News

A multimillion pound project to turn the route of the world’s first public steam-operated railway into a major tourist attraction is set to be launched. The Stockton and Darlington Railway is one of eight heritage sites across the country to be chosen for a high-profile Heritage England revival scheme. Under the Heritage Action Zone scheme,…

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MANY heritage railways across the country were hit hard by the heavy snowfalls over the weekend of December 9/10, with several cancelling their money-spinning Santa services. The Severn Valley Railway called off all of its services on Sunday, December 10, after the line experienced its heaviest snowfall in years. Volunteers worked round the clock to…

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Keith Whitmore has been appointed as the new chairman of the Bahamas Locomotive Society, following the decision of Mark Winderbank to stand down after nearly eight years in the job. Keith has been a member of the society, which preserved LMS Jubilee 4-6-0 No. 45596 Bahamas, since his teens and spent weekends at the former…

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PART of GWR’s Totnes Quay branch – which featured in the early days of standard gauge preservation – has been unearthed. In late November, a section of rail was found buried a foot beneath the roadway, by workmen who dug down to install a new floodgate just a few feet from the Mill Tail near…

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ROYAL Scot is to head the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway’s 50th anniversary celebrations this summer. LMS 4-6-0 No. 46100 will be running on the line from the start of the celebrations on Monday, June 24, for three days. The railway is offering a special return trip behind 1927-built Royal Scot at a cost of…

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A car crashed onto the Chinnor & Princes Risborough Railway’s tracks in Chinnor on the morning of December 14 – startling local residents with a massive ‘bang’. The car broke through a fence in Hill Road and rolled down an embankment onto the line at Chinnor Railway at around 6am. A man was seen crawling…

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A South African engineer and his team have smashed the world record for the longest distance covered by a coal-fired miniature steam locomotive in a 24 hour period. On December 10, Andries Keyser, from Pietermaritzburg, and nine friends set a new record of 205 miles – beating the one set in the UK in 1994…

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By Roger Melton NORTH Yorkshire Moors Railway-based LMS ‘Black Five’ 4-6-0 No. 44806 reached the end of its current boiler certificate on January 1 and was withdrawn from traffic pending overhaul. For its last day of running it had one of its Magpie nameplates reapplied, which date back to when it was based on the…

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A COUNTY Durham pensioner who built a replica steam locomotive from scratch has received the county’s highest honour. David Young, 80, from Fatfield in Washington, spent more than 6000 hours over three years creating a working replica of a long-lost narrow gauge locomotive with only one surviving photograph of the original, engravings and some wheel…

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A County Donegal Railways 2-6-4T has left the north west of Ireland for the first time since it was delivered by makers Nasmyth Wilson in 1907. No. 4 Meenglas, has been moved from outside Derry’s Foyle Valley Railway Museum, where it had been on static display since 1992, to Heritage Engineering Ireland at Whitehead, for…

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