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IT has taken 37 years from the time the early Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway revivalists moved into derelict Toddington station, with the aim of restoring the entire 29-mile route from Stratford-upon-Avon to Cheltenham that had been lifted two years before, to reach the Cotswold tourist gem of Broadway. When Foremarke Hall triumphantly hauls that first public train out of Broadway on Good Friday, everyone throughout the heritage sector will feel a massive sense of pride and rightly so. We at Heritage Railway certainly do. The railway has reached this goal stage by stage, without going into the red, using volunteer labour to inch its way forward over the decades, first reaching Winchcombe, and then Cheltenham Racecourse, and turning north, extending to Laverton and now the real jewel in the crown. However,…
IT was meant to be a celebration: a Britannia Pacific working a train from Liverpool Street to Norwich, replicating the 1950s when class members were rostered to work East Anglian express services to and from London. No. 70013 Oliver Cromwell, the only member of its class in steam at present, was just weeks away from its main line ticket expiring. Organised by Steam Dreams, at the request of the 4-6-2’s Loughborough-based team led by engineer Tom Tighe, the firm’s director, Marcus Robertson alerted the media to what in many people’s eyes was an historic event, on Thursday, February 22. Departing Liverpool Street restricted to 20mph by an engineering restriction as far as Stratford, the ‘Cathedrals Express’, began its journey in earnest, with more than 350 passengers on board. The train…
By the time this issue went to press, the new cylinders for Severn Valley flagship locomotive, No. 4930 Hagley Hall were expected to have been cast. This is a major milestone in the locomotive’s overhaul and later this year the 4-6-0 will take the place of Southern Region BR Standard 4MT 4-6-0 No. 75069 in the main shed so that reassembly can get underway. The next major step will be getting No. 4930’s wheels sent away for new tyres to be fitted. In the meantime, various critical components are being manufactured in readiness for reassembly. The boiler cladding sheets for No. 75069 are currently being painted and it is expected to clad the boiler in April. The cab has been fitted to the locomotive’s frames in the main workshop with…
THE Science Museum Group has invited tenders for an exhibition design team to restructure the National Railway Museum’s Great Hall at a cost of £12 million. It will be the first time that the 9600 square yard Great Hall, a former roundhouse, has undergone a redesign since the York museum opened in 1975, and is part of the venue’s wider redevelopment master plan which is expected to be completed in 2025. The tender states that the chosen consultancy should create a “dramatic” and “coherent” exhibition that “ does justice to stars of the museum’s collection. It is planned that hitherto unseen objects from the museum’s archive will go on display, with a strong focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Work is scheduled to start this summer 2018, with the…
PASSENGERS travelling on The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust’s ‘North Briton’ railtour on Saturday, February 24, were surprised to discover that the train was fronted by a Class 66 diesel piloting Tornado when it departed on its steam-hauled leg from Doncaster. Those who had joined the train, diesel-hauled from Cambridge and stations beforehand, had expected the 66 to give way to the No. 60163 at Doncaster – but it was not to be. Troubled by a serious technical problem to its Train Protecting & Warning System, discovered during a fitness-to-run examination at East Leake on the Great Central Railway (Nottingham) on February 13, a positioning run by the A1 to Didcot planned for that day was cancelled. Following a week’s investigations, during which industry experts, including the manufacturer, examined the system…
THE controversial sale of the Wensleydale Railway’s Aysgarth station has been accompanied by a major about-turn in the line’s short, medium and long-term strategies. The overall aspirations of the Wensleydale Railway Association when it was formed 28 years ago, to restore ‘real’ community passenger services and eventually rebuild the entire 40-mile trans-Pennine route linking Garsdale on the Settle and Carlisle Line to Northallerton on the East Coast Main Line are being edited down or discarded in favour of the running of a self-sufficient heritage railway over a far more financially feasible “bite sized” distance. The move is a diametric contrast to the direction of the Swanage Railway, which as reported in News, pages 28 and 29, has just received the Heritage Railway Association’s Peter Manisty Award for Excellence for its…
