Newsletter 20th August 2000

If I can find some pictures they may take a while to download but have patience - they'll be worth waiting for !!

An even quieter month for news. I want to start this month's Newsletter by acknowledging the initiative given to me by John Glover and if you would kindly click here the link will take you to a page containing a report which stimulated me to start this website. Its been a busy month for reports so when you've digested that one I have another report on the present state of the railways of Majorca which has been kindly forwarded to me by Richard Green and if you would click on this link you'll be taken to a copy of that report. Then, click here to go to a report from Jonathan Beaumont. Finally, Neil Worthington also has a Majorca Railways feature copied from an article by W. A. Willox in The Railway Magazine in April 1936 on his website and this link should take you to a copy on my site or, if you prefer, you can visit Neil's site which I found extremely interesting and which also contains a very useful map. Many thanks for all these tremendous reports.

I've had quite a lot of photos this month but they are taking longer to process than I had anticipated so I'll start with some pictures culled from a booklet (kindly given to me by Edith and Rodney Knight) published by the Majorcan banking organisation "Sa Nostra", part of Caixa de Balears, with the title "El tren a Mallorca". It is a collection of old photos with captions and introduction in Catalan which is a strange mixture of Spanish and French with a smattering of numerous other roots. Not quite so hard to understand as Welsh but I wonder why they think it necessary, in this world where we all want to communicate, to use a language which hardly anybody else speaks.

The first photo is of the old FCM station area in Palma - compare it with the second one, taken from an article by Cliff Thomas (who now writes for "Railway World") in the Winter 1996 edition of International Railway Modelling . Then compare with a similar view which I took in 1998 and finally with one taken in 1999 by Mike Kaben, through the window of a derelict carriage shed alongside the road-bridge from which all the other pictures seem to have been taken. If you let your pointer hover over the individual pictures the original caption and credit will appear.

The booklet contains quite a few pictures taken near the tunnel between the FCM station at Plaza España and the port and here's one of them. It shows a 4-4-0T locomotive, built in the Palma Works in 1903 and which is quite clearly a blatant copy of the Nasmyth Wilson locos previously supplied, outside the harbour portal of the tunnel on the inauguration of the tunnel on the 5th February 1931. Notice all the dignitaries stuffed into the wagons !!

I think I'll save the rest for further newsletters so thats all for now. Hopefully I'll be able to produce another Newsletter next month - please keep the contributions of photos and news coming in. Keep your eyes on "Railway World" as I believe there will shortly be an article published by them on the Majorcan railways.

I want to produce Galleries of Pictures of the Soller Railway, the Soller Tramway and the disused parts of the FCM, which will appear as soon as the pages can be coded and I can obtain more webspace. Meanwhile an archive of my Soller Railway photos can be found here.

Thats all for now, folks !! Watch this site for further developments which will take place whenever new information or pictures come to hand. Any submissions of information, photos old or new, postcards, etc., will be gratefully and enthusiastically received and if used on the site will be suitably acknowledged (as above). The photos, pictures and diagrams used on this site are presented for your information and viewing pleasure only. If any of them should be in copyright violation and the copyright holder would care to notify me I will either remove them or acknowledge the copyright accordingly.