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.
In a change of traction this time, the special trains are formed on the Midland Pullman HST set with a working from Shrewsbury (1Z43), preceded around half an hour earlier by what I am most keen to see, namely Western Class 52 D1015 Western Champion on a working from Dorridge to Penzance (1Z52).
The Western-worked train was being closely followed by a third special working (0Z62) which was beginning its journey at Bishop’s Lydiard on the West Somerset Railway, before reversing at Taunton and then continuing on to Penzance.
This was to have been another test run of The Britannic Explorer, a luxury service being launched later in the summer by Belmond, which has a three-day Cornwall itinerary featuring its luxury sleeping cars and coaches that had been working in Ireland, with its first service on Friday, 8 August, being offered for a modest £7,700 per person!
But there have apparently been some issues with the hired-in rolling stock being used for Britannic Explorer test workings, so all that appeared was GBRf 66768 working light engine. However there was another loco-hauled working to savour as DB 66019 crossed the viaduct with a lengthy train load of empty clay tanks (6V75) working from Westbury to St. Blazey.
As I wrote following my last visit (March 2025) the footbridge offers a fine view of the magnificent Moorswater Viaduct, an eight-arch stone structure with 14 buttressed piers that is 954ft long and completed in 1881 to replace an earlier Brunel timber viaduct. Along with six surviving piers of this original structure, the viaduct gained a Grade II Listing in 1985 and is regarded as the finest of all the many Cornish railway viaducts.
Getting to the footbridge requires a fairly strenuous 25 minute walk from Liskeard station, heading left (downhill) to cross over the “mothballed” route towards Moorswater Cement Works close to Coombe Junction Halt, before going right towards the viaduct, then taking a left turn and along a narrow lane which leads uphill to the footbridge.
Driver training has just begun on the former TfW Class 175 units, so this is almost certain to be a final summer for the GWR Castle HST 2+4 HST sets, which the Class 175 units will replace, and it was good to see that the three hours I was spending in Liskeard was due to produce all three of the Castle sets in action on 28 June 2025.
Since the May 2025 timetable change there have been three Saturday diagrams for GWR’s HST Castle fleet, so during my time at Moorswater footbridge I was able to see 43004/187 (GW06) passing with 2E16 from Penzance (10.39) to Exeter St. David’s, then back at the station the scheduled appearance of set GW07 (43098/189) on 2C49 was cancelled, but 43097/186 (GW08) did run with 2P18 from Penzance (11.50) to Plymouth.
As I have written before, Liskeard Signal Box controls six semaphore signals, with four in the down direction and two in the up. The down quartet are down outer home LD35 followed by LD34 at the station end of Liskeard Viaduct, starter LD33 at the end of the down platform and section signal LD32 beyond and on the right of the running lines, as seen above.
The two up semaphores are outer home signal LD2, which can just be seen from Moorswater footbridge, and celebrity home signal LD3, a wooden-armed centre-pivot signal standing on the up platform (as pictured above) that is one of five examples on the national network, along with those at Droitwich Spa, Malvern Wells, Shrewsbury and Worcester Shrub Hill.
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