Imagine an attractive and rural corner of Central Europe where you can travel on your own steam-hauled narrow gauge train just as the sun is rising, and then spend all day riding a vast narrow gauge network for around £13 a day.
What may sound like a dream is actually a reality on the delightful Harz metre-gauge system in eastern Germany, where for two consecutive days last week I was the only passenger aboard the 07.34 Gernrode to Alexisbad service. Continue reading “Harz delights”
Built and opened in 1978 for a bargain price of just £50,000, Lelant Saltings Park & Ride was an instant success, and for more than four decades it was the place where thousands of visitors to St Ives left their cars and took a scenic four-mile train ride to the bustling artistic capital of Cornwall.
But Lelant Saltings is no more. Three months ago (in June 2019) the popular facility was replaced by smart new parking at nearby St Erth station, its 300 parking spaces now standing eerily empty and its half-hourly service to St Ives reduced to a Parliamentary level of one train a day in each direction. Continue reading “Britain’s newest ghost station”
Closure of the former Park & Ride site at nearby Lelant Saltings, and development of a large new car park south of the station, has seen some significant changes at St. Erth station, that delightful junction in South West Cornwall for the branch line to St. Ives. Continue reading “All change at St Erth”
Just three miles from the National Railway Museum is the start of one of Britain’s finest remaining outposts of mechanical signalling, the 17½ miles of railway route between Harrogate and Poppleton, a growing village north-west of York city centre.
After previously spending time photographing the signalling at Harrogate and other intermediate stations, including remarkable Knaresborough, my latest challenge was to visit three of the route’s gate boxes that are signalled by semaphores. Continue reading “A semaphore stronghold in North Yorkshire”
Exactly a year after publishing an account of a scenic stroll from Ryde to Brading, the last Saturday of summer (31 August 2019) seemed like an ideal time to pay a return visit to the ever-charming Isle of Wight.
Arriving on the island by hovercraft once again, I began where I left off last year and took a leisurely four and a half-mile walk from Brading to Shanklin, during which my challenge was to find a few off-the-beaten-track places at which to photograph Britain’s oldest passenger trains, Island Line’s 80-year old Class 483 units. Continue reading “A nice Wight railway ramble”
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