Various references to these lamps are made in the text and image captions so it is thought some explanation would be beneficial. Tilley made a wide range of lamps and lanterns using the paraffin-pressure principle. They work by pressurising the fuel tank by means of a hand pump and preheating the vapouriser by means of a preheater fuelled by Methylated Spirit. Once preheated the control cock can be opened, the tank pressure then forcing paraffin up to the vapouriser and mantle which can then be lit. The vapourised fuel is mixed with air and therefore the Tilley lamp is in effect just a form of gas lamp with its own fuel supply. Tilley were very good at using a range of standard components to help create various types of lamp along with some model-specific components and the 'Challow' was one such.
The 'Challow' lamp was specifically intended for railway station and yard use, being given a trial by the GWR at Challow station which had originally been named Faringdon Road and closed to passengers in December 1964. Tilley generally gave their products an alpha-numeric code designation but none seems to have been applied to the 'Challow' and the name persisted. The trial at Challow, which took place it is thought in 1923, was a big success and subsequently the GWR so-equipped a large number of its rural stations which had hitherto had to make do with wick lamps. Kidlington was 'Challowed' in 1931 and remained allumed by these lamps until closure. Tilley designed and contracted out the manufacture of, probably to the GWR itself, tall concrete lamp posts with hoisting gear to raise and lower the lamps. At the top of these posts were two inverted forks into which the trough-shaped lamp reflector located to prevent the lamp swinging about in the wind.
Tilley's publicity boasted "The lamp is suspended at a height of about 20 feet, the trough-shaped Reflector throws a beam of light 32 feet wide for a distance of 100 feet in each direction". In other words the lamps were designed to illuminate platforms, although they were also used in goods yards and other locations on the railway. The lamps could burn for 30 hours on a full tank of paraffin, which means they could in theory run for two or three consecutive periods of darkness depending upon time of year but in practice they were lowered and raised each day to be extinguished, have fuel tanks topped up and relit. It is for this reason photographs showing 'Challow' lamps in situ during daylight hours are uncommon and where they do exist it is mainly in publicity material. The 'Challow' lamp was also exported with one notable customer being the Egyptian State Railways.
British railway companies in general bought various types of Tilley lamp in the thousands and that includes London Transport but the 'Challow' appears, despite what the Tilley publicity material below implies, to have been predominantly used by the GWR, in the context of Britain, and its successor BR Western Region. The "300 c.p." means 300 candle power whereas a wick lamp with single wick manages in the region of 20 candle power. Whether the psychological effect of 'Challow' lamps really did increase traffic as Tilley claimed is open to question, although these lamps appear to have done nothing to increase traffic at Kidlington.
In 2023 what is now Tilley International is still in business but as a very small affair based at Loseley Park, to the south of Guildford. They supply just a single product, a storm lantern plus a range of accessories and spare parts. Perhaps surprisingly there is still a market for the paraffin-pressure storm lantern but the majority of Tilley's earlier products are now collectors items and some have become extremely rare. A number of 'Challow' lamps survive in private collections but numbers are minuscule compared to the many hundreds, if not thousands, which were manufactured. Some of the concrete posts designed for these lamps were later adapted for electric lighting but none are known to survive.
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