Like most other projects on our national railway network it is running late and over budget, but later this month the splendid semaphore signalling along ten miles of main line from Gilberdyke to Ferriby, on the north bank of the River Humber, will finally disappear, as control of the route passes to the Railway Operating Centre at York.
It will come as no surprise to those who read my September 2017 feature “Humberside re-signalling delayed” – which, incidentally, provoked outrage from one local NR manager at the time – to see that the planned spring 2018 completion date has been missed by eight months.
But it is also interesting is to see that what was billed as a £34.5 million project when contracts were first let in February 2016 has, according to the most recent Network Rail press release, now become a £50 million project. Continue reading “Goodbye Gilberdyke”
Work is well underway at Eastleigh on a major refurbishment of the first four Class 442 “Plastic Pigs”, which are due to be reintroduced onto the Portsmouth Direct Line next month, almost 12 years after their withdrawal in February 2007 by former franchisee South West Trains.
Having spent much of last year touring the length and breadth of Great Britain in search of surviving semaphore signals to feature in my forthcoming book, I can confidently say that the finest stretch of mechanical signalling in Britain is the 94½ mile stretch of Cumbrian Coast from Arnside, north of Lancaster, along the Furness Line to Barrow-in-Furness, and then on up the Cumbrian Coast Line to Wigton, south-west of Carlisle.
Europe’s last scheduled main line steam services look set to end in little more than a year’s time, with the timetable change on Saturday, 7 December 2019, when a three year agreement to maintain steam working from Wolsztyn in western Poland is due to expire.
Take a walk down the A30 from St Erth station for a about half a mile, passing the closed Lamb & Flag pub, then head down a narrow lane signposted Rosevidney and you come to an over-bridge with a good, though distant view of the two elusive semaphores.
One of Britain’s finest long distance walking routes must surely be the 630-mile long South West Coast Path, which extends all the way from Minehead in Somerset to the Sandbanks Ferry near Poole in Dorset. But for those who like to mix their walking with some scenic rail travel the path offers few opportunities for what I call railway rambling, with one notable exception.
