Category: Articles

Apart from studying the intricacies of timetabling, one of the other pleasures for those with a fascination for our railways is publication by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) of its annual station usage estimates, and the remarkable contrasts it highlights between our busiest and our least-used stations.   

While there are no real surprises amongst the busiest – Waterloo with an estimated 94.355 million entries and exits in the year ended 31 March 2018 being the UK’s busiest and Birmingham New Street (43.741 million) being the busiest outside London – the real interest lies amongst those obscure and badly-served places that are our least used stations. Continue reading “Least used stations 2018”

A longstanding candidate for reopening to passengers is the branch line from Totton, just west of Southampton, to Hythe, which forms most of a route to Fawley that lost its passenger services in February 1966 and most of its freight traffic in early 2016, when the last train of oil tanks bound for the huge refinery arrived from Holybourne, near Alton. 

While most of the 9.5 mile route now stands mothballed, there is still the chance to see action on the line, with occasional freight traffic serving Marchwood Port. This once vitally-important military facility, which boasted its own extensive railway system, is reached by a spur off the Fawley branch immediately south of the former Marchwood station, 3.5 miles from Totton. Continue reading “Movement at Marchwood”

A strategically significant 11-mile stretch of London main line became the first victim of HS2 on Friday (7 December 2018) when train 2M29, the 11.35 Chiltern Railways service from London Paddington to High Wycombe, became the last scheduled service to travel over the Acton to Northolt line, a route running alongside the London Underground’s Central line and extending from Old Oak Common to South Ruislip.

Continue reading “HS2 exorcises Paddington’s ghost train”

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.

Continue reading “Plastic Pigs Are Go”

Spending a few days at Carbis Bay finally gave me the opportunity to photograph our most southerly semaphore signals, which stand around three-quarters of a mile beyond St Erth station, but are totally out of view from the station platforms.

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.

These are down section Signal SE7 and up outer home SE68, which stand almost opposite each other at a point on the main line from Penzance, where a section of straight track bears round to the right as it approaches the station (pictured top). Continue reading “Britain’s most southerly 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.

That exception is a seven-mile stretch of the path from the small town of Hayle (meaning estuary in Cornish) to the charming and cultural resort of St. Ives, which takes in the estuary at Hayle and then follows the route of the scenic St. Ives Bay Line, with numerous attractive photo-opportunities of both railway and seascape along the way. Continue reading “Railway rambling in SW Cornwall”