Month: December 2024

This is my sixth annual look back at a year on our railway, as seen through the lens of my trusty Canon camera, a year that began with the sad loss of mechanical signalling at Par, Lostwithiel and Truro in Cornwall and ended in a chance to travel on the first weekday services to run on the Northumberland Line, one of two lines to re-open on our network during the course of the year.

It was a year too, when I paid visits to two locations where there is nothing but freight action and semaphore signalling, as well as paying return visits to a number of my favourite photographic locations, including Kingussie and Auchterarder in Scotland, the Poacher Line to Skegness, the Cumbrian Coast Line, Burry Port and Holyhead. Continue reading “Images of 2024”

Railway re-openings look like being a thing of the past if the Labour Government continues to snub all the longstanding revival plans that had been coming to fruition, so after a trip earlier in the year to Leven I felt compelled to take a trip on the only other section of line to be re-opening in 2024.

Like the link to Leven in Scotland, the 18-mile Northumberland Line from Newcastle to Ashington has been the subject of a longstanding revival campaign, in this case stretching back more than a decade, and first raised by a former local Labour MP, Denis Murphy in 1999 and then in a Commons debate in January 2007.

Continue reading “A trip on the Northumberland Line”

Re-signalling of the South Wales Main Line between Swansea and Carmarthen is running late, so after my latest feature on the surviving semaphores at Pembrey & Burry Port, it is a great pleasure to be invited by Network Rail to take a look at all four of the signal boxes that will be closed when the Port Talbot West 2 (PTW2) project is completed.

This is a remarkably varied quartet, with the most traditional being Pembrey and Ferryside, which both retain lever frames and semaphores, one at Kidwelly that is a curious hybrid, where a 1950s top has been built on an 1885 GW base, and finally the most modern of all being a BR (WR) structure from 1956 at Carmarthen Junction.

Continue reading “Four South Wales signal boxes on borrowed time”