News

The 5BEL Trust – which has reached an advanced state of restoring a four-car ‘Brighton Belle’ luxury Pullman EMU – is aiming for its first test runs on the national network in early autumn – with its first public trains running next Easter. On March 27, a group of around 40 supporters of the project…

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Nameplate Ketley Hall from GWR No. 4935 may have been overall champion at GW Railwayana’s March 17 sale at Pershore thanks to its £4000 realisation, but a couple of other items did their best to reach the top of the podium. They were Western Region totem sign Ashchurch for Tewkesbury, from a station on the…

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A pair of 150-year-old tickets, one from a railway that operated independently for just seven years, will be the centrepiece of Paddington Ticket Auction’s sale in central London on April 21. The older of the two was issued by the Hampstead Junction Railway in the early 1860s for a second class single from Kensal Green…

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Army dignitaries joined North Norfolk Railway staff for the presentation of the third nameplate cast for WD 2-10-0 No. 90775 Royal Norfolk Regiment on March 15. The third solid-brass nameplate, cast at the same time as the two on the locomotive, was presented to representatives of the Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum by the locomotive’s owner,…

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EPPERCORN A1 Pacific No. 60163 Tornado found itself stranded on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway after a skip lorry hit a bridge on Network Rail’s Middlesbrough to Whitby line causing severe structural damage. Northern passenger services between Battersby and Whitby were immediately suspended following the collision on the rail-over-road bridge at the bottom of Langburn’s…

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The Keighley & Worth Valley Railway is now in its 50th season of operation. The five-mile branch from Keighley to Oxenhope was reopened as a preserved steam railway on June 29,1968 – just six weeks before the end of steam on British Railways. Appropriately the star visitor for the railway’s first enthusiasts’ event in its…

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THE site for the Bala Lake Railway’s new town centre station has been cleared. The demolition of the derelict warehouse in Heol Aran marked the first physical construction work on the ground-breaking extension of the 2ft gauge railway. The cleared site, where the new Bala Town station building is to be located, has been levelled…

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THE Devon Railway Centre is to celebrate its 20th anniversary with a gala over the weekend of May 12-13. Many of the home-based locomotives will be in use on the centre’s 2ft gauge line alongside the River Exe, including Orenstein & Koppel 0-4-0WT No. 5744 of 1912 Rebecca, the oldest working steam engine in Devon,…

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THE Leighton Buzzard Railway ‘s new season began on Sunday, March 4, when the mayor of Leighton-Linslade, Coun Syed Rahman flag off the first train from Page’s Park and took a ride to Stonehenge, accompanied by town crier Peter Hailes, who announced its departure. The season started two weeks earlier than usual, to coincide with…

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