This blog shall serve as a location to store my investigations into whatever topic is of my intrigue. I claim no subject matter expertise on what I discuss since I am only ever an interested outsider. For the time being, I shall be discussing railway electrification in the UK - in particular - feeding arrangements and electrical control. However, other subjects may seep into this blog if I think I have anything interesting to say about it.
I believe electrical control is a much overlooked topic in the rail-enthusiast space and I have basically never heard of any train nerds discussing it. It feels like a secret sibling to railway signalling and so only mentioned by cold, hardened professionals - likely too busy and too serious to placate the grandiloquent baying of ostentatious rivet counters even if the former had turned their noses towards this niche subject.
When it comes to enthusiast media, the general topic of electrification is too often a brief addendum, relegated to a small paragraph about the 'boring' and 'ugly' things that happened once our belovèd motorised kettles were taken to slaughter. Signalling, though equally modern and now decidedly un-quaint, maintains enthusiasts' interest; perhaps propped up by its connection to the powerful symbology of semaphore arms, block bells and Victorian architecture. Even if those austere LED beacons looming over alien artefacts in the 4 foot evoke a distrustful melancholy, they are at least a direct descendant of the virtuous steam railway: when men were men and blocks were absolute.
Electrification is not often granted the same unconditional respect despite being just as old as the golden age of steam. Is it retroactively understood as an encroachment of modernity? Or maybe too associated with commuter lines and urban living? That being said, I can't deny the deep nostalgia that exists for old electric rolling stock and the dedicated chronicling that this has brought. It's more for the infrastructure side that electrification gets the short end of the stick.
I was completely unaware of the presence of electrical control rooms until I purchased one of the latest editions of the quailmap from Darlington station's WHSmith last year. The very latest editions of quailmap (from 2022 onwards) have started to include ECRs for no apparent reason. I think I must have guessed they existed if someone had asked me the question, maybe as an extra function of signal boxes. What's more telling is that nobody had ever posed that idea in my vicinity or mentioned electrical control even in passing. But it was here I learned electrical control was its own domain with completely different boundaries to signalling and so I was incensed to locate every site of electrical control and the lines that belonged to them. And so I discovered the total lack of commentary online about this subject and so I think it worth me starting this blog to centralise any information I have found.
In addition to conventional sources like books and official documentation, I will also be relaying anything interesting I find mentioned on RailUK Forums. Likely someone on there knows the answer to almost any question I could muster. The general problem with RailUK Forums is that there are a comparatively small number of people who know the information, and quite a lot of people continually asking the same things about a topic. This often leads to the situation where those who know get tired of repeating the same points over and over again and so you get ignored or told to parse 200+pages of random conversation dating back over a decade.
Another sub-function of this blog is to hold information that I'm considering adding to Wikipedia but am not yet satisfied that it reaches their evidencing standards. Even if I put what I've found on a Wikipedia article, I'll be freer here to add more explanation to my judgements and comment on more broader notions.
The first topic I will discuss is the past and present of electrification in the Anglia region.
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