Steam locomotives and banking engines on the Lickey Incline

I posted this video on Liberal England years ago, but as babies have been born and raised families since I started blogging, I'm becoming less anxious about repeating myself.*

The Lickey Incline is the longest sustained main-line gradient in Britain. As Derek Cooper says, the climb is 1 in 37.7 for a continuous distance of two miles.

Such a gradient requires the use of banking engines to help trains with the climb - heavy freight trains have to be banked even today. But in steam days even short passenger trains needed help, leading to the wonderful footage here.

A mention too for the classic trainspotters we see early in the video - Cooper calls them 'loco spotters'. Trainspotting as a hobby is usually said to be a post-war phenomenon, fuelled by the publisher Ian Allen and growing working-class affluence.

But a friend's father remembered spotting before the war, when the only trains of interest were  locomotives with names - hence 'loco spotting', perhaps.

* To my knowledge two songs have inadvertently been featured twice as a Sunday music video here: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall by Bryan Ferry and Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones.