WHAT’S IN THIS MONTH’S EDITOR’S PICKS...

Steam Railway has again teamed up with Unseen Steam - the online and DVD home of rare and captivating railway footage - to bring you some fantastic scenes of classic Southern branch line steam. The Southern Railway had a very progressive policy to eliminate steam during the 1920s and 1930s with its electrification programme, but this was completely derailed by the advent of war. It didn’t introduce any steam locomotives suitable for branch line use in the 1920s and 30s, relying on cast-off suburban engines such as the ex-LSWR Drummond ‘M7s’. After nationalisation in 1948, the Southern Region had no alternative but to keep large numbers of these Victorian locomotives at work on branch lines, despite receiving BR Standard machines for heavier cross-country work. Thus enthusiasts could delight in seeing old wooden-bodied pull-push (the Southern used that term back-to-front!) coaches still in use on branches such as the line to Bordon, where we see ‘M7’ No. 30056 leaving Bordon station pushing an ex-LSWR pull-push set, still in BR crimson livery, in 1956. The line, still worked by ‘M7s’ to the end, closed to passengers on 16th September 1957. You can read more about the history of the Bordon branch in this month’s Countdown to Nationalisation, on page 108. Elsewhere on the Southern, ‘M7s’ thrived into the 1960s, Bournemouth shed having around a dozen of them for working the Swanage, Lymington and Ringwood lines. The line to Swanage was one of the last haunts of the Drummond tanks and No. 30128 is seen propelling another ex-LSWR P-P set into Swanage station in 1956. We hope you enjoy this fascinating and rare Southern steam footage.