Forthcoming Additions

"I didn't want to get your hopes up ...;"

What Alan Baylis said to Mark Bennett to explain why he hadn't mentioned that a Kidderminster - Tenby ADEX might be Class 25 hauled until the evening before it was due to run!

I wrote those words when this website started over ten years ago and how accurate they proved to be. Time marches on and I still have so much to add! I keep the site up to date for all Class 25 passenger train workings I am told about or those I find on websites such as Flickr or Facebook and those I see in books or magazines. But as time goes on these additions will naturally become less and less, unless someone finds a stash of spotting books from the 70s and tells me about it.

Photographs - Even now I still have a hundred or so B&W/colour photographs of class 25's in action on both passenger and freight trains to put here (plus some from Vic Berry's scrapyard) which I will add as and when I can find time to get round to scanning them from the original negatives/slides. I also purchase Class 25 slides/photographs from Ebay to add to this site if I don't have better from my own collection. Then there are other good friends who feely offer their photographs for inclusion on this site and I am grateful to all who do this. (Their contributions are identified on the relevant pages).

When I started the website a download speed of 56kB/s was the norn but now it more like 50 Mb/s. So at that time I made available what I considered to be my best pictures as "full size screen size images" and called those my Signature Series photos because I added a signature watermark! Technology, both in internet speeds and photo processing, has advanced a lot as has my ability to process them so I have task ahead of me to redo all the photos and increase their quality in the years to come. The purists amongst you might spot that the odd telegraph pole has disappeared to in a couple of pictures (good memory!) but I am more interested in people looking at the locos rather than poles sticking out from their roofs.  Also please don't complain if all Aberystwyth pictures look the same, what do you expect!

Recollections - Maybe it was because I've always had a poor memory or perhaps because I was often asked why I had done a particular move (generally because it was a clown move it has to be said) that throughout the 80's I kept a diary of both my personal bashing moves and a 'Dear Diary' commentary.  This will enable me to recall some of the more exciting(!?) events that happened during my Rat Bashing career.  Not all are as exciting as the 100mph car journey to York for a relief train which I made but I have both amusing and run of the mill stories to share with you when I get round to writing them up.  Hopefully you saw my article in Traction magazine, Issue 129 July 05, regarding the 'fun and games' we had with the Aberystwyth trains in 1983.  I'll be doing more of the same for this site.

Loco Workings - All the loco workings I record are in an Access database but the individual loco and dated workings pages are actually created in Excel and stored as separate pages. Eventually I hope to create a query based website allowing you to search for whatever but I've not got round to working on that. All pages such as their last workings or the passenger mileages have to manually created at the moment. May I remind you that if you know of any workings that don't appear here then please let me know via the link on the front page. There are still be lots of Crewe - Cardiff, Exeter - Barnstaple/Paignton and Scottish gen still waiting to be captured for posterity. I know some people use this site to identify old photographs and sometimes the odd working can add two or three others that fill in the gaps.

Performance Logs - I have about fifty timing logs of class 25s in action, and many more recording performance over Talerddig.  I'll be adding these once I have time.

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