Category: Britain

After five days’ walking a highly-scenic stretch of the South West Coast Path from Padstow to St. Ives with a group of friends, time for a couple of trips on the marvellous St. Ives Bay Line using a bargain-priced Day Ranger (£2.75 with railcard) then a walk south from St. Erth to the remote Rosengrouse Road over-bridge to capture trains passing Britain’s most south-westerly semaphores.

My luck was in on the afternoon of 13 May 2026 when not only did the sun shine, but I had the luck to capture two trains passing the semaphore signals that can be seen looking back from the bridge towards St. Erth, with up outer home signal SE68 on the left, alongside down section signal SE7.

Exactly 43 years ago, on the evening of Friday, 13 May 1983, I travelled on the last ever train from Elmers End to Sanderstead, accompanied not only by a huge crowd of fellow enthusiasts, but also by a very famous photographer, who captured some remarkable images of that fateful night.

At the tender age of 25 I had recently joined the City office staff of The Observer and in my enthusiasm for a story had persuaded the News Desk that I should cover what by the early 1980s had happily become something of a rarity – not only the closure of a railway, but one in the heart of the prosperous South-East.

For lovers of traditional mechanical signalling there are three routes radiating from Shrub Hill station in Worcester that all retain some semaphore interest, in an area bounded by Droitwich Spa to the north and Norton Junction and Moreton-in-Marsh to the south and east.

Westernmost of the nine signal boxes to control mechanical signalling in the Worcester area is the tall Great Western Railway box at Ledbury in Herefordshire, which is one of four along the Worcester-Hereford route, dates from 1885 and boasts a 42-lever McKenzie & Holland frame.

An enjoyable return visit to Pantyffynnon in February 2026 prompts me to pay another overdue return on 21 April 2026 to what is now the only other mechanically-signalled location west of Cardiff in South Wales, and a trip to Tondu on the Bridgend-Maesteg branch line.

Four years on from my March 2022 visit and the only real change since then has been to the rolling stock and destinations served by branch services, with TfW Class 170/175 units replaced by Class 197s, all of which now shuttle between Maesteg and Ebbw Vale Town, rather than serving places as far afield as Cheltenham Spa and Holyhead.

Among the handful of isolated locations across Southern England that still boast any mechanical signalling, one remarkable outpost is in the charming town of Deal, where semaphore signalling has hung on almost 15 years since completion of a major re-signalling project in East Kent at the end of 2011.

Deal boasts one of the classic Type 13 signal boxes built by the Southern Railway (1939) in what is known as the Odeon or glasshouse style, with a model of it produced by Hornby. Another working example (also with semaphores) can be found at Bognor Regis (feature: March 2026), while there are preserved examples at Horsham, Wimbledon, Woking and Portsmouth Harbour.

Railway re-openings are always a cause for celebration and invariably see passenger forecasts vastly exceeded, as has most recently been the case with the Newcastle-Ashington Northumberland Line, so with no indication when the Oxford-Bletchley East-West Rail route will see its first passengers, it is good to be able to head to the West Midlands and sample opening day on the UK’s newest passenger service.

While the Northumberland Line was closed to passengers during the Beeching era (July 1964) and the Varsity Line from Oxford to Cambridge in January 1968, residents of Moseley and Kings Heath to the south of Birmingham have had to wait a good deal longer for the restoration of Camp Hill Line services, whose local stations were closed 85 years ago (in 1941) as a war-time economy measure.

Cheltenham Gold Cup day (13 March 2026) makes the perfect excuse for another rail excursion to ever-charming Moreton-in-Marsh, to photograph the luxury £799-a-head Gold Cup Special (1Z25) on its journey from London Paddington to Evesham.

This year’s special, formed of the Northern Belle Pullman coaches was top-and-tailed by West Coast Railways’ maroon-liveried 47812 and 57314 and made a fine sight as it approached and passed the Cotswold station and its array of semaphore signals.

Two days after my visit to Montrose and Craigo and the offer of a bargain-priced £19.00 ScotRail Club 50 flat-fare tempts me to max-out the opportunity and pay my first visit for more than six years to Keith Junction – a 380-mile round trip from Edinburgh, and with the first 130½ miles to Aberdeen happily being aboard another Inter7City HST set.

For the past nine years Keith Junction has been the UK’s most northerly outpost of mechanical signalling, an honour it acquired when the signal boxes at Elgin West and Forres were eliminated in October 2017, while the 2019 closure of Inverurie Signal Box has left just three other mechanically-signalled locations along the Inverness-Aberdeen route – at Huntly, Kennethmont and Insch.

Almost four years on from my only previous visit (May 2022) and the lure of a 90-mile trip aboard one of ScotRail’s comfortable Inter7City HSTs tempts me to take a journey from Edinburgh to Montrose and then a short bus ride on to Craigo, to capture HSTs passing the re-opened signal box and its quartet of semaphore signals.

Craigo is a small village five miles north of Montrose that is home to a Caledonian Railway signal box dating from 1907 and boasting a 21-lever frame. As I wrote following my previous visit, the box was routinely “switched out” for many years, but re-opened on a regular basis when Montrose-Inverurie local services began in 2018.