News

By Roger Melton THE North Yorkshire Moors Railway has won planning permission for a £9.2 million improvement scheme, including a shed to house 40 carriages. The scheme, for which half of the funding is coming from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and the remainder though legacies and public fundraising, is seen as the biggest-ever single investment…

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THE 16mm gauge live steam locomotive which starred in the Channel 4 show The Biggest Little Railway in the World, when it became the first to run over all 72 miles of Scotland’s Great Glen, is to go on display at the National Garden Railway Show in Peterborough on April 7. Filmed during June 2017…

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HIGHLAND Railway-built carriage No. 58A – which ran behind privately-owned 0-4-4T Dunrobin has been returned to service at Beamish –the North of England Open Air Museum. Built by Sharp Stewart in 1895 to a design similar to the Highland Railway W class for the 3rd Duke of Sutherland, Dunrobin was used until around 1920 to…

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FLAGSHIP locomotive WR 4-6-0 No. 7903 Foremarke Hall is rostered to haul the historic first Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway public train out of the Cotswold tourist honeypot of Broadway on Good Friday. Heritage Railway Association president and line patron Lord Richard Faulkner of Worcester will signal the opening of the new Broadway station by unveiling a…

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HERITAGE Railway and its sister title The Railway Magazine are to sponsor the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway’s May 26-28 spring bank holiday Cotswold Festival of Steam – which this year has the theme Give my regards to Broadway. The high-profile event will celebrate the railway’s extension into its new Broadway station – and topping the bill…

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THE Talyllyn Railway’s Barclay 0-4-0T No. 6 Douglas was unveiled in a brand new livery of RAF Traffic Blue to mark the 100th anniversary of both it and the RAF. Built to 2ft gauge originally for use at the Royal Naval Flying Corps airfield at Manston in Kent, a few weeks later, on April 1,…

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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…

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By Cedric Johns 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…

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A NEW company has been formed to take the Great Western Society’s £1.5 million project to build a new 38XX County 4-4-0 to the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway. While affiliated to the society, the Churchward County Trust Ltd has been established as an independent company in its own right to build the 41st locomotive in the…

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By Geoff Courtney ON a bitterly cold first day of February, with rain hovering and low temperatures exacerbated by an icy wind, 70 or so people assembled in a Cheshire churchyard in honour of a railwayman who nearly 53 years ago sacrificed his life because he opted to do his duty. Wallace Oakes, a well-liked…

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