No photos, just memories. The village train depot was mostly for the station master/telegrapher who received messages about train locations. He would tie the message to string in a long-handled Y contraption. He stood by the tracks and the engineer would put his hand through the Y to grab the message. The station master was a big sports fan so the local boys hung out there in the summer, talking and trading baseball cards. Sometimes he let one of the local boys deliver the message. It takes nerve for a 10-year-old boy to stand there, arm stretched high up as tons of roaring steel rushes at him. I still get a thrill thinking about that big, black locomotive, spouting steam roaring along at probably 50 mph. We were told if we got scared to fall away from the train. (The station master was down track with a duplicate message in case a boy chickened out. None did.) Sometimes a locomotive would stop for water and the engineer would let the boy in the cabin. That was mid 1950's. All of the men would be jailed if they did that today. It looked a lot like this:
My Grandad was a signal man in London. I will try to find the photo. He died in WW2. But I know the history.
More for your edification Candy darlin' I did try to find film of the Battle of Lewes Road when a local hotelier with some university students and 'black legs' attempted to break through the picket lines outside the Brighton bus depot in Lewes Road, but there doesn't appear to be anything.
Could be about that time. There's a '59 Chevy parked along the street which would have been fairly new had that been December '58.
Helped along by a good old Class 47 locomotive, It could be a born again Class 57. The Class 47 was the saviour of British Rail as at long last that was not under powered and unreliable like many other diesel locomotives they previously had.