train’. It’s a great book highlighting some well known but also lesser-known seaside locations which are, or were, accessible by train. Places that no longer are, featured in the book, include Silloth, Fleetwood, Hunstanton, Hornsea, Padstow and Hayling
Island. Fortunately, we can still get to Eastbourne, Brighton, Saltburn, Lowestoft Pwllheli, Cromer and Whitby – despite Beeching’s best efforts in some cases. We can celebrate the return of trains to Levenmouth, and hopefully Fleetwood some time soon. Andrew bemoans the uncomfortable modern trains with mis-aligned seats that don’t allow you much of a view. Maybe, as rail’s leisure traffic increases while commuting stagnates, operators (and the future GBR) will recognize the importance of these things.
Andrew writes with knowledge, enthusiasm and humour – the book is well worth buying, though there is a lending copy in the station Library. Published by profile Books, Price £18.99
Books in print (at gradely prices)
Northern Rail Heritage: an introduction to the social history of railways in the North of England is available price £5 from Kents Bank Station
Library, cheques for £8 (including post and packing) to Kents Bank Library, c/o Station House, Kentsford Road, Grange-over-Sands LA11 7BB. ISBN 978-1-0683741-0-4
The Loco Vanishes – Northern Rail Mysteries available price £13 (including post and packing) from Kents Bank Station Library (address above). ISBN 978-1-0683741-1-1
Lancastrians: Mills, Mines and Minarets I still get invitations to speak on my book on Lancashire’s history. The book is hardback, price £25. Salvo readers can get it post free directly from me: http://lancashireloominary.co.uk/index.html/order-form Or from publisher Hurst. Get in touch if you’d like a talk about the book and its themes. Later this year I’m talking to Bolton Soroptimists on ‘Great Lancashire Women Whom The History Books Ignore’.
ALLEN CLARKE: Lancashire’s Romantic Radical £5.99 (normally £18.99): the only biography of Allen Clarke/Teddy Ashton (1863 – 1935): Lancashire dialect writer, socialist, cyclist, philosopher, poet, novelist…and more. Born in Bolton, mum and dad were millworkers; spent his later years in Blackpool. A remarkable chap who helped keep memories of the 1896 Winter Hill Trespass alive, friend of Tolstoy, admirer of Walt Whitman, etc. etc.
Moorlands, Memories and Reflections £15.00 (£21.00): based on Allen Clarke’s Lancashire classic Moorlands and Memories, bringing some of the story up to date and exploring the forgotten history of the Lancashire moors.
The Settle-Carlisle Railway A history of the famous route with an emphasis on the human story (including my own, as a guard in the 70s!). £14 including p and p.
Last Train from Blackstock Junction (published by Platform 5 Books). A collection of short stories about railway life in the North of England. Salvo readers can get the book at a specially discounted price, courtesy of Platform 5 Publishing. Go to https://www.platform5.com/Catalogue/New-Titles. Enter LAST22 in the promotional code box at the basket and this will reduce the unit price from £12.95 to £10.95. I’ve a few copies of my own to sell at £10.95 plus p and p.
With Walt Whitman in Bolton: This has been out of print for a few months but I’m doing a new edition, with at least one additional chapter. Likely to be out for next May.
