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Lost Railways Sheffield on Channel Five


History dude

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The new series of exploring lost railways takes a look at Sheffield this Friday (28 September) at 9pm on Channel Five.  It will be looking at Victoria Station and then up the Woodhead line all the way to Manchester.

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I watched the programme and then remembered what a friend who worked for the rail research place in Derby told me. He said the Woodhead line had closed to raise money for other electrification schemes. The Woodhead electrification was proposed pre war in L.N.E.R. days, in fact the first engine was built in 1939 and ran on Dutch Railways after the invasion of Europe. I seem to remember the line was electrified at 700 volt DC rather that the 25KV system in use today. As a result of the lower voltage and the use of DC all the overhead lines, the feeders from the substations and the transformers contained much more copper. Closing the line raised a lot of money in the scrap value of the copper. Money was also raised by the sale of the electric locomotives to the Dutch railways where they continued to run for many years.

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The closure of the line, according to information I received several years ago, was on account of the need to begin replacing the locos and infrastructure to a system which was non-standard. The line was also no longer really connected to the rest of the national system following Beeching's closure of passenger services and freight demand was rapidly diminishing.

 Back to topic I was amazed at Goathland tunnel...illuminated and with a stunning echo!!!! 

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5 hours ago, lysander said:

The closure of the line, according to information I received several years ago, was on account of the need to begin replacing the locos and infrastructure to a system which was non-standard. The line was also no longer really connected to the rest of the national system following Beeching's closure of passenger services and freight demand was rapidly diminishing.

 Back to topic I was amazed at Goathland tunnel...illuminated and with a stunning echo!!!! 

The freight traffic was mainly coal from the Wath on Dearn marshalling yard going to power stations etc. on the other side of the Pennines. One of the features of the D.C. system was that when the Locos of freight trains were on the long descent out of the tunnel and past the reservoirs towards Manchester the D.C. motors generated power back into the system. Thereby helping power the trains climbing the slope.

Why did the locos need replacing when they ran on the Dutch railways after closure of the Woodhead route?

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Possibly ,because the option was to convert the line to 25 kva...at a considerable cost...and, politically, the rump of the GCR line ...was out of favour...as indeed were railways in general.

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It was only the passenger electric loco's (Class 77) that were sold to the Dutch, with the closure to passengers of the line. The other loco the Class 76 were kept running. As they were built in 1950, they were just knackered by the end of their service and scraped.

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