Category: Britain

Basingstoke to Wareham is 96 miles on the direct route via Southampton Central, but take a new summer Saturday “seaside special” and the distance becomes exactly 150 miles, while the journey time increases from around one hour 40 minutes on the main line to almost four hours!

Two years after previous franchisee South West Trains took the welcome and innovative step of launching a summer Saturday service from Basingstoke to Weymouth via Yeovil Junction and Yeovil Pen Mill – with bargain fares of £5.00 return from places in Dorset like Gillingham and Tisbury – South Western Railway has not only revived that service this year, but has gone one better. Continue reading “Slow Way Round (SWR) to Corfe Castle”

Several locations on the national network can boast a mixture of upper and lower quadrant signals, but my shot today of a train passing successive upper and lower quadrant signals at Dorrington got me wondering if there are any other places where it is possible to see such a scene?

Places which mix upper and lower quadrant include Gobowen (pictured below) and Yeovil Pen Mill, where in each case the down signals are upper quadrant, while those controlling up trains are traditional GWR-style lower quadrant variety. Continue reading “Mixed signals at Dorrington”

 

Lower quadrant, Great Western-style signals survive at a number of locations on the national rail network, notably in Cornwall, the Worcester area and on the Marches Route between Shrewsbury and Abergavenny.

But for all that remains, which includes numerous fixed distant signals in the Worcester area such as HK5 pictured below, there is now only one working lower quadrant distant signal on the network. Continue reading “Britain’s last working lower quadrant distant signal”

Among the many railway revival schemes around the country, one of the most longstanding and compelling is the 31-mile long “Ivanhoe Line” linking Burton-upon-Trent and Leicester.

Despite closing to passengers in September 1964, it survived to serve the many collieries along its length and today remains a vital access by rail to the stone quarries at Bardon Hill, near Coalville.

British Rail had planned a revival of passenger services in the 1990s, but that fell by the wayside at privatisation, since when two separate consultancy firms have produced feasibility reports that have put a relatively modest cost on re-opening to passengers, but not forecast sufficient passenger traffic to make it viable. Continue reading “Two Leicestershire towns in need of a train service”

Finding new uses for redundant Signal boxes is often no easy matter. While some do find a new lease of life – cafes at York and Totnes being good examples – many other fine structures are simply boarded up and left unloved, where the years inevitably take their toll, or they eventually succumb to fire damage.

Happily that was not the case with the 1913-vintage Exeter West box, a fine wooden structure, with a 131-lever frame (only installed in 1959), that was made redundant by re-signalling in 1985.

It was painstakingly re-built at the Crewe Heritage Centre, after failing to find a home on the Severn Valley Railway, at Bristol Temple Meads and then at Swindon’s new STEAM museum, and was ceremonially re-opened almost exactly 25 years ago, on May Day 1993. Continue reading “Preserving Britain’s remarkable signalling heritage”

Having reviewed the many railway re-opening prospects around Britain for my book Railway Renaissance, one of the most compelling candidates is unquestionably the Avon Rail Link – a missing nine miles of line that would give Stratford-upon-Avon a southern link to Oxford, London and the South-West – by reinstating a section of line that has been the subject of re-opening efforts for decades.

Pictured above is 37608 approaching Long Marston on 31 March 2018 towing EMU 350263, which formed 535Z, the 08.55 from Northampton EMD, with the EMU being taken to Long Marston for corrosion repair work

Shakespeare’s birthplace has been a terminus to passengers on local services from Birmingham and Leamington Spa ever since the end of services to Evesham and Worcester on 5 May 1969, yet its attraction as one of the UK’s foremost tourist destinations meant that more than a million passengers passed through its station in 2016/7, the first time that seven-figure total had ever been achieved. Continue reading “Avon Rail Link: it’s time for action”

ScotRail operator Abellio commendably uses two loco-hauled sets for weekday commuter services on the Fife Circle, but from an enthusiast point of view seems to be missing a trick when it comes to stock utilisation.

Pictured above is 68020 at Haymarket on 8 March 2017 with the 17.11 departure for Glenrothes with Thornton

Looking at the movements morning and evening of the two Class 68-powered six-coach trains reveals that they spend far more time working empty from and to their Mossend and Motherwell bases near Glasgow than they do in revenue-earning service. Continue reading “A missed opportunity for more loco-hauled services in Scotland”

Readers of my previous blogs will know that in less than a week’s time the North Wales Main Line will be closing for the week-end as new signalling is commissioned and five mechanical signal boxes between Talacre and Abergele & Pensarn will be signalling their last trains before final closure.

Having already featured the boxes at Prestatyn, Rhyl and Abergele, following a visit kindly arranged for me by Network Rail, this seems a timely moment to take one final look at the signalling that is about to disappear from these locations, as captured on last month’s visit (23 February 2018) and on my previous visit to North Wales one year earlier, in February 2017. Continue reading “North Wales Semaphore Finale”

The pressing need to simplify railway ticketing has been a long running theme on Britain’s fragmented network, but nothing tangible ever seems to happen, and we continue to live in a crazy world where getting the cheapest fare for my most recent day return journey involved buying no less than four separate sets of tickets.

My Sunday trip from Haslemere to Cardiff – for the Wales vs. Italy Six Nations rugby international – would have cost me £55.50 (using a railcard) had I opted for the cheapest direct ticket, a super off-peak return (not via London), travelling to Guildford, then on to Reading and from there directly to Cardiff. Continue reading “The madness of split-ticketing”

In less than three weeks’ time a key milestone will be reached in the £50 million North Wales Railway Upgrade, with closure of five mechanical signal boxes between Talacre and Abergele and the commissioning of new colour light signalling that will be controlled by the Railway Operating Centre in Cardiff.

On the day of a visit last month to Rhyl No. 1 box (featured in my previous post) I was also fortunate to be able to visit two of the other doomed boxes, those at Abergele & Pensarn and at Prestatyn.

As with Rhyl No. 1, Abergele & Pensarn is another Grade II listed LNWR box, dating from 1902, which stands between the running lines at the eastern end of the Grade II listed, but unstaffed, station. Continue reading “Goodbye, Abergele, Farewell, Prestatyn!”