The Severn Valley Railway is a preserved line running for some 16½ miles through the counties of Worcestershire and Shropshire in England - which is part of the United Kingdom. As the name suggests, the railway runs for most of its length near the River Severn, Britain's longest river. The line runs from the busy market town of Kidderminster, once famous for carpet making, through the smaller riverside town of Bewdley and on to Bridgnorth, a rural market town in Shropshire. Picturesque wayside stations serve the small villages of Arley, Highley and Hampton Loade, but the line runs mainly through the rolling fields of the Welsh Marches. The line originally continued beyond Bridgnorth to Shropshire's county town, Shrewsbury.
The majority of the line was closed in the 1960s as part of the infamous "Beeching Axe" which closed many rural lines in Britain. Only a stub at Kidderminster was retained in mainline use, as a long freight siding serving a sugar factory in Kidderminster. The SVR took over working the line between Bridgnorth and Bewdley as a preserved railway, and have continued to do so ever since. In 1984, with the ceasing of rail traffic from the sugar factory, the remainder of the line into Kidderminster became available to the SVR, and thereafter the southern terminus of the line was Kidderminster instead of Bewdley.
The original headquarters of the preserved line was Bridgnorth, and it remains the main site for steam locomotive stabling and repairs. As the SVR has grown, some of the other stations have become the centres for other rôles. Bewdley became the Carriage and Wagon works until the larger site at Kidderminster became available, when a large part of C & W activity moved there. The SVR's administrative offices are at Bewdley and the Wholesale Department at Kidderminster. In recent years, a growing fleet of preserved diesel locomotives have become based at Kidderminster as well. Such is the passage of time that many of the diesel locomotives that made steam obsolete have now become museum pieces themselves!
We are always keen to recruit new volunteers to the S & T department (and indeed to all departments of the railway). If you are interested - or think you might be - please contact The Membership Secretary, at the address below.
| The Unofficial SVR Web Site Network |  |
www.svr-net.org.uk |
| More information on the SVR generally (Official SVR Site) | www.svr.co.uk | |
| Information about the SVR S&T's Signals Section | www.home-in-bristol.fsnet.co.uk | |
| The Unofficial SVR Online Stock Page | www.svrstockonline.co.uk | |
The Severn Valley Railway's Signal & Telecomms department runs an independent telephone system around the railway, for the convenience of SVR staff. This is useful for many purposes, from sorting out the operation of the railway, to arranging to meet at the pub!
There is a financial saving to the railway in using the internal network because, apart from providing the equipment in the first place, there is no cost for these calls
This network is not connected to the public telephone network, and therefore can only be used for communication on S.V.R. property. A variety of equipment is used, some of it quite old. There are, however bits that are quite "hi-tech".
The S.V.R. Signal & Telecomms department is an all-volunteer workforce, responsible for the railway's signalling equipment, as well as for the telephone system. The Chief S&T Engineer (CS&TE) is John Phillips, whilst the Telecomms section is organised by Steve Bradbury. The considerable work undertaken by the Signals part of the S&T is outside the scope of this discussion, but there is another website devoted to that subject. See Chris Hall's SVR Signals website
There are three types of telephone circuits used on the S.V.R. These are:
All the various telephone circuits are carried in the railway's own network of cables and overhead wires. In the early days of the S.V.R's restoration, much use was made of "open-wire" pole routes, which are telegraph poles carrying uninsulated wires on ceramic insulators. Pole routes were used intially because much of British Rail's old route was still standing, or easily restored, and because the raw materials were generally cheaper. In more recent years there has been a change towards using buried cables, which have better electrical performance, and require less maintenance. Cabling results in better transmission of conversations (lower noise and less loss), so changing to cable results in better quality speech for users. The use of cable also reduces the amount of maintenance work required compared with open wire, as the wires need re-tensioning at intervals, as well as being prone to "crossed wires" or tangles, in windy weather.
However, because of the attractive appearance of pole routes, several lengths have been kept as a preservation excercise. The large pole route running south from Bridgnorth station is particularly impressive.
Several different types of exchanges are used for the "automatic" telephones. Traditionally, these have been of electro-mechanical "Strowger" type, the two main exchanges at Bridgnorth and Bewdley still being so.
At the smaller stations along the line, 16 line analogue electronic exchanges have been made "in house", as a project done entirely by the S&T volunteers.
There are a whole range of jobs carried out by "the telecomms".
Basically all the functions necessary to install and maintain a telephone network have to be carried out by the volunteers. There is also some overlap with the signals section, especially in areas like cables and overhead lines, because all the signalling circuits share cable/pole routes with the telephone circuits.
A primary requirement for a telephone network is the telphone lines! The maintenance and enhancing of the "line plant" (as this network of cables, wires etc., is collectively known) occupies a significant proportion of our time. More information about line plant
After wires to connect telephones together, the next fundamental requirement is telephones themselves. The telephones and associated bits and bobs are lumped together under the heading "subscriber's apparatus", Sub's Apps for short. More about "Sub's Apps"
The final ingredient is the telephone exchanges. These allow the "Auto" telephones to dial one another up, in the way that everyone is familiar with. The term "Auto" derives from the fact that when mechanical exchanges were developed to take over from the old "Manual" exchanges ('Number please'), they were known as "Automatic Exchanges". As noted above, the SVR has other types of telephone for particular purposes, but the largest part of the system is the "Auto", so it is the focus of a lot of our work. Some details of the SVR's exchanges
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Severn Valley Railway Telecomms Homepage |  |
Details of some of our phones and telephone kiosks |  |
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Return to the Top of Page | |
More information about Line Plant |  |
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My personal Homepage - more about me | |
About Telephone Exchanges |  |
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| Copyright © Chris Wright 2000 | |
Last updated: 4th January 2001 | ||
| Page URL http://svrtel.org.uk | |
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