News

By Geoff Courtney A DRAMATIC scene of LMS Princess Coronation Pacific No. 46235 City of Birmingham storming through the night under a leaden sky was the public’s overwhelming favourite at the Guild of Railway Artists’ annual Railart exhibition, which closed on September 30. The oil painting, by guild president John Austin, won the exhibition’s Picture…

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By Brian Sharpe Bad luck for Britain’s two best-known steam engines on East Coast Main Line railtours has resulted in an unexpected bonus for the Nene Valley Railway, with both engines finding themselves together on the line at the end of September. LNER A3 Pacific No. 60103 Flying Scotsman came to grief with an overheated…

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Was it really five years ago that a forlorn-looking Bahamas appeared on a low loader in the car park of Heritage Railway publisher Mortons at Horncastle, en route from Ingrow on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway to Tyseley Locomotive Works in Birmingham for its long-awaited overhaul to begin? On Friday, September 28, when Bahamas…

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Words and pictures by Brian Sharpe NORFOLK has always been known as fertile ground for discovering grounded pre-Grouping wooden coach bodies, with many examples still surviving on farms and in a variety of other locations. Further coaches are regularly being discovered, but a surprising twist is that no less than four GER coach bodies have…

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By Geoff Courtney ONE of the brass cabside numberplates from a unique GWR express locomotive that was described by a leading railway engineer and journalist as one of the few failures to emerge from Swindon and was even allegedly regarded as a ‘white elephant’ by its designer, is to go under the hammer on November…

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THE Welshpool & Llanfair Railway has loaned its diminutive Andrew Barclay 0-4-0T No. 2207 of 1946 Dougal to the Taiwan Sugar Corporation (Taisugar) for six months – and the locomotive may return to action, subject to the results of a detailed inspection. The initiative is the result of a twinning arrangement that has been agreed…

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By Paul Appleton The small team of volunteers behind the project to refurbish the platform at the Severn Valley Railway’s forgotten station – Eardington Halt – were in buoyant mood during the September 20-23 autumn steam gala, after hearing that the planning committee aims to stop trains at the former halt during the 2019 spring…

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IT is now 70 years since newly-created British Railways staged the 1948 Locomotive Exchanges that saw classic designs from the ‘Big Four’ companies transferred to trials on other successor regions. Officially, the aim was to analyse the best aspects of each so they could be incorporated in the proposed new BR Standard designs. However, while…

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By Jonathan Webb LOCOMOTIVE Services Limited has commenced steam crew training on the Severn Valley Railway. The TOC currently makes great use of drivers from other operators, such as DB Cargo, which are hired in to drive their steam charters, as it has very few steam qualified drivers of its own. The training, which involves…

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By Robin Jones and Cedric Johns BRITAIN’S newest Train Operating Company, Vintage Trains Limited, has run its first official train – and it wasn’t steam or heritage stock. Just nine days after the TOC’s public launch, on Thursday, September 27, VTL provided the crew and paths for mileage accumulation on the new Vivarail Class 230…

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