Features

TV dramas are not always noted for their historical accuracy, but one children’s series in the 1980s was very different in this respect. Avril Rowlands, who wrote the stories, recounts the efforts made to achieve authenticity while filming on the Severn Valley Railway. At 5.15 on eight consecutive Wednesday evenings in 1980 more than five…

Continue reading »

Hugh Dougherty visits the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland’s museum on the Antrim coast, which has now been nominated for a Heritage Railway Association Peter Manisty Award for excellence. When the first RPSI members moved their embryonic Irish railway heritage collection to the old Whitehead Excursion Station at Whitehead in County Antrim in 1966, they…

Continue reading »

Fifty years ago the last Britannia Pacifics were concentrated at Carlisle Kingmoor shed, which was due for closure on December 31, 1967. Once the pride of Norwich and elsewhere, the Britannias were now filthy and had been stripped of nameplates and numberplates… but were still doing a day’s work. Maurice Burns recalls the Britannias at…

Continue reading »

It seems inconceivable that a steam-worked narrow gauge railway would be built in the 1960s to fulfil a real passenger transport need. It lasted remarkably well but as Mark Smithers reports, its new incarnation at the opposite end of the Lincolnshire coast is now more orientated towards preservation. Britain’s preservation-era steam railway history has seen…

Continue reading »

Most visitors to heritage lines see only their train, the buffet, shop and toilets, but there’s far more to see on an organised tour behind the scenes. Peter Brown enjoyed such an experience on the Kent & East Sussex Railway. At the start of the year I passed a certain milestone in my life. It…

Continue reading »

As the clock ticked down to the end of BR steam, operations were now concentrated in the North West. The northern-most outpost was Carlisle Kingmoor, which still supplied steam to work over Shap summit. Maurice Burns reflects on his early adventures to Shap and the countdown to the closure of Carlisle Kingmoor, Workington and Tebay…

Continue reading »

By Don Benn I make no apologies for returning to the work of No. 35028 Clan Line again, for this engine just seems to get better and better. There are now two Merchant Navy Pacifics on the main line although as I write I have just heard the sad news that No. 35018 British India…

Continue reading »

The autumn of 1967 saw the end of steam on the Eastern Region and at the great railway centre of Crewe. BR also introduced a ban on privately-owned steam engines. Brian Sharpe recounts not only how BR’s steam operations rapidly contracted as the final curtain approached but also how many now-famous locomotives were being saved.…

Continue reading »