ALAN WHALLEY'S WORLD

VETERAN nostalgia fan Stan Roberts, who often helps to enliven this creaky page with his colourful recollections, can certainly tell a good tale...

Picking up on my recent railway theme, Stan flicks back to his days as a trainee guard attached to the old loco sheds at Baxters Lane, Sutton.

Railway vans and wagons were constantly shunted around, containing supplies and products for the many collieries and factories then existing in the St Helens area.

And he claims that, on one tragically-memorable occasion, a UGB (Nuttalls) employee dropped dead with shock when he opened a railway van door and found it full of bags filled with silver coins.

It had been intended for delivery to St Helens for bank use but had somehow become misdirected.

And Stan, from Wharmby Road, Haydock, recalls the perilous way in which clogged-up iron stoves, inside the old guard's vans, were unblocked.

"The stove chimneys used to coke up with soot," he recalls, "so we'd light the fire, place a small industrial detonator on top and then pop the lid back on, held down by a couple of housebricks."

The explosion would do the trick, all right! "But anyone who got too close was likely to get covered in soot!"

Stan was then doing his trainee loco runs from St Helens Junction, across Fleet Lane and Boardmans Lane at Parr, and onwards to Rainford.

WHAT a different world it was when this whole region was criss-crossed by busy mineral and passenger lines. And perhaps a better one, too!

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.