..three Calibre self-recordings

During the 1950’s until the mid 1970’s you could find these do-it-yourself recording machines at UK holiday destinations and at main line railway stations. This one was photographed at London, Waterloo.

 

My three disks contain mystery recordings, which I believe were made on London Paddington station, of me and my mate Nick singing, and possibly blaspheming. 

After inserting your money, and making the recording, the machine delivered a single disk a few minutes later, the quality of which was nothing special.

Here is an example from YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBVESdm6f4U 

…a book of Great Western Railway Engine names and numbers dated 1921

Trainspotting is considered mainly a post-war hobby, with the 1950’s and 1960’s as its heyday, although the earliest reference to trainspotting, found recently by the National Railway Museum in York, is of a 14 year old girl named Fanny Johnson in 1861, whose notebook of Great Western Railway (GWR) trains at Westbourne Park station, London, is mentioned in a GWR magazine of 1935.

The young lad who once owned this book marked the engines he had seen, though it is not clear what the difference was between the ticks and crosses. Few of the engines listed in 1921 survive. A famous one that does is City of Truro, here numbered 3717, but today carrying its original number when built in 1903 of 3440. 

As a private company, the GWR was free to name its engines as it chose. A certain eccentricity therefore crept in. The name Lalla Rookh is the title of an early 19^th century novel. Katerfelto, is another now obscure novel. And quite why you would call an engine One-and-All is a mystery. Several, it is evident, were named after Directors of the Company; men whose names have long since faded from public recognition, such as Francis Mildmay, Charles Grey Mott and Sir Massey Lopes.