Watching Z Cars in black and white

WHEN Blackburn's pioneeering police acquired their first two high-speed Z-cars in 1962, they not only raced ahead of other forces, they also introduced a new sound to East Lancashire's streets - the two-tone blare of "continental-style" police-car horn.

Another innovation was their choosing a white car as well as one in the until-then traditional police-car colour of black.

"We feel at the moment that a white car will have more impact on the public when they see it, but we thought we would get a black one at the same time to see whether our conclusions are right," explained Superintendent Robert Anderton.

But the biggest impact the new cars were meant to have was on what the Evening Telegraph called the "ever-increasing number of road hogs."

The 100-mph Ford cars - Blackburn's was the first borough force in the country to get them - were made specially to order for police work and, to give them extra speed, fitted in their Zephyr 6 bodies were six-cylinder, 2.5-litre engines that normally came with the heavier Mark III Zodiac models. "They will be able to reach 100 mph in a space of time that is phenomenally short for what is almost the standard model of car. Speed merchants who once could get away from police cars will not have such luck with these," said Superintendent Anderton.

The Z-cars' new-style horns, he added, would be used for urgent overtaking or flagging down offending motorists.

Going loco for rail sell-off

WHEN it came to selling off the railways, East Lancashire was in the fast track, way in front of any state privatisation programme - as 37 years ago an unusual engine departed under new ownership from Darwen for Cheshire while all its track went in another direction . . .back to the future.

It was a move signalled by the switch from coal to oil for the kilns and boilers at the Waterside plant of Shaws Glazed Brick Company - where the firm had used a private railway for more than 50 years to carry coal about the extensive site to which they had moved from Whitebirk, Blackburn, in 1909.

Redundant as a result, their 30-year-old Fowler diesel locomotive - called "Thos Phillips" after a former company secretary who was in retirement at Feniscowles when his namesake moved on in 1962 - was sold. But it kept a connection with excavated minerals, being bought by the owners of a salt mine in Sandbach. "It's been a topper," said works engineer Teddy Crompton as he said farewell to the engine.

Shaw's entire private siding also went - to form a new track at the Tramway Museum at Crich in Derbyshire, with another curious connection coming about by coincidence.

For though the Thos Phillips engine had been preceded by a steam-powered one as the firm's workhorse at Waterside, on the rails that were become a tram track, the company had originally used a second-hand locomotive that once actually hauled . . . trams.

Uneasy rider tamed an old hobby horse

THE biking club James Duerden founded in Nelson many turns of the wheel ago is still going, but, these days , the members of the long-established Star Cycling Club stay put - for, now, it's simply a social club.

But back in 1950 Mr Duerden - then aged 78 and its oldest member - was a custodian of one of the pair of museum-piece bikes that used to hang on the walls of the club's porch. The crude, cast-iron contraption, known as a hobby horse, pre-dated even the penny-farthing bicycle of the Victorian era, and what it was like to ride was explained by its original owner - Mr Duerden himself.

"It was hard work," he said. "The roads were bad and full of potholes and getting on it was a job in itself - it meant running about 20 yards first."

The longest trip Mr Duerden ever went on with it was to Whalley.

"It was a case of walking with it a large part of the way and it was something of an achievement to ride it for more than a mile at a stretch," he said.

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