The Golden Age of Steam

Graham Dukes
Durig the war years and up to 1948 I was living in Stourbridge and frequently using the old Stourbridge Town Station. Shortly after nationalization of the railways,instructions were given to remove the old company names and replace them with the names of the new railway regions. However there was no money available to do it properly, so there had to be compromises. Outside Stourbridge Town was a large notice board, with text in white wooden letters nailed, in GWR fashion, to a brown background. It proclaimed that this was the Great Western Railway's Stourbridge Town Station with frequent services to Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Worcester. One day, some months after nationalization, I watched a railway carpenter with a long ladder climb up to the notice board with his tools. What did he do? He simply hacked off the letters G-R-E-A-T. Then he climbed down and walked away with his ladder. Somehow it was symbolic of the fact that the old greatness was being taken out of the system.Graham DukesOslo