Month: June 2025

As another year rolls relentlessly on I am paying a return visit to the Royal Duchy (28 June 2025) to capture – for a third successive year – the special workings that are bound for Penzance and its famous Mazey Day celebrations, the culmination of the two-week Midsummer celebrations in Cornwall known as Golowan.

Having almost been thwarted by train cancellations on this day in 2024, I am heading back to Liskeard, and walking out once again to Moorswater footbridge west of the town, which I first visited in March 2025, in the hope of capturing the special trains as they head west across Moorswater Viaduct.

Continue reading “Mazey Day action at Moorswater”

Anyone wanting to see and experience scheduled weekday HST action in Great Britain 2025 has a choice between the three GWR diagrams between Exeter, Plymouth and Penzance or the rather more extensive 15 daily ScotRail Inter7City HST diagrams for express services between Glasgow/Edinburgh and Aberdeen/Inverness.

Having paid numerous visits to Cornwall in recent months, a short break in Edinburgh meant the chance to take a 90-minute journey aboard one of these very comfortable Inter7City HST sets on 18 June 2025 as far as Arbroath, in order to capture a few shots of four and five-car Class 43-powered sets passing the semaphore signals.

Continue reading “HST action at Arbroath”

Four months on from my last visit (February 2025) and it is time to return once again to Pembrey & Burry Port to see whether Network Rail remains on track to complete the resignalling here by November 2025, as promised in its most recent update on the rather long drawn-out Port Talbot West 2 (PTW2) project.

At the time of that February 2025 visit there was no apparent evidence of progress, beyond some new equipment that had been in place for a considerable time, so visiting both Pembrey and Ferryside on this occasion (4 June 2025) it would be interesting to see if there was evidence of progress with the resignalling.

Continue reading “One final summer for the South Wales semaphores”

Almost seven years on from my last visit (August 2018) and the prospect of some fine weather prompts me to pay a return (on 30 May 2025) to a busy Wiltshire junction to witness the varied railway action at Westbury, a place best known to travellers on the Berks & Hants route for its impressive white horse, carved into the nearby hillside.

Like Eastleigh on the South Western Main Line, Westbury sees a great variety of passing passenger and freight traffic, the latter largely comprising stone traffic from Merehead and Whatley quarries, but also including civil engineer workings to and from the large yard south of the station and occasional workings to and from Southampton Docks.

Continue reading “Historic and GM loco action at Westbury”